Happy solstice, and happy Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day! After my inventory of my code today, I have decided it's time to pass on moreutils to someone new. This project remains interesting to people, including me. People still send patches, which are easy to deal with. Taking up basic maintenance of this package will be easy for you, if you feel like stepping forward. People still contribute ideas and code for new tools to add to moreutils. But I have not added any new tools to it since 2016. There is a big collections of ideas that I have done nothing with. The problem, I realized, is that "general-purpose new unix tool" is rather open-ended, and kind of problimatic. Picking new tools to add is an editorial process, or it becomes a mishmash of too many tools that are perhaps not general purpose. I am not a great editor, and so I tightened my requirements for "general-purpose" and "new" so far that I stopped adding anything. If you have ideas to solve that, or fearless good taste in curating a collection, this project is for you. The other reason it's less appealing to me is that unix tools as a whole are less appealing to me now. Now, as a functional programmer, I can get excited about actual general-purpose functional tools. And these are well curated and collected and can be shown to fit because the math says they do. Even a tiny Haskell function like this is really very interesting in how something so maximally trivial is actually usable in so many contexts.

id :: a -> a
id x = x

Anyway, I am not dropping maintenance of moreutils unless and until someone steps up to take it on. As I said, it's easy. But I am laying down the burden of editorial responsibility and won't be thinking about adding new tools to it.

---

Thanks very much to Sumana Harihareswara for developing and promoting the amnesty day idea!

This is about why I decided to get vaccinated, and why that was a hard choice. Note: If you have the opportunity to get vaccinated, you should. This is good for public health. If you re worried about being a bad person by getting vaccinated now, you re probably not a bad person. This is my professional opinion as a bioethics graduate student. Anyway, onward. Not Great Reasons to Not Get Vaccinated Reason one: Other people need them more. There are people have a much higher risk of dying from COVID or having long term consequences. I don t want to get a vaccine at the expense of someone who has much worse projected outcomes. Reason two: I live a lowish risk life. I have a low/medium risk lifestyle. I go to the grocery store, but I don t do things like indoor dining. I have drinks with friends, outside, generally maintaining distance and trying to be polite and careful. I go on walks or sit in parks with friends. I have three people I see inside, and we don t see anyone else inside. Through my school, I am tested regularly though I am behind right now, I ll admit. I work from home, I take classes on my computer. My podmates also work from home. There are other people who live much higher risk lives and don t have a choice in the matter. They work outside of their homes, they are taking care of other people, they re incarcerated, their children go to school in-person. Those people need vaccines more than I do or at least I feel like that s the case. Even though I know that, e.g., parents won t be able to get vaccinated unless they otherwise qualify, I still feel like I d be doing them wrong by getting vaccinated first! Reason three: I don t want to deal with other people s judgement. When New Jersey allowed smokers to get vaccinated, wow, did people go off on how unfair that is. I ve seen the same rhetoric applied to other preexisting conditions/qualifications. Boo. Great Reasons to Get Vaccinated I had a few good conversations with friends I respect a lot. They convinced me that I should get vaccinated, in spite of my concerns. Reason one: I m scared of COVID. I actually find this the weakest of my reasons to get vaccinated: I m scared of COVID. I get migraines. I downplay how bad they are, because I know other people who have it worse, but they re terrible. They re debilitating. COVID can increase your risk of migraines, especially if you re already prone to them. They can last months. Boo. I m terrified of Long COVID. A part of my identity comes from doing things outside, and this past year without regularly swimming or going on bike trips or going up mountains has been really rough for me. For my own sake, I don t want to get sick. Reason two: I want to protect the people in my life. Being vaccinated is good for the people in my life. The current conversation I ve heard is that if you re vaccinated, you re probably less likely to spread COVID to those around you. That sounds great! I m not going to change my lifestyle anytime soon to be higher risk, but I like knowing that there s an even smaller chance I will become a disease vector. Reason three: Seriously, everyone should get vaccinated. Vaccinations are key to fighting COVID. I am not an epidemiologist (though I did once consider become an epistemologist). I m not going to pretend to be one. But they tell me that vaccines are really important, and the Intro to Public Health class I took agrees. We need to vaccinate everyone we can, everywhere in the world, in order to create the best outcomes. We don t want some vaccine-resistant COVID variant to show up somewhere because we were jerkfaces and prevented people from getting vaccinated. Medical professionals and experts I talked with told me to get vaccinated as soon as the opportunity arose. Maybe they said this because they like me, but I think they re also concerned about public health. So you re ready to get your vaccine! I m so excited for you! Sumana Harihareswara wrote this great blog post about getting vaccinated in New York City, though is probably relevant for New York State in general. Please check out your state s guidelines and maybe do a little research or creative thinking about what counts. This Twitter thread Sumana shared talked about ADHD as a qualifying condition under developmental and learning disorders. Your doctor might be super helpful! Your doctor might also not be helpful at all. When I talked to mine they didn t know much about the vaccine roll out plan, criteria, or procedures around proof of medical condition. Some vaccine sites also have waitlists for extra doses. A friend of mine is on one! For these, you generally don t have to meet the qualification criteria. These are doses left at the end of the day due to canceled appointments and things like that. A lot of states have useful Twitter bots and web sites. We have TurboVax. It s great. Big fan. These are usually appoints for the day of or the next day or two.

