Ooh, I like this

Edit: I think part of why I like it is that it’s evocative of both “construction” and “destruction”, and civil engineering necessarily involves aspects of both. Like, even when there isn’t existing infrastructure to demolish, there’ll still be tasks such as digging into the ground to anchor support structures, which I could consider to be a kind of destruction

I was going to edit my original comment to add this on, but that wouldn’t have notified you, so here’s an additional comment.

I was just reading Alyssa Battistoni’s book “Freedom Beyond the Free Gift” and there was a line that reminded me of you, and my response to you because of how effectively it distilled my entire thesis into one, guiding question.

“What must we do to make freedom possible on a damaged planet?”

COVID was the catalyst for Amsterdam exploring ideas from Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. It’s only a small example, but I find it powerful to see examples of alternative economic frameworks that prioritise sustainability actually being implemented.

Another example is that when I was at university, disabled students activist groups were constantly battling to get the university to implement basic reasonable adjustments, such as recording lectures so disabled students who couldn’t attend in person wouldn’t miss out. The university was a big, old one, so there was a lot of silly inertia. While I was there, it was often necessary for the university’s Disability Support Department to employ people to go into lectures and physically be there to record lectures. It was tremendously silly and wasteful, and even then, some lecturers would refuse to be recorded, even after having been told by the university that they had to.

For obvious reasons, that all changed during COVID, when everything was done remotely. It was quite frustrating to see things implemented so easily, because it highlighted how needless all of the previous battles had been. However, now that things have gone back to being fully in person, those changes made during COVID have persisted for the students who need them. Lectures and other learning materials are now more readily available to students with accessibility needs, because the social and technical infrastructure now exists in a widespread way.

Progress isn’t linear, and it certainly doesn’t happen all at once. I only know about the remote learning thing because I used to be a part of disabled students groups at that university, and because I am friends with someone working in public policy in Amsterdam. We hear so much about how the world is going to shit, and that’s not wrong, but there’s also so much good work being done beneath our notice, everywhere and all the time. There are likely things in closer proximity to your life where you’re either already a part of building something good, or you could be. I know it’s hard to muster the energy to try to change things when the world is so demoralising, but it is possible to build positive things that can make the future a bit better. These things don’t erase the awfulness that’s going on, but neither do those awful things erase our achievements.

Yes, but there are good examples too. Despite being chronically demoralised at the state of the world, I am literally only alive because there’s so many things that give me hope. It’s not the kind of hope that necessarily counters the dread I feel at all the awfulness, but rather something that stands alongside it, despite everything.

As a random example, I went to the Netherlands recently, and I was jazzed at the freedom conferred to me by the solid bike infrastructure. Being disabled, I’m more reliant on my car than most people, and I never feel so disabled as when I’m having to spend half an hour driving through a city when the walking route can be twice as fast. Riding a bike through Rotterdam felt so liberating, especially when I cycled to a shop that was due to close soon. I remember thinking “this must be what able bodies in a city people feel like — to be able to go somewhere free of the constraints of their car”

When I returned to the UK, it was pretty depressing to see how rubbish our bicycle infrastructure is in general. Though there are many smart and passionate people pushing for changes to civil infrastructure to facilitate pedestrian and cycling transit in cities, there’s so much inertia and fragmented implementation that it’s pretty depressing.

Recently, however, I visited a friend in Preston. Like many UK cities, the bike infrastructure was far from universal, but what I did see was really cool. Distinct bike lanes that are wholly separated from the road, just like the experts are always pushing for! Road markings and traffic signals that require car users to yield to cyclists. This stuck out to me especially because I was reading recently about how Preston city council has been doing a thing called “community wealth building”, which involves an investment strategy that prioritises local growth and infrastructure. So like, if there’s a new housing development that is being bid for, then local businesses and contractors would get priority on that. This strategy was, in large part, a response to the chronic underfunding of local authorities, which disproportionately affects the North of England, and other socioeconomically deprived areas. It’s only small, but it makes me hopeful because this is a concretely good idea that’s being implemented. It might not work out entirely as hoped, and even the best solutions to problems will inevitably present us with new problems, but that’s great — that’s how we learn!

