vaurora's comments

I'm married to a lawyer, so I asked him to look into this and he wrote a blog post:

https://bourniquelaw.com/2024/10/09/data-23-and-me/

Most relevant bit:

"The law requires medical laboratories to retain some testing data and materials for various lengths of time, often 2 years, but as long as 10 years for some kinds of test."

My personal experience: I also failed the birth date test, even with my usual fake birth date. I also refused to provide a copy of my ID. They escalated my request and agreed to delete it anyway. All my samples and data are more than 10 years old, so they have no legal obligation to retain anything, which I pointed out to them in my confirmation.

I'm hoping they delete it but don't have the resources to do anything more than hope.

Trying to figure out how to apply Charles' Rules of Argument to the situation, I realized I wrote an entire article on this topic (and linked to it from the OP):

http://lwn.net/Articles/351422/

Short version: ext4's behavior under default mount options changed. You can't blame it on someone mis-reading the docs.

It was safe to rename() a file and expect the data it contained after crash to either be (1) the data before the rename(), (2) the data after the rename(). What changing the ext4 default logging mode to "data=writeback" did is add two more options, (3) nothing (0 bytes), and (4) whatever random garbage it found on disk, potentially including a copy of /etc/shadow. No-one misread the docs, the behavior changed.

But hey, if you're angling to be hired by a YC-funded storage startup, this is certainly a post.

Will you volunteer to filter my social media and email for rape threats, and compensate me for the lifetime earnings loss that is the result of naming someone who controls whether my code gets merged or whether I get invited to the top Linux invite-only summits? I've learned not to name names unless I'm ready to face the consequences of speaking out to protect other people.

OP here. To all the people flustered that I'm calling "listening politely" and "respecting people" feminist acts, I'll point out that, at the time, the only place you could reasonably expect that behavior in the Linux community was... a feminist collective, LinuxChix.

To this day, women in $COMPUTER_THING groups tend to be overrun by men searching for a civil place to have a technical conversation. It happened with the #debian-women IRC channel too. Just today, another man told me how volunteering for Women Who Code taught him to be more welcoming to newcomers in his own open source project. And have you seen the stickers on Guido Van Rossum's laptop?

So, yeah, it's possible to have these values without identifying as feminist, but in open source software today, explicitly feminist communities are usually the only ones that put these values into practice.

There was already code written to zero out the BSS shared across all the bootloaders for PowerPC, the call to it had just gotten lost when our enthusiastic fellow kernel dev rewrote bootloaders for platforms they couldn't test. I assume I just added the call to the existing code back in.

This study is so flawed as to be scientifically worthless.

The experimenter who was interacting with the babies and measuring the time they spent staring at faces knew the gender of each baby - in other words, it wasn't double blind. This is a well known recipe for allowing the experimenter's bias to influence their recording of the results. This is just one of several basic flaws in the study; see the analysis starting on page 113 of Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender."

"Delusions of Gender" has lots of similar analyses of the research "proving" innate gender differences. The takedown of Louann Brizendine's references starting on page 158 and the one about the frozen salmon MRIs on page 150 are particularly hilarious. One example:

"Casually, Brizendine notes, 'All of the therapists who showed these responses happened to be women.' For some reason, she fails to mention that this is because only female therapists, selected from phone directories, happened to be recruited for the study."

Er, while trying to research Jessamyn, I think you instead tracked down the leader of the Dreamwidth project, Denise Paolucci. Yes, she updates the Dreamwidth documentation, among other things...

If you've ever been annoyed by a sexist comment on Hacker News, you should donate to the Ada Initiative. We're working hard to change the culture and attitudes in open source and free/open culture.

Have you met any of the "core regulars" in the Linux community?

The short answer is that the people who do these things include both regulars and newbies. I have personally been groped or fondled by two "core regulars."

An upper bound of N - 1, where N = number of all women in tech. Work hard on that and you should be able to get it down to at least N - 1000 or so.