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Reposted by Paul Rohr

Kathleen Clark @kathleenclark.bsky.social · 12h

A master class from MIT in responding to authoritarian overreach:

Your “premise … is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.
… America’s leadership in science & innovation depends on independent thinking & open competition for excellence.

Dear Madam Secretary,
I write in response to your letter of October 1, inviting MIT to review a "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education." I acknowledge the vital importance of these matters.
I appreciated the chance to meet with you earlier this year to discuss the priorities we share for American higher education.
As we discussed, the Institute's mission of service to the nation directs us to advance knowledge, educate students and bring knowledge to bear on the world's great challenges.
We do that in line with a clear set of values, with excellence above all. Some practical examples:
• MIT prides itself on rewarding merit. Students, faculty and staff succeed here based on the strength of their talent, ideas and hard work. For instance, the Institute was the first to reinstate the SAT/ACT requirement after the pandemic. And MIT has never had legacy preferences in admissions.
• MIT opens its doors to the most talented students regardless of their family's finances. Admissions are need-blind. Incoming undergraduates whose families earn less than $200,000 a year pay no tuition. Nearly 88% of our last graduating class left MIT with no debt for their education. We make a wealth of free courses and low-cost certificates available to any American with an internet connection. Of the undergraduate degrees we award, 94% are in STEM fields. And in service to the nation, we cap enrollment of international undergraduates at roughly 10%.

source:
https://orgchart.mit.edu/letters/regarding-compact

• We value free expression, as clearly described in the MIT Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom. We must hear facts and opinions we don't like - and engage respectfully with those with whom we disagree.
These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they're right, and we live by them because they support our mission - work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law.
The document also includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution. And fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.
In our view, America's leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.
As you know, MIT's record of service to the nation is long and enduring. Eight decades ago, MIT leaders helped invent a scientific partnership between America's research universities and the U.S. government that has delivered extraordinary benefits for the American people. We continue to believe in the power of this partnership to serve the nation.
Sincerely,
Sally Kornbluth

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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 1d

Nice simplification!

What's the use case where the final toggle is needed as an explicit option?

Wouldn't it be even simpler to just omit that + always default the other settings to whatever you used the previous time? (It's an easily learnable behavior)

Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 1d

Papal infallibility is only an article of faith within a single religious tradition

You can fervently believe in the importance of Constitutional law without having to treat SCOTUS with undue reverence. If something's gone terribly awry there, then we find proportionate ways to fix it

Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 1d

On legitimacy:

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

Nobody's claiming the entire federal judiciary is illegitimate. Just this particular collection of 9 fallible robed humans

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Reposted by Paul Rohr

Grace @gracekind.net · 19d

You can slice a cube in half and get a hexagon ??

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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 2d

How do you envision this mechanism working if downstream labelers aren't just emitting a noisy subset (or superset) of upstream label records under a new namespace?

Does adding DAGs somehow become a clever namespace aliasing hack which makes partial join results more cacheable within AppViews?

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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 2d

Effectively, the AppView winds up locally doing a logical JOIN across its copy of three kinds of data:

- raw content records
- matching label records
- user moderation config records

... with the last category acting as a namespace filter to only include records from specific labelers

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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 2d

IIRC, in the current architecture, labeler processes independently emit label records for specific pieces of content

A copy of that dataflow from each labeler, aggregated via relays, is then used by AppViews when hydrating subsequent requests for content

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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 2d

Interesting idea

Any clues where/how that might reduce workloads within the system? Would the DAGs be:

- directly expressing set algebra,
- just emitting exceptions, +/or
- doing something else entirely?

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Reposted by Paul Rohr

Kelsey Atherton @atherton.bsky.social · 2d

'By applying protections meant for vulnerable groups to shield government actors, Apple has created — within its own ecosystem — a new kind of protected class: state power itself."

migrantinsider.com/p/scoop-appl...

SCOOP: Apple Quietly Made ICE Agents a Protected Class

Internal emails show tech giant used anti-hate-speech rules meant for minorities to block an app documenting immigration enforcement.

migrantinsider.com

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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 3d

Rudy's book publishing metaphor really pays off here, because previously only protocol weenies understood the tradeoffs required for @whey.party's workaround app to function

( Read the whole 🧵 for an outstanding example of taking the time to communicate calmly about complex technical solutions )

Rudy wants revolution. @rude1.blacksky.team · 3d

As you can see in this screenshot, not only are AJ Link's post and profile still available elsewhere, he is still posting (though seemingly less happily) freedom of speech unimpeded
This app Red Dwarf by @whey.party skips the bookstore and goes straight to the author. blacksky.community doesn't 5/11

Reposted by Paul Rohr

JK @miniver.bsky.social · 3d

A society which rewards boldness reïnforces privilege

The_Lady_Red @theladyred.bsky.social · 3d

Midweek mind-your-privilege reminder.

