wanderfowl

12 ms·

31.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Hm. At some level, this would be great, particularly for fluidly switching among keyboards across many languages, or even for particular games or applications (remapping the keys to functions which are nicely labeled). But it would need t
32.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
This is sadly common, but I'd like to assure you there are many of us who are interested in pedagogy, and measure our long-term success on the success and learning of our students.
33.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
This seems like a feature, not a bug. If developers know that tricking or coercing kids into IAPs will not profit them, they will stop doing so. And even putting the kid issue aside, anything that discourages repeated-purchase IAPs is itse
34.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Much like UPS targeting boxes, this is 100% not OK, and as a professor, if I found out my TAs were doing this, they would quickly find themselves someplace between "disciplined" and "fired".
35.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
I love that idea, and it seems like a reasonable way to slowly move a toolchain, provided that there are clean breaks to shift from MATLAB to the next step. And cluster computing in MATLAB, I agree, is just that: a cluster.
36.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
As somebody in an academic field where many scripts exist for MATLAB (mostly digital signal processing focused), there are few projects I want to succeed more than Octave. It's very hard to recommend that students and colleagues grow i
37.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Given that he put "teaching" in with "overhead", there's no shock that he left. The precise reason I chose to push to continue into a professor position was my love of teaching, and my willingness to sacrifice lucra
38.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
It's an assumption, but in my experience, the celiac folks tend to be the "screw it, give me the hash browns" type, rather than starting a shouting match over their allotted gluten-free toast.
39.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
If she decided to go full vegetarian tomorrow, I'd absolutely support it. But I love the rest of her enough to disagree on this point.
40.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Nothing makes "I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain" carnivores faster than dickish vegans. And there's a difference between an ethical problem (killing and eating something morally relevant which would ra
41.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
As a vegetarian (by ethical choice, not medical necessity), I do my best not to lose sight of the simple fact that I'm the problem here. When I walk into a steakhouse with my carnivorous wife, they're helping me out by finding
42.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
I've always found it slightly amusing that we've now reached the time in the history of civilization where immortality, even were it possible, has become a massive liability. One can no longer simply assume a new identity of pr
43.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
I love this idea. With insane mobile processors, terabyte storage on phones, external GPUs, and USB-C docking, we're tantalizingly close to "I do my computing on this device. It's in my pocket with a phone interface right
44.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Am I the only person who struggles with the idea of anything that's set at 1-to-1 with a single fiat currency being called 'stable'? Certainly, USD is more stable than BTC or ETH, so a "stablecoin" pegged to it wi
45.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Having NLTK and SciKitLearn in the same environment as my stats tools is... tantalizing. And if I could write Markdown-to-TeX docs straight from Jupyter, rather than the R -> TeX tables/variables read into LaTeX I'd used befor
46.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
I like R for many things, but Python just keeps getting more compelling, particularly given the excellent machine learning packages. As these sorts of toolchain elements get better and better, and as more people realize that there's a
47.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
This is one of the things I dislike most about modern games: We used to have cheat codes in single player games which allowed you to skip the BS and have a different kind of fun. Now, we have money that does the same thing. As a result, ne
48.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
What's hardware compatibility like? Did/do you struggle to find good portable machines to run Qubes on with solid wireless/bluetooth support? As somebody whose (trash) recently-current MBP just spent the weekend with Apple d
49.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Considering the amount of pain going into fighting the million drivers and black-box chips in a commodity X86 box where you can run user code as root, I can't imagine a smartphone would provide anything but suffering for a Qubes-style
50.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Sure, but at the same time, a big part of Qubes involved creating very secure jails for processes, which they could not escape. So, 'keeping untrusted stuff in its box' is sort of her expertise, and if anybody's going to do t
51.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Reading the Golem website, I'm no longer sure that I 'get it'. Is this just a decentralized AWS or supercomputing service which is payable using $ThisWeeksHotCryptocurrency? Her description made it sound less like a marketp
52.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Joanna's brilliant, and this Golem project is fascinating. The idea of a secure remote compute arrangement is sort of a natural extension from Qubes, and this is a pretty unique approach. May she (and Qubes, and Golem) find great suc
53.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
I agree that this is probably the cultural solution, provided the author can't be coerced to post on Arxiv, but it's an ugly one, which reeks of an ivory tower and gatekeeping ("nobody who isn't an established scholar in
54.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
This is a particularly appropriate link right now, given that the core idea of "saving data and state is something which should be avoided" is seeing a renaissance in both privacy-focused circles and in privacy-focused regulatory
55.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
This is a stellar comment, I've always found that a person's level of (dis)comfort with their past work is a great judge of how willing they are to learn and improve.
56.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
I've liked Airmail, but it has a tendency towards weird bugs (e.g. adding gibberish attachments to email chains in large numbers). Email tools, imho, need to be 'boring', stable, and predictable, and Airmail never has been, a
57.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Mutt is great if you're not often dealing with images or rich text, and if you love keyboard-based workflows. I was a mutt guy for a while. But I've found apps like MailMate or even GMail's web client to be keyboardy enoug
58.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
This is amazing, both in process and in result. Very well done, and a pleasant reminder that great things can come in small filesizes.
59.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Notational Velocity (and clones) always seemed to do well with that. Very light, very plaintext, but great as a sort of reactionary "Open and start typing and ask questions later" platform.
60.
by wanderfowl 8y ago
Even having won the Tenure-Track Lotto, I don't do this. Generally speaking, a student telling me they want a Ph.D in my field gets a strong warning and a frank discussion about the nature of the job market. I'm willing to support

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