I've gotten in the habit of going to the FSF's LibrePlanet conference in Boston. It's a very special conference, much wider ranging than a typical technology conference, solidly grounded in software freedom, and full of extraordinary people. (And the only conference I've ever taken my Mom to!) After attending for four years, I finally thought it was time to perhaps speak at it.

Four keynote speakers will anchor the event. Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty program of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, will kick things off on Saturday morning by sharing how technologists can enlist in the growing fight for civil liberties. On Saturday night, Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman will present the Free Software Awards and discuss pressing threats and important opportunities for software freedom. Day two will begin with Cory Doctorow, science fiction author and special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, revealing how to eradicate all Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) in a decade. The conference will draw to a close with Sumana Harihareswara, leader, speaker, and advocate for free software and communities, giving a talk entitled "Lessons, Myths, and Lenses: What I Wish I'd Known in 1998." That's not all. We'll hear about the GNU philosophy from Marianne Corvellec of the French free software organization April, Joey Hess will touch on encryption with a talk about backing up your GPG keys, and Denver Gingerich will update us on a crucial free software need: the mobile phone. Others will look at ways to grow the free software movement: through cross-pollination with other activist movements, removal of barriers to free software use and contribution, and new ideas for free software as paid work.

-- Here's a sneak peek at LibrePlanet 2017: Register today! I'll be giving some varient of the keysafe talk from Linux.Conf.Au. By the way, videos of my keysafe and propellor talks at Linux.Conf.Au are now available, see the talks page.

On Friday, June 24, the last day of Open Source Bridge, I won a scarf! It says, "Open Source Citizen." I wasn't the only one. The attendees nominated people who "made an extra effort to help others and share their knowledge," and the conference committee chose the three people they felt exemplified this. The winners were Sumana Harihareswara, Igal Koshevoy, and me. In case you don't know Sumana, she's the new Wikimedia Volunteer Development Coordinator, a friend, and a commenter here at Asheeshworld. In the photo of her and her new scarf, you can also see Ward Cunningham. I suggest reading her wrap-up about the conference, and checking out the notes from her talk. I haven't met Igal, but I've learned he's a fixture of the Portland tech scene. He's user number one on opensourcebridge.org and one of the original contributors to calagator, the most important event calendar in the Portland tech world. That's just a brief summary; follow him on Twitter to keep in touch. I started the conference a little shy, not wanting to introduce myself to people, so I hung out with Sumana. She talked to everyone she could find, and there I was standing next to her. On the first day, it was only because of Sumana's outgoingness that people knew who I was. On the second and third days, I was involved in two sessions: a panel on open source communities and a talk about the OpenHatch training missions. I was extremely honored to be chosen. There were so many other spectacular people I met for the first time, like Valerie Aurora, Jacinta Richardson, Brian Aker, and Alex Linsker. These are all people with three crucial traits: they're extremely knowledgeable, friendly, and opinionated. I'm glad I had a chance to attend and meet them! Photo credits: Thanks to Noah Swartz for the photo of me. Sumana's photo comes from her post to wikitech-l. Igal's comes from his Open Source Bridge user profile.

