cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • https://www.grahamforsenate.com/about :

    After graduating high school in 2003, during the height of the Iraq War, Graham snuck his birth certificate out of his father’s office to enlist in the United States Marine Corps.

    (the bio on his campaign site goes on...)

    After completing his infantry training, Graham was assigned to Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion 8th Marines and deployed to Al-Anbar Province, Iraq in January of 2005 where the battalion served primarily in the area east of Fallujah. In 2006, he was deployed to Ramadi, Iraq and served as machinegun section leader at the Government Center. He was deployed again in 2007.

    After his third deployment, Graham enrolled at The George Washington University using the GI Bill. Graham quickly realized that his time serving in uniform was not over. So in 2009, he joined the Maryland Army National Guard. He was deployed to Afghanistan the following year where he served as a rifle team leader.

    He returned from Afghanistan and went back to school at The George Washington University in 2011. Like many veterans, Graham struggled with undiagnosed PTSD and physical challenges that come from heavy infantry combat. Graham eventually withdrew from George Washington University and moved back home to Maine where he used the resources from the Department of Veterans Affairs to get the help he needed.

    After four tours overseas, Graham was deeply disillusioned with America’s failed foreign policy and endless wars and decided to focus on serving his local community in Maine.

    In 2018, Graham started working on his friend’s small oyster farm in his hometown of Sullivan. He quickly felt deeply connected with the sea and the community. He eventually took over the oyster farm and built it into a business that produces high quality oysters. Graham also began a diving and mooring service to help out around the bay, and serves the town of Sullivan as Harbormaster and Planning Board Chair.

    for some reason his website bio omits his time as a “security contractor” in 2018, although he did mention it in this interview:

    After his return to DC, he was in and out of college. He picked up bartending, and never ended up finishing school. In 2016, he moved back to Maine, where he began gaining support from the Veterans Affairs department, getting physical and mental therapy. He felt a renewed call to service, and in 2018, got a job as a security contractor for the State Department in Afghanistan.

    meanwhile, https://www.grahamforsenate.com/platform :

    Everything we went through in Iraq can be laid at the feet of those in Washington

    canonical(-according-to-wikipedia) "Hide the Pain Harold" (András Arató) meme photo, no text



  • Python does have a year option that they are not using.

    No, it doesn’t:

    help(datetime.timedelta)
    Help on class timedelta in module datetime:
    
    class timedelta(builtins.object)
     |  Difference between two datetime values.
     |
     |  timedelta(days=0, seconds=0, microseconds=0, milliseconds=0, minutes=0, hours=0, weeks=0)
     |
     |  All arguments are optional and default to 0.
     |  Arguments may be integers or floats, and may be positive or negative.
    




















  • with BlueSky I’d have to account for the data volume of all users on the platform as a whole, bringing the data volume way up to tens of terabytes

    I think this is a common misconception based on some critics’ incorrect assumptions and back-of-the-envelope math. See the atproto overview for the different components involved, and then this post (from a BlueSky employee) “A Full-Network Relay for $34 a Month” for some numbers.

    If I understand correctly, to run a “full nework relay” does mean to consume all of the text posts from all known servers, but not necessarily all of the media, and not necessarily to keep data you aren’t interested in for any long period of time.

    Also, you can run your own PDS and/or App Views without running your own relay at all. And, you can also use multiple other people’s relays.

    Disclaimer: I’m not an atproto expert, and I haven’t set any of this up myself.






  • The blog post also says this:

    There is one other thing which Bluesky gets right, and which the present-day fediverse does not. This is that Bluesky uses content-addressed content, so that content can survive if a node goes down. In this way (well, also allegedly with identity, but I will critique that part because it has several problems), Bluesky achieves its “credible exit” (Bluesky’s own term, by the way) in that the main node or individual hosts could go down, posts can continue to be referenced. This is possible to also do on the fediverse, but is not done presently; today, a fediverse user has to worry a lot about a node going down. indeed I intentionally fought for and left open the possibility within ActivityPub of adding content-addressed posts, and several years ago I wrote a demo of how to combine content addressing with ActivityPub. But nonetheless, even though such a thing is spec-compatible with ActivityPub, content-addressing is not done today on ActivityPub, and is done on Bluesky.

    My comment should have been clearer; what I meant when i said it is more “decentralized architecturally” I was referring to the data model part of the architecture as opposed to the physical server infrastructure currently operating it. The latter is obviously quite centralized still, but the former is designed for resilience against nodes unexpectedly (and permanently) failing.