Hi author,

I think you've written an excellent article, and also that you would be well served by ignoring the comments on it.

Some people here feel you've called them entitled. I think you made a useful nuanced point about how engineering looks to others, but the people who feel insulted don't see it that way and some of them are going to be quite harsh about it.

Those who interpret your article as an attack are not going to be swayed, so I'm just here to say you have my respect if you choose to disengage.

You need to think of EMI as having a magnitude and a direction. Half the time you are adding a negative voltage.

Since he’s using a Piezo lighter, shouldn’t it be just a single DC pulse like discharging a capacitor?

Even your example of discharging a capacitor can end up with a pulse both directions, caused by the inductance of the wires.

In this specific situation, there's no common reference level, and so the induced pulse will go both directions. You can think of this as being about the edges of the pulse being the parts that actually cause radio to be transmitted, and there's both a positive-going edge and a negative-going edge on a pulse.

I was confused on the lighter type so I deleted that part of my response. I think you're correct but I can't say for sure.

I think one of the hardest problems in community moderation is finding good moderators.

A moderator's job description involves outlining fault in other people's words and occasionally punishing them for it. That sort of thing is tedious to most people, but thrilling to some very emotionally unhealthy ones. Few people who want the job can be trusted with the power.

I fear the python steering council has been lost to people who don't have the maturity to talk through problems in a healthy way.

Fortunately, the Steering Council at least consists of annually re-elected members.

The same can't be said for the Code of Conduct Work Group, or most other Work Groups, or for Discourse forum moderators.

I actually can't find any documentation anywhere of the election process for the PSF Board of Directors, or anything about how Officers are selected. Not on psf.python.org, not on the PSF blog, not on Mr. Willamson's blog (as a former board member whose blog was recently shared on HN); not as a PEP (that only covers the Steering Council). All I know is that a few new members are elected annually, but not how long their terms are.

(But I can easily find a diversity statement.)

The issue is not that wannabe moderators and "leaders" are merely immature. They are cunning activists and opportunists. The right approach is to throw out anyone who insists on co-opting an open software project to advance goals that are not directly related to the project's purpose. This is especially obvious when they start trying to censor or ban people over disagreements and opinions outside the scope of the project.