So, what makes a mentor? Someone who supports you. Someone who transforms you. Someone who helps you become who you’re meant to be. Sometimes they’re older and wiser. Sometimes they’re peers. Sometimes they’re your own students, teaching you courage.

As said by a colleague in response to this tweet.

all boys ritually emasculate/are emasculated by other boys as part of showing you are a real man. Trans women do not respond to this phenomenon the way that boys do and, as a result, are treated differently long before anyone realizes they are trans.

Who needs a JavaScript date picker? The answer, in most cases, is nobody! Complex UI leads to more errors and abandoned forms. There can be easier ways to pick a date than a calendar widget. This guide provides alternate ideas and aims to send developers on a path towards user-friendly interfaces.

This video is my take on 3B1B’s Summer of Math Exposition (SoME) competition

It explains in pretty intuitive terms how ideas from topology (or “rubber geometry”) can be used in neuroscience, to help us understand the way information is embedded in high-dimensional representations inside neural circuits

Compare genres, dialects, time periods; use AI; search by PoS, collocates, synonyms, and much more.

Useful linguistics database.

SAUER: At its fringes, wokeness becomes an autoimmune disorder: a desire for moral improvement, which is intrinsically worth striving for, begins to question the foundations that allowed this desire to arise in the first place.

Shit; that’s totally me.

SAUER: a moral absolutism that always views the private as political, which allows no compromise and knows no escape, to which everything must subordinate itself in the eternal struggle of the good (to which we belong) against the evil (to which the others belong), which makes every waking moment and every sphere of life, from loving and laughing to eating and sleeping, subject to the dark and monastic asceticism of a moral demand for purity.

Have been hearing this a lot recently.

BLOOM: Sauer has persuaded me to try to be humble here, to accept the possibility that my moral positions are almost certainly flawed and that I can learn something even from a moral movement that I find unappealing.

Have been hearing this, too.

This talk is an extension of my earlier Data Replication Design Spectrum blog post. The blog post was the analysis of the various replication algorithms, which concludes with showing that Raft has no particular advantage along any easy analyze/theoretical dimension. This builds on that argument to try and persuade you out of using Raft and to supply suggestions on how to work around the downsides of quorum-based or reconfiguration-based replication which makes people shy away from them.

Title is a bit clickbait-y, but it is quite a good historical overview of transphobic science and ideology in the United States.

the urge to try to attain a true “infinite rabbithole” of interpretation - a game whose secrets may never be fully plumbed - is a damn tempting one. and depth may be plumbed from even fixed sources!

Useful tools for navigating Moira lists at MIT

Some modern writings on the implications of “On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives” for the Kantian. You cannot lie, but the categorical imperative does not beget you yo give useful information or unnecessarily share your thoughts.

SKINNER: So, it’s no lies for the Kantian, but sometimes misleading truths are in order.

KLEMPNER: In a world where all our choices are determined by game theory (including the choice whether to tell the truth or tell a lie) something precious has been lost, the foundation of our ability to communicate with one another. That’s the point Kant is making.

Cool tapes.

Semantic diffusion occurs when you have a word that is coined by a person or group, often with a pretty good definition, but then gets spread through the wider community in a way that weakens that definition. This weakening risks losing the definition entirely - and with it any usefulness to the term.

In this sharp manifesto, veteran author and activist, Jude Doyle, reunites feminist and trans politics through a common belief: that all people deserve to have the final say about who they are…

An excellent book on transfeminism from the transmasc POV. A terrifyingly easy read: I zoomed through its 200 pages in about a day.

Chronic self-derogation is a common clinical problem, often difficult to treat. It is not a by-product of low self-esteem, but a coping strategy used to: (1) block impulsivity and overcome psychic immobilization, (2) ward off the hostility and aggression of others, and (3) defend against experiences of helplessness, humiliation, and shame. Successful treatment requires the exploration of the underlying presence of conflict, anxiety, helplessness, and threat, and the acquisition of alternate means of mastery and control.

The finding that progressives report more anxiety and depression than conservatives is well established. But it risks oversimplifying the story if we treat liberals as uniquely “mentally unhealthy” and conservatives as inherently “well adjusted.” A more useful interpretation is that both camps might carry a similar burden of neuroticism, expressed through different political dialects—liberals inwardly, as anxiety and self-criticism; conservatives outwardly, as anger and paranoia. And the picture becomes even more complex when evidence shows that depressive symptoms can heighten support for populist conservatives, even among Democrats. That suggests despair is not a partisan quirk but a general political force—one that is shaping American politics today and is likely to shape it even more in an era of lingering malaise.

friend.com reviews by NYC