when the foundational assumptions of a field or discipline change

that's when you really find out who was paying attention to the introductory material and understood it all the way to the bottom. from what we've seen, it's not the advanced topics that tend to matter in charting a path forward, it's the basics!

the "why" is so easy to skip over in education, as the learner or the teacher, but so crucial in those moments

so for example, during initial setup, we computed how many mip levels to use based on the pixel dimensions of the one (1) texture we were loading. that then became a parameter in setting up the sampler, which is a Vulkan object that describes how to go from texture coordinates to a pixel value.

one of the nice things about the refactoring we're doing to break our graphics objects into separate structs based on their lifecycles is, it's forcing us to get really clear about which dependencies exist between them and how we deal with those

we didn't really think of our time at Google as working in the ad industry, because it was, you know, privacy, trying to protect the public

which was a bad theory of change that we shouldn't have fallen for, but at least we're in a position now to say for absolute certain that self-regulation does not work

but we sure did learn the jargon

there was some point in our life at which we listened to the song "Video Killed the Radio Star", as we'd done many times before, but that time we understood what it meant to "put the blame on VTR" and took that in stride instead of it being a weird mystery

we don't know when it was. huh.

it took us a while to recognize that ourselves, because we're quite fond of long-form semipermeable-group communication. we grew up on mailing lists and Usenet, neither of which are popular these days, but it's not just nostalgia, those conditions are great for shared pursuit of insight.

we had seen Discourse as the modern equivalent of those things, but it fails in that one key way - it gives all power to whoever controls it, none to anyone else

Discourse as a piece of software is an interesting case study to us since it was created with socially positive goals, by an excellent team who sincerely wanted all that stuff and documented what they were doing and why

and yet it is a tool of control that communities strongly dislike, and they're right to

does anybody have a favorite logo of any sort that involves a globe or realistic rendition of the Earth, especially if the agenda it glorifies is a horrifying one?

we have started a collection

we're sure many of the people involved sincerely believe it's the right thing to do. that is not in question. it is still the wrong thing to do.

look, we'll just say it, we don't like or trust organizations that pitch themselves as the governance layer of the fediverse. it's an attempt to build a hierarchical power structure. that is not the right shape for such things.

(because of our lifetime of experience dealing with dissociative phenomena, we're pretty good at functioning in conditions where it nominally doesn't make sense that we should, but it's not fun)

anyway, whatever the cause we do not think we will be capable of anything that requires working memory for the rest of the evening. alas.

all the air quality charts in Vancouver say it's fine but we're having symptoms we associate with smoke, and the sky is, like... more yellow than normal water clouds tend to get here

it's so angering how the people with the actual authority to do anything about climate stuff are all "I don't know what you mean, that's my emotional support fiery orange sky"

thesis: life is short
antithesis: you have all the time you need
Lachesis: no actually that's up to me

thesis: the sun is hot
antithesis: the sun goes away at night
pyrokinesis: it doesn't have to

we imagine the feelings we have these days as a programmer, privacy expert, etc are a lot like how it must have felt for chemical engineers when cigarettes were invented

like ... "oh. you shouldn't be doing that. please stop doing that. please stop reorienting the entirety of society around getting more people to do that."

we should pay attention to corporate structure that seeks to create multiple tiers of workers, and we should refuse to let that set us against each other. those who have comparatively more power and status must use it to fight for those who do not; it is a moral obligation and a strategic necessity.

we've been saying this for maybe five years now, but we think perhaps the historical moment for it had not yet arrived and not everyone was able to see our point -

no technology remains new and exciting forever. programmers should be aiming to end up like machinists, not like garment workers.

to do that we must protect the culture of knowledge and creativity, and we must take labor action when appropriate, up to and including strikes

we're personally fond of can-of-worms as a metaphor, because it's so vivid. that's usually our go-to when talking about irreversible escapes, with toothpaste a distant second. we try to avoid the genie thing because of the slavery and racism angle.

with that said, when humans are actively choosing to do a thing, that is always a choice those humans could make differently. people have control over their own choices, you know?