1/ For all those now reporting on QAnon following the events of last week. "Q" has not posted since December 8. QAnon is a self sustaining movement and ideology, with as many variations as there are influencers and conspiracy theories latched on to the central QAnon tenet.

Thread : this is going to be my penultimate post on Swedish mortality & covid. After SCB's next update, Jan 18th, we can consider the prel. numbers for all cause mortality 2020 fully stable, and I will then do a final update. What follows below, is still subject to minor updates.

2/n: To get ahead of media, who no doubt any hour now will report "Sweden has highest number of deaths since 1918!", here's what the absolute deaths deaths look like:

3/n: So expect media headlines painting Sweden as "The World's Cautionary Tale". However, with a little bit of thought and analysis, we might reach different conclusions... Let's first take population size into account:

4/n: when adjusting for population, 2020 as we speak (remember, the numbers are not fully finalized yet) has mortality on par with 2015. Can you spot the two outliers...? (hint: 2020 is not one of them).

5/n: As I've mentioned earlier, it's not enough to adjust for population - different years have quite different demographics in terms of age. So we need to take that into account, by adjusting for age:

Thread: The @PSCupdates latest campaign to write to the Foreign Secretary accusing Israel of 'medical apartheid' over Covid vaccinations is abhorrent. This thread takes apart the “medical apartheid” lie. (1)

PSC cites the Geneva Convention and the obligations an occupier has to the occupied. But the Oslo Accords - a big step towards Palestinian statehood and sovereignty - gave the PA control of their own healthcare provision – something they wanted as a step towards statehood. (2)

On 21/11/20 the Palestine Authority (PA) meet with WHO, UNICEF, UNRWA to ensure that it was provided with adequate Covid vaccines. Israel wasn’t invited to these talks. (3)

The PA continue to acquire Covid vaccinations independently and on 12/12/20 ordered 4million doses of the Russian vaccine. (4)

On 9 Jan the PA announced that “Four vaccine producer companies [will deliver for] 70% of the Palestinian people... the WHO will provide for 20%.” Still not asking Israel for help. (5)

Many people have drawn parallels between white mobs of today and the historical violence of lynch mobs at home and imperialism abroad. But what I keep thinking about is colonization. What we saw on January 6th is the uncivilized, unchecked, entitled violence of colonizers.

This is how colonizers behave. They storm, they invade, they steal, they defecate, they destroy and they do so under the banner of freedom, liberty and self-proclaimed superiority.

The unapologetic embrace of brute force in the name of liberty is exactly what our founding fathers advocated. It's what we celebrate with every national holiday. It's what the Capitol actually represents. It's the ugly truth that even Democratic "leaders" are determined to deny.

The sad reality is that even if Democrats had the ovaries to hold violent insurrectionists accountable for the ongoing coup, their efforts would be in vain so long as they continue to ignore or -- worse, celebrate -- the colonial rot at the heart of our nation's project.

White supremacist colonialism explains why none of the words we are using to describe the "mob" are effective. Even the word "insurrectionists" fails. Within this system, white men are not just ALLOWED to be violent insurrectionists, they have historically been celebrated for it.

USNat’s men’s FS thread

There are moments now and then when, if I imagine hard enough, it’s like it was before.

I don’t feel the ear loops from the mask.

I don’t notice the red signs on the floor, saying “6 ft apart!”

I don’t feel... the heaviness that tinges every single hour.

There are moments. 1/

I’m standing in line at the post office. It’s a beautiful day and sunlight streams in through the windows.

Miraculously it’s relatively deserted.

A bored little boy looks through the stamps for sale with his mother.

A man stands behind me, elderly, leaning on a cane. 2/

He’s tall, lean, and wears a “GO ARMY” sweatshirt paired with sweatpants, and those brown sandals that seem ubiquitous in South Texas.

I nod hello.

He nods in return, “Hi, doc.”

For a moment, I feel that queasy discomfort of being unable to remember.

Do I know him? 3/

I know patients expect me to recognize them, and I often remember, but there’re just too many.

Then I realize, he’s not a patient.

I forgot to unclip the hospital ID tag on my shirt pocket.

He grins, “What kind of doc are ya?”

I unclip the ID tag and smile, “Kidneys.” 4/

“My kidneys are just about the only damn part of me that works!”

He laughs. A choppy sound, dry.

I nod politely, saying nothing.

He continues with that easy familiarity that comes from being sociable, and lonely.

“I busted my knees jumpin’ outta planes for the army.” 5/

@DonaldWelsh16 Oh hello.

I knew Dr Rorabeck. He was a wonderful guy. @SchulichMedDent does have much to be proud of. Like any institution, it has its warts.