That’s one example of my hope at a larger, systemic level, but I also find my resolve bolstered by countless good things at the personal or community level. Seeing how a local community activism group navigates complex governance problems and draws on past experience is another thing that makes me hopeful. A personal example is that I have faced so much strife due to the system letting me down, but when I have most been struggling, the kindness and solidarity of the people around me have helped immensely. Sometimes this kindness comes from people who are struggling just as much as me. Acts of individual kindness aren’t enough to fix a broken system, but they’re powerful in a different way, especially because they exist in spite of all the incentives towards being a selfish asshole that capitalism provides.

Our history is fixed, but the history of the future is still being written — by us. People who come after us will have countless examples of “what not to do”, but what keeps me going is the desire to give them as many examples of “what is good to do” as possible.

This is so funny to me for some reason. Kids are so silly, and it’s delightful.

I think that perhaps the reason why I find this so endearing is that it’s not a trait exclusive to kids — adults can be (and are, in our hearts) just as silly, we’ve just learned to mask it

What helps me a bit is to think about what the world would look like in the years after a widespread societal collapse. Many of the things we rely on and take for granted today would no longer be available, so we’d have to do a lot of rebuilding of societal systems

But the crucial part is that if humanity ends up in that scenario, then the last thing we should do is try to rebuild society to be as it was before. After all, our current system is what is currently wrecking the world. That means we need to do what we can to proactively consider (and where relevant, implement) systems designed for a better world.

In all likelihood, I won’t be one of the people who would be rebuilding in that scenario (chronic health stuff means I’d be dead before I got to that point), but there’s still power in building new stuff. My hope is that if(/when) everything blows up, then maybe the things that I have helped build will end up as useful pieces for the people who come after to salvage.

Technofascists can hide away in their bunkers and network states when everything blows up, because I earnestly believe that the rest of us will stand a far better chance at surviving, even if we have far fewer resources than the billionaires. They fundamentally do not understand humanity, so all their silly plans for their “afterwards” are even more doomed to failure than our current, groaning structures.

No matter what happens in the coming years, there will always be an “afterwards”. Time will keep ticking forward no matter what. I reckon that even in the super bad outcomes, humanity will continue to exist in some form, even if in drastically diminished numbers. However, I don’t know that for certain. In the end, it doesn’t really matter, because I’ll never know what comes after me. If humans do end up being eradicated, then I suppose nothing I do matters. However, because I can’t know if that will be the case, all I can do is operate under the assumption that humans will continue to exist when I no longer do. Consequently, I feel that my ethical duty is to do everything I possibly can to give those hypothetical people the opportunity to salvage some useful tools and building blocks from the wreckage of our collapsed society.

The neat thing is that this work is still useful in a world where things don’t collapse disastrously. The question of “what would we need to thrive?” will be just as relevant in the event that we are able to avert a full on societal collapse. I find it useful to look back on the history that my life is built upon; whilst there’s so much awful stuff that has direct throughlines to the awful problems we face today, there are also so many powerful acts of resistance and activism that help me build a template for what I feel we should strive for today. I imagine that the people who come after me will look back on us in a similar way. All I can strive for is to build little pockets of goodness that will help them in the same way that I draw strength of historical resistance.

Maybe it won’t be enough, but that’s okay, because I don’t need to ask the question of “how much is enough?”, because that’s not answerable now, or ever. Thus I am forced to set that dread aside and just focus on what I can do to help.

No, but maybe we can muddle along together.

The people who come after us will also feel like they have no idea what to do, but my hope is that we might be able to make their struggle a little easier for them. They won’t necessarily realise the impact of our work; it’ll form the mostly invisible, foundational assumptions that they build their own perspectives on top of, but that’s okay. The point of it all is to facilitate them being able to see further than we are able to — to see *more" than we can right now.

It may not feel like it when we’re in the thick of it, but this is what progress is.

Corporations are not our friends, even when they seem friendly, like Steam. However, they can be useful allies, so I’m glad to see this response from Steam.

Were you running it with the unofficial patch? I don’t remember what it was that was causing me problems, but it’s possible that was it.

"I made a mod that replaces cliffracers with Thomas the Tank Engine. […] I am incapable of learning lessons whenever it involves corporations, because I fundamentally do not view toy company CEOs or media CEOs as people.

In between working on my game and dying of various accidental injuries, I sometimes feel like I need to milk a particular joke until its inevitable demise. I will do this no matter how many legal threats, actual threats, black vans with the Mattel logo on them, or severed Barbie heads are mailed to me.