Soon before leaving NYC for the summer, Sumana invited me to see a monologue on facebook by Mike Daisy. It was a good show and he has since provided an mp3 of it. There are some classic moments in there, especially toward the middle of the audio. I am looking for am mp3 of his Great Men of Genius where he addresses Mr Hubbard among others (I find stuff on it
but not it). Anyone have it or pointers to where it might be?

Soon before leaving NYC for the summer, Sumana invited me to see a monologue on facebook by Mike Daisy. It was a good show and he has since provided an mp3 of it. There are some classic moments in there, especially toward the middle of the audio. I am looking for am mp3 of his Great Men of Genius where he addresses Mr Hubbard among others (I find stuff on it
but not it). Anyone have it or pointers to where it might be?

One day, I would love to teach a class on the culture and politics of technology and ditch all of the academic pieces and replace with a string of novels and fictional short stories. Though it may be a few years before I can pull this off, I am already compiling my list and there is naturally a healthy serving of science fiction (along with Kurt Vonnegut, who I adore). Perhaps one my favorite science fiction authors is Philip Dick who edges his readers close to delirum and sometimes insanity and all through mere words. But one of my favorite writings by PD comes not from his fictional fun house but from a regular (and staid) letter composed of a simple and elegant description of what makes science fiction so e(special):

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at
Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf
story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is *good* sf the
idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all,
it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the
reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader s mind so that the mind,
like the author s, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and it
inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not
do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read
it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being
set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea
in it; hence the very best since fiction ultimately winds up being a
collaboration between author and reader, in which both create and
enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science
fiction, the joy of discovery of newness. Philip Dick (in a letter)
May 14, 1981

Truth be told, I don t really know much about science fiction outside of the classics but I look forward to reading more and slowly am adding a few pieces to my collection. And when I need to find out something about sci fi, I turn to Sumana who is pretty well schooled in its ways. She has recently co-edited a new anthology of science fiction stories including one on hardware hacking and faith that some of you might enjoy.

One day, I would love to teach a class on the culture and politics of technology and ditch all of the academic pieces and replace with a string of novels and fictional short stories. Though it may be a few years before I can pull this off, I am already compiling my list and there is naturally a healthy serving of science fiction (along with Kurt Vonnegut, who I adore). Perhaps one my favorite science fiction authors is Philip Dick who edges his readers close to delirum and sometimes insanity and all through mere words. But one of my favorite writings by PD comes not from his fictional fun house but from a regular (and staid) letter composed of a simple and elegant description of what makes science fiction so e(special):

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at
Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf
story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is *good* sf the
idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all,
it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the
reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader s mind so that the mind,
like the author s, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and it
inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not
do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read
it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being
set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea
in it; hence the very best since fiction ultimately winds up being a
collaboration between author and reader, in which both create and
enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science
fiction, the joy of discovery of newness. Philip Dick (in a letter)
May 14, 1981

Truth be told, I don t really know much about science fiction outside of the classics but I look forward to reading more and slowly am adding a few pieces to my collection. And when I need to find out something about sci fi, I turn to Sumana who is pretty well schooled in its ways. She has recently co-edited a new anthology of science fiction stories including one on hardware hacking and faith that some of you might enjoy.