Categories Twitter
I'm going to make a bomb shell statement here around the turn of the year, something so risky that I face prospects of the Twitter account being attacked or even banned.
— Cosmic Penguin (@Cosmic_Penguin) December 31, 2020
It's about my very uneasy Twitter experience over the past 2-6 months, the worst I could ever remember.
You see, I realized in the last few months that, by translating information and news related to one of the fastest growing spaceflight powers of the world...I inadvertently became a spreader of PRC propaganda.
And with me exactly 180 degrees away from them, I feel scared.
It actually started a few years ago - it's not hard to meet Chinese Twitter users interested in spaceflight, either those living overseas or find a way to climb over the wall. Not surprisingly, many of these S/F enthusiasts are interested in their own military too.
This steadily grew with my followers' count until the flagship Chinese spaceflight missions of 2020 (Chang'e 5 especially but also many others) brought in dozens of them liking/re-tweeting my info tweets sometimes, and similar no. of such followers every month.
I do casually check these new followers/users sometimes. To my horror, far too many of them routinely insults, attacks, mocks others who they see as "anti-China" or spread potential mis-information, even blatant attacks, that started off w/ their state media/spokesperson.
It's time again for the 2nd annual #top10photonics thread, where I compile my own #top10 best photonics papers list of the year!
See here for last year's thread:
https://t.co/6h82mPAn3w
A thread 👇
Hey #optics and #photonics twitter
— Orad Reshef (@Orad) December 29, 2019
It's the time of year where we are inundated in end-of-year top10 lists... but how many of those lists are made for _US_ and our community?
So I decided to compile my own #top10 best photonics papers list for 2019
A #top10photonics thread \U0001f447
Same disclaimers as last time:
1. These aren't just papers that were published in 2020. They are papers that were added to my library in 2020. Some are a little older — some are a lot older. All are interesting or exciting to me in some way.
2. I reiterate - TO ME. This list is highly subjective, and is mostly about what captured my imagination most, not about what will make the biggest impact, or what is most worth funding. The order is mostly arbitrary too. This is just for fun :)
3. Once again I am NOT including any of my papers, or any from my current or former groups. If you're curious about what I do, drop a proverbial tip in my jar and peruse my publication list
And while I have your attention, register for #POM20ja, happening in 2 weeks. (It's free!) It's a completely reinvented @PhotonicsMeetup, and it promises to be a great time!
Now, on to the main event!
Every single critic of "cancel culture" just thinks the wrong people are getting canceled. pic.twitter.com/DDIVccj8zV
— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) February 2, 2021
Obviously, people will disagree about which norms are important, about how bad it is to violate them, and thus about how severe the social cost ought to be. That's just pluralism, man, and it's good.
It's important to openly talk through these substantive differences, which is why derailing these conversations with hand-waving moral panic about "cancel culture" is obnoxious and illiberal.
Screaming "cancel culture!" when somebody pays a social costs other people have been fighting hard to get others to see as necessary is often just a way to declare, with no argument, that the sanction in question was not only unnecessary but in breach of a more important norm.
It's impossible to uphold social norms without social sanctions, so obviously anti-cancelers are going to want to impose a social cost on people they see as imposing unjustly steep social costs on others.
Thinking about this tweetstorm, one of the issues I’ve run into as an engineering leader is what to call the software engineering stuff that’s “agile” given that the Agile Community(tm) has killed the brand.
I might do an \u201cagile\u201d tweet storm to the effect that all the attention is to the least leveraged portions of the value stream. Interest?
— Arien Malec (@amalec) October 26, 2019
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And by & large, I’ve taken to call it “DevOps”, because the DevOps community have taken up much of the mantle @KentBeck & the XP community started with. & Kent has independently focused on safe small changes deployed to production. Which is DevOps.
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Much of the art here is making changes safe enough to deploy to production continuously. And to do that, we need to design incrementally, test obsessively, take architecture seriously so we decompose dependencies. & we need to automate everything & do it all the time.
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It turns out that this is what Kent & @RonJeffries @GeePawHill & many other folks have been nattering on about & being broadly misunderstood. @KentBeck has some brilliant essays (scattered across FB & his site alas) & @GeePawHill has amazing twitter threads on the topic
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When you look at *what it takes* to get to the DORA measures that @nicolefv & team write about in Accelerate, the input metrics for the DORA outputs, it’s making small changes safe.
Inside: Twitter's Project Blue Sky; Brazil's world-beating data breach; Evictions and utility cutoffs are covid comorbidities; "North Korea" targets infosec researchers; and more!
Archived at: https://t.co/eCzogk14kg
#Pluralistic
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Join me this Thursday for the launch of the print edition of my 2020 book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM!
https://t.co/8Op6IEocPB
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Twitter's Project Blue Sky: Fix the internet, not the platforms.
https://t.co/KoZNABMJrE
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It's been more than a year since @jack announced Project Blue Sky, inspired by @mmasnick's "Protocols, Not Platforms," paper - a critical work explaining how walled gardens can be transformed into open protocols.https://t.co/1yDSNJehRP
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 26, 2021
1/ pic.twitter.com/xwDIErMFLJ
Brazil's world-beating data breach: More than 100% of the population doxed.
https://t.co/6tcbcX2gQ6
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Brazil's public health agency has suffered what is arguably the worst data-exposure in world history, losing 243m+ records in a country of 211m people (the excess represents dead peoples' records).https://t.co/VsQUtIEnC7
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 26, 2021
1/ pic.twitter.com/DV6k2NfvHW
Evictions and utility cutoffs are covid comorbidities: 143,000 covid deaths due to economic precarity.
https://t.co/pZM80W5DuR
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"Public health" isn't just about vaccinations, clinics and urgent care: it's a holistic discipline that encompasses all the contributors to health outcomes, which include things like housing, employment, transportation, pollution and more.
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) January 26, 2021
1/ pic.twitter.com/UQRgLVoczQ
