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● 05.31.23

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● Gemini Links 31/05/2023: Personality of Software Engineers

Posted in News Roundup at 8:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Today I Lost an Important Thing in My Life

• A very important thing, which made up large parts of my private life for the last decade, has been taken from me. Nothing life-threatening or dangerous in any way, just leaving a big hole.

• Granted, I was thinking about removing it from my life voluntarily a couple of times, but never took any action. Or, better, not stopping what I was doing.

=> ↺ Composing with Constraints: Episodes I-III

• Results from “Composing with Constraints: 100 Practical Exercises in Music Composition” by Jorge Variego, for better or worse.

=> ↺ Seriously? Last day ‘o May already?

• Pleasant day. We rehearsed a bit for a show on the 3rd. Hashed out some interpersonal abrasions that had been dogging us. Hit a winery and a couple “dispensaries”. Should be good to go for a couple months. I’m hoping the low grade stuff we acquired solves a specific pain issue for my wife.

• I guess I’m just never going to feel energetic again, post COVID. There’s a weariness that just plain doesn’t go away no matter what chemicals I forego, no matter “how well I eat”, etc.

• I mean, I’m sure age is a non-trivial factor at this point. But just a year ago we were both “killing it” in terms of still holding down jobs and getting gobs of other shit done (e.g. take care of a couple short term rentals). Now it seems I have to stop and rest after every form of even middle-of-the-road exertion.

=> ↺ Un-Shittifying Wordle

• Like many others in the smolnet scene I was very nonplussed about the NYT acquisition of Wordle. I think we all knew exactly where that was headed eventually. Luckily so many people telegraphed what would happen that there is a plethora of ways to play wordle on a TON of different platforms without having to involve the NYT at all. This is far from an exhaustive list of Wordle clones. There are far too many to keep track of but these are the ones I play or at least have tried and enjoyed.

Politics

=> ↺ ‘Up, Simba’: David Foster Wallace on the Presidential campaign trail & UK Citizenship

• I’ve been re-reading some of David Foster Wallace’s essays and journalism in the collection ‘Consider the Lobster and Other Essays’ (2005). Last night, I couldn’t sleep until the small hours – and years of insomnia have taught me that the thing to do is accept it, get up and read (rather than, say: stay laying down in a state of somewhat wakefulness, conscious of the night, of the silence, of the changing cadence of the street outside (this can drag for hours, and almost never leads to sleep)). So I spent a few hours of the night getting absorbed in Wallace’s piece of journalism ‘Up, Simba’, originally written for Rolling Stone magazine; an account of the 2000 Republican nominee campaign trail following John McCain, who at the time was up against his main competitor and now ex-President George Bush Jr.

Technical

=> ↺ Asus L210MA lid screen issue with XFCE4 on Devuan 5

=> ↺ Asus L210MA lid screen issue with XFCE4 on Devuan 5

• I tested several combinations and followed various ancient and modern workarounds, none of those worked out; eventually I found my recipe, perhaps many steps are even unnecessary, however this combination seems to have the highest rate of reliability.

=> ↺ The computer is a dream

• I had to think about it for a bit. I certainly used to dream about computers. I used to dream in ASCII, the dream rolling down the insides of my closed eyelids like letters on a flickering CRT. And then I’d wake up, make coffee,and check Usenet on my 386, dialed into either the CS department Sun server, or a community UUCP provider, at 2400 baud. Probably even for a while after that, when I was setting up auto-dial and dynamic DNS on my 486 and 56k modem, and porting Unix software to OS/2 instead of working my dissertation proposal, completely unrelated to computers.

Science

=> ↺ Neuralink and Autism

• I want you, the reader, for the length of this post, to ignore the “Holy Shit!” implications of “enabling Web browsing and telepathy” as a linked pair and instead let’s just focus on Autism.

• I have always been different. I’ve always known that I was different, too. But it took me much of my lifetime to gain insight into what made me different. At least part of the difference is Autism.

Programming

=> ↺ The Personality of Software Engineers

• First, non-technical folk vastly over estimate how much computer scientists and software engineers know what they’re doing. We’re all just making it up as we go along and especially when it comes to machine learning we haven’t a clue of how any of it works, nor what’s even with the scope of possibility. We’re figuring all this stuff out with the rest of society.

• Another thing is the level of understanding of software technologies in the general population. Most people have a general baseline of understanding of cancer; they understand that cancers can be life threatening, and that treatments are difficult and fraught with complications. When it comes to software, the average persons knows nothing: they think that programmers wear hoodies, sitting in basements, with falling green text projected onto their faces. We see this in the ludicrous questions that elected officials ask of executives, and in turn the almost as ludicrous answers that those executives give in response.

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