On the issue of access to information for adopted persons #knowyouridentity, there are others who have more expertise in this than me but since I didn't get time to make all the points I would have liked to on @morningireland earlier, here are some thoughts (Thread ⬇️)

The previous AG advised that it would be unconst to provide an unlimited right to access info in leg - reasons were not given but we can presume this opinion is based on the result in the IOT vB case, which is a misreading of that case, while privacy was prioritised in that case

The SC indicated that this was an issue which should properly be dealt with by the Oir, which is entitled to conduct a balancing exercise and decide that one right should prevail over the other. The only prob would be if one set of rights was completely disregarded

Also, the weight of law and legal opinion is on the side of the right to know your identity, a CoA judgmnt last feb identified a right right to have your identity correctly recognised by the State and that was said to encompass a right to have a birth certificate and a passport.

The ECHR has recognised identity rights in respect of a variety of adoption information context & under EU law a person’s name is their personal data to which they have a right & personal data can lawfully be restricted only if there is clear legislation that allows for it

I posted this elsewhere on social media today. Sharing here because I think there are many ppl who relate, and bc having gotten pushback again today, I have found further reason for hope in some of the support I’ve gotten (thread): 1/11

In all of the pushback I’ve gotten over the past yr in statements I’ve made about politics & the white evangelical church, notably a lot has been not about the substance of my message but a continual refrain of “why do you have to say ‘white’ Christians?” 2/11

I’ll share a little to explain why this stands out to me. I’m Indian-American, loosely defined. My dad is from India and my mom is white. I have enjoyed all the privilege of living as a white American, to be clear (lots to unpack there, but have to save that for another day) 3/11

My entire life I’ve been asked to explain myself. “Where are you from?” “Ohio.” “But where are you *really* from?” Or worse, “what *are* you?” I grew up in the 80s and 90s and this is my lived experience. I now know it’s a common one for others like me. 4/11

Again, much more to unpack here, but the point is: I was always “other” because I wasn’t white.

White is just assumed as this default that we have lived with in America, and everyone else has then of course had to be named as something else: black, Hispanic, brown, etc 5/11

1/n

I am working on a paper on why interest rates and yields are as low as they are. I will share some preliminary results here.

2/n

What I will share are some of the output from a simple model for US 10-year Treasury bond yields.

3/n

It is key to me that the model not only is statistically significantly, but is also economically significant. We need to understand economic developments within economic theory.

4/n

I have estimated a model for the US 10-year bond yield based on the following fundamental variables.

5/n

1) Nominal GDP growth (per capita).

We're LIVE for the 2nd in a 3-part series around #EquityinEducation! We are grateful to have @DrDBL & @SuptEnfield joining us today for this important conversation. Follow along in this thread ⤵️ #BringPeopeTogether #TeVirtualEvents @EquitySupt1 @KafrissenKai

starts us off with a group activity to recognize our White Privilege. Kai acknowledges that she is showing up today in her own way, and leaning into these conversations as best she can. How are you showing up today? #BringPeopleTogether #TeVirtualEvents

reminds us why we are bringing people together for this work. 90% of school district leaders in the US are white. 90% also stated that the work of #DEI is important but only 20% believe that they are equipped with the skills and talent to lead this work! #Equity

- Hope is not a strategy! For marginalized populations hope is the only thing they have to hold on to, unless leaders like us pick up this work and accelerate it. #BringPeopleTogether #DEI #Equity #EquityInEducation

tells us that when she moved to Highline public schools (diverse population) she was criticized for moving too quickly in this work. There is a sense of urgency because we are so behind and we are playing catch up! #EquityInEducation #DEI

THREAD, PT DEUX -- it was a lovely long weekend, I’m feeling rested and energized, and lucky for you I’ve got some more great criminal justice policy ideas to share. Real exciting stuff, I promise. Let’s flesh these out: 1/9

Ok, so to reduce unnecessary contacts between police and people/communities of color, here’s what we’re going to do: end the war on drugs. 2/9

Right now we needlessly make felons out of 10,000+ Virginians per year for narcotics possession, so for that we’re going to end the war on drugs. 3/9

Reduce court fines and fees, prevent disenfranchisement, demilitarize police departments, eliminate mandatory minimums? I’ve got a great idea for those, as well: end the war on drugs 4/9