This is because I have issues with authority, particularly authority derived from intimidation. I kicked a lot of bullies in the nuts when I was a kid.”

Idgaf about silly mods like this, but this is iconic

I was going to comment this, so I’m glad to see that you beat me to it. Benzene is so cool.

Meme: Virgin cyclohexane in chair conformation vs. Chad benzene, a planar ring

To be fair, the first part of the game is by far the best. The unofficial patch adds back in a heckton of content in the late game, but even then, it feels sparse. I have very fond memories of exploring Santa Monica though. The game felt huge and exciting, even playing it for the first time in 2019.

Damn, I should try install it again. I’m running Linux now, and if I recall, I had some problems getting it working. I should take another crack at it.

Symbols are powerful things. I’m not an American, but something that surprised me with Mangione was how people on the left and the right seemed to support him. It was a rare case of example of political unity amongst regular people.

I don’t have any specific examples, but the standard of code is really bad in science. I don’t mean this in an overly judgemental way — I am not surprised that scientists who have minimal code specific education end up with the kind of “eh, close enough” stuff that you see in personal projects. It is unfortunate how it leads to code being even less intelligible on average, which makes collaboration harder, even if the code is released open source.

I see a lot of teams basically reinventing the wheel. For example, 3D protein structures in the Protein Database (pdb) don’t have hydrogens on them. This is partly because that’ll depend a heckton on the pH of the environment that the protein is. Aspartic acid, for example, is an amino acid where its variable side chain (different for each amino acid) is CH2COOH in acidic conditions, but CH2COO- in basic conditions. Because it’s so relative to both the protein and the protein’s environment, you tend to get research groups just bashing together some simple code to add hydrogens back on depending on what they’re studying. This can lead to silly mistakes and shabby code in general though.

I can’t be too mad about it though. After all, wanting to learn how to be better at this stuff and to understand what was best practice caused me to go out and learn this stuff properly (or attempt to). Amongst programmers, I’m still more biochemist than programmer, but amongst my fellow scientists, I’m more programmer than biochemist. It’s a weird, liminal existence, but I sort of dig it.

I’m pretty open about the fact that I have autism, and there have been a few times when I have used the strategy in these tweets, but adding the invocation of my autism.

When I ask them to explain why it’s funny, they will often try to deflect the conversation at first, because they’re uncomfortable at being challenged. I can then double down on asking them to explain the joke, being all apologetic and saying that jokes often go over my head because I’m autistic. That makes it much harder to deflect, especially because I’m super good at appearing earnest when I’m asking this, so it manoeuvres the joke-teller into a no-win situation, where they either explain the joke, and look like an asshole, or they don’t explain it, and they still look like an asshole.

Then when they do eventually explain it, I am good at making my face fall in disappointment, before saying “oh, that’s not a very funny joke”. It gives me a great deal of satisfaction because there are many people who believe that autistic people are incapable of lying or acting, when in fact, being autistic means I’ve spent my entire life learning how to put on a performance for the outer world.

Tbf, I’d rather appear dumb than a condescending asshole. Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely times when condescension is an effective approach to challenging assholes in conversation, but if the person using condescension was the same person who made an offensive joke, then I feel like that would just be digging themselves deeper.

Like, if someone is open about being slow to understanding stuff, and says something like “yes, I often do ask people to explain things when I don’t understand them. It usually doesn’t pose a problem”, then that negates a bunch of the power of the condescension

It tends to mean something akin to “you don’t even need to transition to be a woman, because your masculinity is already so corrupted that you effectively already are one”.

This logic isn’t in contradiction with their transphobia, but in fact synergises with it. Trans men are seen as having no right to intrude upon the privileged position of masculinity, and trans women are seen as even more horrifying due to the fact that they willingly eschew their masculinity — something that’s incomprehensible to someone whose personal identity is 90% whatever hegemonic masculinity tells them to be.

A friend remarked to me once that one of the reasons she found transition liberating was because she had been bullied all her life for being too effeminate, so coming out as trans felt like shouting “you can’t fire me, I quit!”

This particular dog is fortunate enough to have shoes

Absolutely they do

I would imagine that there isn’t anything hazardous to that degree. I studied biochemistry, and I can think of a lot of different research areas that would include minimally hazardous materials (e.g. phosphate buffer)