@SchulichMedDent But to respond to your comment: I think you’re referencing the concept of balanced pathogenicity, which probably will will, over the longer term, favour less virulent strains.

@SchulichMedDent The difficulty we have with VOC is that they appear to bind better to ace2 (as a vascular biologist I bet you’ve heard of that!) and that may underlie their increased infectivity and increased

@SchulichMedDent propensity to cause outbreaks among kids, which has caused the UK to do a u-turn on schools.

You seem to fancy yourself a bit of a quant (math! So great!) so you can probably figure out what happens if you get an increase in R resulting in increased attack rates, while virulence

@SchulichMedDent Remains constant. Yes! You get more people dying that way!

You got it! Gold star ⭐️!

And we have no evidence of diminished virulence for VOC as yet. What we do have is evidence for increased virulence.

THREAD

Nginx has a service mesh too. Is it any good?

Let's find out.

1/

Most service meshes use Envoy as a proxy and for good reasons:

1. It's fully open-source
2. It can be customised on-the-fly via an API
3. It can be extended

2/

Is there a service mesh without Envoy? Of course!

The best example is @Linkerd that uses a custom proxy written in Rust.

Linkerd is smaller and more focussed but it is also slower to add features.

And now there's a new entry: @nginx

3/

But isn't Nginx one of those products not fully open-source proxies?

Yes it is, but they made an exception.

When you run the Nginx Service Mesh you can use Nginx Plus (the paid product) as a proxy for free.

Great isn't it?

4/

How does the meshwork?

There are four main components:

- The API
- SPIRE (cert authority)
- NATS (message broker)
- Nginx Plus as a proxy

Grafana, Prometheus and Zipkin are automatically installed too.

A thread of #digitalart drafts, inspired by optical ring resonators:

It started with #Neff:

And then Neff ring matters:

And alas I digress:

And moreso

And even more

*rubber duck thread* Using the Sega CD subcpu in mode 1 is very doable but the larger problem is: what kind of tasks can we hand off to it, and are they asynchronous?

We can't run code directly off the cart from the subcpu. We can't simply make the faster cpu run the game. So it makes more sense that we'd have subroutines running on the subcpu to accelerate common operations that can be called from the MD main cpu.

But we run into a problem here. First is defining what "common operations" would really be. Since the subcpu is another 68k with a roughly 50% higher clock, it wouldn't make much sense to run very small or atomic operations on it. There is overhead in passing arguments...

... because it has to be done in shared memory. Overhead could kill the gains. We'd get more benefit from a larger, more complex function to really take advantage of that higher clock speed. This adds another layer to the problem, synchronicity.

If the MD cpu has to block (stop and wait for a result from the subcpu) we're losing a lot of potential throughput. The effect is similar the other way around in that we also waste resources on the subcpu waiting for a command from the MD.

okay but seriously though i've had to swallow down a lot of objections to transphobic comments from people who are friends! with other trans people! but apparently not good enough friends to put in effort not to do like 101 fuckups

real fucking hard to carve out any space in gamedev at all as it is let alone having to swallow down and smile politely to shit basic research would point out is Not Okay

is it an NT thing or what bc when i make friends with someone whose identity I don't already understand i go and research to try and ensure i don't accidentally cause them pain with basic fucking mistakes that are incredibly dehumanizing

not even touching on how fucking common it is to see established people deciding that today they're going to shit on a shitpost by a marginalized junior being excited about something

i was really excited when i first started being able to establish myself as a dev and now im just filled with dread all of the time because frankly a lot of devs are fucking MEAN and the leftist presentation crumbles on the slightest fuckin provocation

Let's chat about the McCarthy article and why I state that he cannot maintain a consistent position within the article. Let's look at this:

In the space of a few paragraphs, he goes from He did not want them to storm the building. He did not want people to be killed and injured to reckless encouragement and depraved indifference. McCarthy is stating that Trump did not and then did have mens rea as is convenient.

Not only is that intellectually inconsistent, it's outright insulting that McCarthy thinks we will not remember what we read not a few seconds before. Not to mention that McCarthy said this at the beginning of the article:

From one SENTENCE to the next McCarthy said it cannot be gainsaid and then immediately he gains the say. I will grudgingly give McCarthy credit for at least gesturing towards a good faith interpretation of Trump's words. But McCarthy's position fails immediately by his own words.

Now, back to the first bit. There is nothing inappropriate about a political demonstration outside the Capitol. Nothing at all. The elision here between people demonstrating outside vs those who broke inside is more vile because of his attempt to deny he's doing it.