Oh, and police and prison budgets are bloated, driving state and municipal governments into debt, with no societal benefit to show for it. So in order to save a crap ton of cash we’re also going to end the war on drugs 5/9

1/ How many times have u been told that ‘Imposter syndrome’ is an internal problem? That it’s your responsibility to make it go away from your mind. That it’s entirely a figment of your own imagination. Well I don’t think so, but the journey to this conclusion has been painful 🧵

2/ Let’s start with the definition of Imposter syndrome: it’s basically those feelings of inadequacy & doubt in your abilities to do the things that you’ve proved successful in doing by virtue of your achievements & qualifications. This in turn affects your confidence to do them.

3/We’re told women, particularly those from minoritised backgrounds, have this more intensely though it can affect anyone. I’ve certainly felt it throughout my life intensifying at times of stress and overload. But is it entirely internally triggered? Well, this is the narrative.

4/ You go to courses, you read articles, you speak to mentors and what they usually tell you is that it’s all in your mind. Perhaps triggered by your social upbringing & cultural background. So you must work on it. But I’ve realised recently that it’s not just that.

5/ Some people in your surroundings trigger this, to be fair to them perhaps unconsciously. They may have in their minds a stereotype of you that is inadequate & incapable of achieving what you’ve achieved in reality. So they do or say things that trigger the feeling in you..

It strikes me that much of the anti-CRT pieces that charge Black Christians with being CRT proponents go to great lengths to root CRT in European philosophical streams of thought. This despite actual proponents rooting their thoughts elsewhere in the Black intellectual trad.
/1

So one has to ask the question: Why this tendency? Why press a movement often self-consciously located in one tradition into a tradition it sees as foreign to its thinking?

I'm sure there are many answers. But one answer seems to me to be it's an attempt to control the debate./2

A lot of the historical and philosophical excursus, insofar as it overlooks what the actual proponents claim, is simply another effort at colonizing thought, of insisting on a certain philosophical priority, and of demeaning the constructive thoughts of a group being rejected.
/3

This is partly why so little progress is made or can be hoped for in these discussions. The critics aren't willing to take justice proponents at their word and engage their actual arguments and tradition.

/4

Some need to "other" justice advocates both by (a) alienating the advocate from their own philosophical and theological resources and (b) positioning them within rejected and anathematized streams of thought in western society. It's a double-alienation that rigs the convo.

/5

A lengthy thread I wrote just to write. Feel free to ignore.

1/ The future of consumer GPUs is probably less ASICy than people think. I think we're nearing the end of growing non-general purpose compute/cache die utilization in consumer GPUs. Here's why:

2/ Real world RT core usage is far from peak theoretical perf. On Nvidia, they're cache starved. The way to improve performance for Nvidia is to add more cache to the die a la infinity cache. On AMD, it's just to improve their RT core design, which isn't great.

More importantly,

3/ real world RT core usage is very naive. It's often collect n sample per pixel with m reflections w/irradiance caching, & then run A-SVGF to denoise. This usually works well, but sucks w/moving objects, fine details like leaves on distant trees, and the combo of leaves in wind.

4/ But research already shows that you can get pretty drastic improvements w/adaptive sampling in that case.

Beyond that, adaptive sampling research usually focuses on general cases. But consumer GPUs use RT for e.g. games, Blender, etc. These aren't super general. The engines

5/ underpinning these applications have access to a lot of information. For example, developers can add hints to objects to suggest to the renderer that they be sampled more or less.

Better exploitation of temporal data and ray tracing statistics can make a lot of the rays cast

How many boomers are feeling:

A thread

Just finished listening to Matt Stoller's Goliath, a political and intellectual history of the anti-monopoly movement over the last ~100 years. It gave me a better understanding of the intellectual history of 20th Century anti-monopoly thinking.

In particular, Stoller draws a distinction I hadn't thought very much about previously: between liberals who favor leaving monopolies in place and regulating them strictly vs. those who oppose bigness as such.

As Stoller tells it, New Dealers erected a complicated legal system designed to tilt the playing field in favor of small companies.

For example, there were laws against discounting to prevent big retailers from using their market power to win lower prices from suppliers and undercutting small retailers. A law capped deposit interest rates to prevent big banks from outbidding small banks for deposits.