Asim Qureshi
CEO Jibble-the employee time clock app 2d. Edited.

Several years ago, I encouraged a friend to take more risks in his
career.

He responded, "I'm supporting my parents, a sibling, my wife and kids. I mess up, we're out on the street."

I didn't encourage him again.

Now, over the years, many have told me that they really respect me as I gave up a fantastic career to pursue my dream of becoming an entrepreneur.

The reality is that it was nothing more than privilege at play - unlike many, including my friend, I had the luxury of being able to fail.

I also had a wife that encouraged me to go for it.

Risks aren't as risky for those that can afford to take them - heroism is often nothing more than the omission of details.

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Reposted by Paul Rohr

bryan (they/them) @chaosgreml.in · 4d

Do what @rude1.blacksky.team and @blackskyweb.xyz are doing. Do what @bad-example.com is doing. Do what @essentialrandom.bsky.social is doing. Do what @prosocialdesign.bsky.social is doing! Build new societal and communal structures that promote equity and participation and sustainable engagement.

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Reposted by Paul Rohr

bryan (they/them) @chaosgreml.in · 4d

Been thinking a lot about the #waffles discourse and how it’s frustrated me in a lot of different directions.

One of the main reasons, I think, is that it remains so individualist. Too many of you are blaming individuals instead of the structural forces that reify oppression & abuse on all sides.

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Reposted by Paul Rohr

dan @danabra.mov · 4d

good stuff

The strategy I used was to figure out how to line up the incentives such that using a different set of options was orders of magnitude more annoying than not.
Prettier is used in two main places: CI and the IDE. I made it so that both would read their options from a different place with a different rollout schedule.

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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 4d

Thus, I'm really looking forward to deep thoughts from @bnewbold.net, @rahaeli.bsky.social, et al on account-level moderation in the atproto ecosystem

Specifically ways that communities might be able to scalably access these kinds of tools to proactively improve their collective experience

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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 4d

Even if upcoming features like "zen mode" (whatever that is) can do a better job of separating folks before they devolve into angrily chasing each other off ...

... they're unlikely to be as proactively effective as the community-wide shunning that some are so urgently seeking

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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 4d

The bsky team has successfully delivered conflict-reduction features like:

- the apocablock
- quote detachment
- hide reply for all

... each of which helps individuals curate their own experience + reduce the blast radius for others -- but only after the fact

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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 4d

What's still needed is an equally thoughtful discussion about how, why, + where *accounts* can/should be moderated

Those mod actions are far more socially contentious + norms vary widely between communities, but the net effect is to proactively ban an entire account based on prior offenses

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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 4d

Lots of useful distinctions + vocabulary here. However, they're most relevant for understanding where + how interventions can or should be done to moderate:

- specific pieces of content
- volumes of spam

whether proactively or in response to reports

bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 4d

for atproto devs and protocol watchers, I published an overview of the network moderation architecture.

it tries to cover all the mod actions possible for each service type. this design has been around a while, but not well documented.

this doc is not very polished, but could clarify some details

AT Moderation Architecture | bryan newbold

The AT network is becoming more heterogeneous in practice, with independent PDS hosts, apps, and alternative bsky AppViews establishing themselves. This means that more complex inter-service moderatio...

whtwnd.com

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Reposted by Paul Rohr

JK @miniver.bsky.social · 4d

The President believes that this situation requires intervention by the 82nd Airborne

competentposter @competentposter.bsky.social · 6d

wizard frog is insane

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Reposted by Paul Rohr

bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 4d

a bunch of folks are wondering about how mod comms work for other PDS instances. this is also a problem for, eg, labelers trying to reply to appeals.

the plan is this proposal, which we have been making slow progress towards (it has been a very very busy 12 months for mod eng team)

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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 4d

Instead, I'd recommend recoloring the graph slightly so the AppView box on the left is green instead of blue

That'd make it much clearer that the distinctive UX for each app has its own green + orange flows, reusing the generic blue mechanisms shareable by all atproto apps

Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 4d

You meant diamond = relay, square = AppView, correct?

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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 4d

The only problem is that all the blue boxes on the atproto diagram are labelled as "servers" without differentiating their roles, potentially leading to confusion

Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 4d

☝️ This. Reading it as a unidirectional dataflow diagram explains how an atproto app's UX is hydrated from a single user's perspective

Each user's client writes to their own PDS, which forwards writes via a relay to the AppView their client connects to for a full view of the world

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