Ideas

At some point in my life, I started going to meetings, and slowly started gathering good and bad experiences. Also, for some reason, during university I actually studied how to have productive meetings, and I’ve kept a few tidbits of wisdom from that course.

I hold this truth to be self evident: most meetings are a waste of time.

But there’s a corollary: it’s also hard to identify which of your meetings are a waste of time, and why. It’s hard to predict in advance whether a meeting will be productive.

Consider the "strawman" logical fallacy (wonderfully illustrated in video here):

1. Person A presents her argument (call it A).
2. Person B voices his disagreement with argument S (an exaggerated or incorrect version of A).

I'm a Christian and a feminist. Membership in both groups is a key part of my identity. If you talk to someone with a simplistic understanding of these groups, though, they might be surprised that it's possible to be a member of both groups!

The problem is that we aren't very good at differentiating subgroups that happen to share the same label. We lump Catholics, Pentecostals, and Unitarians into one group called "Christians". We even lump Canadian Christians and American Christians into one group!

It's taken a long time to get from planning to reality, but https://metamaps.cc now has a working import/export feature!

If you aren't familiar with Metamaps, and/or would like an invite code, feel free to reach me on Twitter.

Now, how can you get your grubby paws on some mind map data?

People should cite Wikipedia when they use it for information.

People are afraid of citing Wikipedia because their professors in university or high school said it "wasn't academic". Then they went on to talk about academic dishonesty and plagiarism, probably in the same breath.

I have a surprising number of friends who want to do away with capitalism entirely. The hope is to create a new economic order, with the aim of achieving some or all of these goals (among others):

"Malthusianism is a school of ideas derived from the political/economic thought of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus . . . which describes how unchecked population growth is exponential while the growth of the food supply was expected to be arithmetical. Malthus believed there were two types of "checks" that could then reduce the population, returning it to a more sustainable level.

I'm running mosh 1.2.4 on my Ubuntu server, and it's always annoyed me that it doesn't print the message of the day (MOTD) on startup. ssh prints helpful information when you log in, like if you need to reboot or update packages, that I miss when logging in via mosh.

So you can imagine my surprise when I found out that this issue was fixed in version 1.2 of mosh, 4 versions ago!

This is absolutely brilliant

cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh remoteserver.example.com 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'

All credit to Matt Might

I've been in China for two months now, and I enjoy programming so I've checked probably 5-6 projects out of github at this point.

During this time, I've had troubles accessing https://gist.github.com. This always struck me as weird, but I didn't think too much of it.