Stoller situates Teddy Roosevelt, JK Galbraith, and Ralph Nader in the camp of liberals who (mostly) favored regulating monopolies instead of breaking them up. Also Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and most modern Democratic leaders.

A couple of years ago I promised myself that one day I'll be strong enough to be able to talk about my mental health openly. I've made this my goal. I think this is the day, so here's how I ended up diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 37 - a thread...

In 2017 I reached my rock-bottom. I got back home from Philippines, where I failed to deliver my conference talk due to being a mental train-wreck (for which I'm terribly sorry!). I started having suicidal idealizations and I realized it's time to get help.

It's not that I wanted to end myself, but I would see myself dying in all sorts of ways every-single-day. These are called intrusive thoughts and the ones I had were probably one of the worst ones you can experience.

I started therapy in May 2017 and it was surprisingly easy for me to...just start talking. It was a relief that I could just talk to somebody because I pretty much isolated myself from everybody.

Unfortunately, my therapist didn't want to be specific about my problems and everything was just...too generalized? I don't know how to describe this. I wanted to hear concrete facts eventually, like "you're dealing with X and you should do Y to improve".

So, I was asked to write down my thoughts on the coup for a major newspaper earlier this week.

I told them no, and let me tell you why.

In 2016, after the election I wrote an op-ed on white nationalism and the alt-right for a major newspaper and appeared on MSNBC.

I was hyped to have the opportunity to share my expertise with a wider audience.

I wasn't prepared for what came next.

The op-ed was shared pretty widely. It is probably as close as I've come to a viral piece.

I wrote for a prestigious pub, and people were reading about my scholarly research.

Cool, right?

Not quite.

The day the op-ed was published I was at an amusement park with my partner, two kids, nephew and niece, one of my sisters and her partner.

While waiting on the kids to get off a ride, I started getting messages from folks asking if I was okay.

I was confused. Why wouldn't I be okay?

Well, then, folks were like, "Uh, there are some pretty nasty threats being lobbed at you on Twitter."

I took a drive down the 22 yesterday to check out a #monolith that popped up in the Crowsnest Pass area! Went to investigate, left realizing the @UCPCaucus is likely involved, in a bad way, as usual

More in thread 🔽

#monolithmystery
#FiretheUCP #ableg #WaterNotCoal #Alberta

If you haven't driven down the 22, it is gorgeous - rolling foothills, streams cutting through picturesque ranch land, and a rugged mountain landscape background. Near Maycroft provincial park, right near the Crowsnest pass is where this thing stands, approx. 12 feet tall.

It sounds like the Tin Man from Oz when you knock on it and looks to be made of shiny sheet metal. Seems to be mounted firmly into the ground, with no visible supports

Its similar to others I've seen, only in pictures, but has an additional feature: what appears to be an extra component that seems to indicate the monolith is 'pointing' to a larger swath of area, rather than strictly in the direction of the acute triangle shaped object's 'point'

If that is the case, it looks to point towards a chunk of the eastern slopes of Southern Alberta. A chunk that happens to be where the proposed Grassy Mountain Coal mine would be located.

The republican speeches today are familiar to any abuse survivor.

"I hate that you made me hit you. I've never hit anyone before, so that's how awful you've been to me to make me do that. And the way you keep pushing this, it feels like you're trying to make me go there again."

Deciding what to and when to go all in on an idea is super challenging and there’s a lot of bad advice out there

Here’s how it went for me and SwagUp

Here we go 👇

1/ the first important thing is that SwagUp wasn’t the first product/business idea I had worked on

By the time @swaguphq was started I had launched at least 15+ different ideas of varying levels of success growing up

2/ The chances your 1st, 2nd, or even 5th idea/product is going to take off are pretty low

And that’s largely because building startups are less about the product and ideas, and more about markets, timing, and execution

3/ So I think the first key lesson is that the number of swings you take early on is as important as the product you choose to work on

This is where you see many “over night successes” that were really the culmination of years of at bats, even for me at 25, I started at 6 :)

4/ Now back to the founding of SwagUp...

Leading up to it, I had known a bit about the industry, needing swag while launching and app in school, eventually selling flags and custom shirts to fraternities on campus in college