#OpenSource #OpenScience #OpenAccess, #birds and #birding, #inaturalist #ebird #Latin, #languages, travel and politics.
- Co-Organizer of CURIOSS @curioss, SustainOSS @sustainoss, and OpenSustain.tech
- PhD student at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington in Pōneke Wellington, Aotearoa NZ
- Professional conlanger
- Linguist, Latinist, and taxonomist
- eBird reviewer
He/him.
Grew up on unceded Abenaki land.
| Website | https://burntfen.com |
| Socials | http://richard.social |
| Podcast | https://podcast.sustainoss.org |
Open Source Gave Me Everything Until I Had Nothing Left to Give - Kenneth Reitz
I was at a tech conference in Sweden when it started. I hadn’t slept in days. I was one of the most prolific open source developers in the Python ecosystem, maintaining the most downloaded HTTP library on Earth, keynoting conferences across the world, and I was losing my mind in a hotel room six thousand miles from home.
My first solo-authored publication just appeared in *Linguistic Typology*: "The over-representation of phonological features in basic vocabulary doesn’t replicate when controlling for spatial and phylogenetic effects"
Running a #Bayesian model with #Lexibank data, I show that most previously observed effects that have been claimed to be sound symbolism do **not** replicate. A handful of effects emerges as highly stable though, mostly related to body-parts and the pronominal system.
The statistical over-representation of certain phonological features in the basic vocabulary of languages is often interpreted as reflecting potentially universal sound symbolic patterns. However, most of these cases have not been tested explicitly for reproducibility and might be prone to biases in the study samples or models. Many studies on the topic do not adequately control for genealogical and areal dependencies between sampled languages, casting doubts on the robustness of the results. In this study, I test the robustness of a recent study on sound symbolism in basic vocabulary concepts which analyzed 245 languages. This paper adds a new sample of 2,864 languages from Lexibank. I modify the original model by adding statistical controls for spatial and phylogenetic dependencies between languages. The new results show that most of the previously observed patterns are not robust, and in fact many patterns disappear completely when adding the genealogical and areal controls. A small number of patterns, however, emerges as highly stable even with the new sample. Through the new analysis, it is possible to assess the distribution of sound symbolism on a larger scale than previously. The study further highlights the need for testing all universal claims on language for robustness on various levels.
Ran an AGM today, and finished my six months of service on the exec committee for my postgrad student association. Happy to be just a member again. 🖖
https://www.burntfen.com/2026-03-16/te-herenga-waka-postgraduate-student-association
Lost the day to US taxes. Was a beautiful day.
Ahhh, the mountains I could have seen...
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@sustainoss/116222229525399859
I jumped on the microphone with @richlitt to discuss the sustainability of regional conferences like @pyconau and how important it is to have a thriving local community!
🎧 https://podcast.sustainoss.org/286
Thanks for having me on Richard, it was a great conversation 🎉
Host Richard (@richlitt) talks with Jack (@gdayitsjack) about PyCon AU (https://2026.pycon.org.au/) and how regional conferences build local connections, support new speakers, and help sustain open source communities.
Listen at 🎙️ https://podcast.sustainoss.org/286
In 2015 I was on a beach in Hawai'i helping build the prototype of what became Signal. I argued that the app needed pseudonyms because abusers know their victims' phone numbers. I lost the fight that day. History proved me right, and Signal would move to usernames under @Mer__edith's stewardship.
In this new essay, I trace the line from Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace through smart-home forensics, metadata killings, and Archive Team's non-consensual Tumblr scrape to ask: when did we decide that a jpeg is a photograph, that a profile is a person, that storage is memory?
The answer involves a boat off Honolulu, the early days of Signal, Iran's missiles over Amazon's Dubai AWS facilities, and the communities already building for a world where the server goes dark. This is an essay about infrastructure, memory, archiving without consent, and what we lose when we mistake the filesystem for memory.
It is also the angriest and most personal text I've ever written. I'm furious, and you should be too. We bet an entire civilisation on a brutal and unreliable stack. Now, fate has come to collect that wager.
California has a lot to fucking answer for.
https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/who-will-remember-us-when-the-servers-go-dark/
Kōkako photos in the press.
https://www.burntfen.com/2026-03-11/kokako-photos-in-the-press
The Jupyter Book and Jupyter Hub teams are hiring a community manager! This is a one-year contract to help us pioneer this critical role by improving and growing our community. Read more here, and please share and apply!
Rimu
Frederic Blum
Jack Skinner
SustainOSS
𝔰𝔥𝔦𝔟𝔠𝔬
Jason Lefkowitz
2i2c