busybee fluffy rambles Notes

Jewish applicants are frequently passed over by hiring managers. In fact, 26% of hiring managers say they are less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants.

[…]

When asked how they come to believe that an applicant is Jewish, 56% say it’s because it was directly stated by the applicant. However, many also make assumptions based on the applicant’s educational background (35%), last name (33%), past or current experiences with Jewish organizations (28%), and even their appearance (26%).

[…]

When asked why they are less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants, the top reasons include Jews have too much power and control (38%), claim to be the ‘chosen people’ (38%), and have too much wealth (35%).

Why use ActivityPub when RSS still exists, and when IndieWeb adds social functionality to traditional, non-ActivityPub blogging?

Even at its best, ActivityPub is a very difficult standard to implement, with a lot of really hairy edge conditions and an at-best-mediocre experience for things that don’t fit neatly into its model, and Mastodon’s particular implementation of ActivityPub isn’t, y'know, great. (And I’ve written a bunch more about my thoughts on this as well.)

Basically I’d love to see more people support IndieWeb, using RSS/Atom and ideally also h-feed as the syndication formats, and to that end, I’d say that micro.blog is a better choice of “new Google Reader.”

asyncio generally requires that you provide a “session”/“client” object that contains the run loop for the async operations. I think that when you refactor a library to support asyncio, you provide a non-async wrapper around it which spins up the execution loop for each operation, although there might be a better pattern for it these days.

An antipattern I’ve seen a lot is people wrapping a non-async library in a threadpool and then have the async wrapper block on the future, but that completely misses the point to asyncio and makes everything perform way worse.

asyncio is kind of wonky to wrap your head around at first but it’s well worth it for the major performance gains you get. It can be a huge pill to swallow though, and given that most Python web apps are still running in a thread-per-connection context (because wsgi is designed around it) it can feel like a chicken-egg scenario at times. But doing the work of moving to asyncio (and providing a non-async wrapper around it) makes it easier for more things to move to asyncio and getting the performance benefits as a result, so it’s a net good IMO, even if it isn’t heavily used right away.

Indieweb Utils looks pretty neat and there’s a few projects I’ve had on the backburner which would benefit from this.

I’d also be pretty tempted to look into moving Pushl over to it, just to cut down on my own code maintenance requirements, except it looks like it doesn’t have any support for asyncio, which is less-than-optimal for an I/O-bound tool which sends a bunch of bulk updates. Is there any interest in adding asyncio support?

A conversation of sorts about how modern social media helps to amplify some of the worst aspects of toxic discourse. Possibly educational for straight allies, too.

jamesg asks:

How much coffee do you drink in a day?

I usually drink 1-2 shots of espresso per day, so “1 cup” feels like the closest match.

Most of it is decaf, though.

@jamesg:

I am intrigued by the IndieWeb’s approach to plurality and building technologies that don’t serve the creation of monocultures or single ways of thinking about things. IndieWeb technologies help build plug-and-play social bridges. The technologies are your pipes. You get to decide how they connect and what you make with those pipes. This idea excites me to a great degree.

Could you explain what you mean by “plurality?” In the circles I run in it almost certainly means something different than what you mean by it, and the definition I’m familiar with is likely to be the more common one on the Internet in 2020 2022.

From context it seems like you’re talking about building a (distributed) voting/polling system, which is definitely an interesting topic to think about, and the first-cut approach would probably be to do something using fragmentions or otherwise having a u-vote-for (or similar) link either to an anchor on the page or to the resource being voted on (e.g. the image itself).

Once again I’m finding myself wishing I had time to work on Publ. I really need to get around to writing a MicroPub endpoint for it! (And all the related stuff necessary to make it actually work…)