proud of myself for getting through the ~60 papers assigned in my first grad-level humanities class. that is probably less than a real humanities person would read in a semester but as someone who didn't consider a reality other than technological determinism in august, I feel accomplished

description list is is my favorite html element

Halloween decreases the amount of social media posts that I understand to basically zero

why do I need to restart my wifi driver every time I send an email

And all new programming languages that contain abstractions to help humans reason about computation need to provide a huge corpus of correct programs covering a wide range of use cases if they want to succeed, because why should we have to know how to use the language if we want to use the language?

some of my reading in the past week (Braverman, Noble, Zuboff) focused on the impact of automation in the mid/late 20th century and in addition to rhyming with AI discourse, it made me nostalgic for when blue collar work meant skilled machinists and wasnt just a euphemism for amazon delivery serf

we should have revolted back when web pages stopped being mostly html

i miss building stuff

university policy on prelims + course schedules are starting to put me in a corner and I'm not sure I'm going to get the things I want out of my program anymore

I was looking through some photo memories today and saw that 2 years to the day before my talk at ICFP I was at the first US-RSE conference in Chicago trying to find a PhD advisor. That me could have never imagined I'd be here

I chatted with so many awesome people at ICFP yesterday but woke up with basically no voice and decided to do some vocal rest today so I don't sound like RFK Jr during my talk on Friday. I really missed interacting with folks though

libc

I still haven't fully processed the fact that I'm going halfway around the world later this week

only spent 12.5 hours setting up LaTeX and biblatex and biber to format my annotated bibliography, this is gonna save me so much time

writing a ppx feels like such a hack but idk what else to do

Wrote a mini research statement today and I'm already seeing how the humanities courses I'm taking this semester are helping me be more articulate about my interests

Remember, its called LaTeX because it makes your work look sexy

is my trackpad dead or is it just arch linux

wait maybe if I don't made them polymorphic

de bruijn indices solved λ.0 of my problems

wow the video production quality at fun ocaml is really good

a few friends had gatherings at different places yesterday and i was able to walk from home to all of them. this is the future liberals want.

implications for society generally are worrisome. but also consider that this happened at a place of higher education, an institution that is already very damaged. can universities survive a response that is directed at them?

the paper i was trying to read was *really good*...now I'm distracted

will 9/10 be as pivotal as 9/11

using python for a web dev project after a few months of not using it and I really miss OCaml. Even with pydantic and pyright, I just don't trust the code the same way. There are so many more tests I feel like I have to write. how does anyone live like this

in the 1960s they really just pondered their theories for 16 pages, no citations just vibes

as is standard practice

I wish google drive had not de-emphasized directory structure. The suggested stuff is not often what I am looking for and I'm so used to remembering hierarchies instead of filenames

one of those videos where someone who is really good at excel expeditiously solves a bunch of reformatting challenges but instead its emacs and text files

Some scientists writing software: make it up as you go, don't accept improvements out of fear that things will break, watch ignorant people copy parts of it into their own scripts. Software engineering as a process is not that different from the scientific method.

just spent many dollars on conference travel to guilt myself into doing work

meeting the new Informatics students this morning has really put me in the right head space for the beginning of the school year

okay I know this is the most basic PCB ever and the hole in the middle is the wrong size but this has got me dreaming big

so called top research university says no to RA unionization because they want to be able to terminate research appointments at will

wait where did all the summer go

when will AI notice that I am running low on storage and automatically go through my email inbox and find all the junk marketing crap we all get bombarded with and offer to delete it to save x terabytes of storage so that I don't have to pay for more storage oh wait never

wait designing my own pcb doesnt look that hard actually

a lot of people at the airport were there for their first time today

Something that made me think: "If we teach only the findings and products of science...without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?" Was Carl Sagan talking about scientific software?

I've really been enjoying some books by Steven Johnson lately, his presentation of historical events is very entertaining and I come away with new perspectives on uses of information (from The Infernal Machine) and development of science (from The Invention of Air)

someone at OPLSS showed me the natural numbers game so I started playing it today and I may now have to cancel my evening plans

"you're an unethical monster, and that if you continue to `try { thisBullshit(); }` you are going to `catch (theseHands)`" is my favorite sentence from a blog post ever.

i went to a used book store for the first time last week and it was magical

not trying to subtweet anyone but is it normal for people to wear the same clothes multiple days in a row at a conference?

day 8 of OPLSS. they started putting music symbols in the math

if i cannot *walk* between terminals and gates at your airport and i cannot walk without passing through security again then the airport designer has incorrigibly failed and should lose their airport designing degree and license

duckplyr almost makes me want to use R again but also...what if there was ppx_duckdb

anyone going to OPLSS this year?

the thing where a page loads with some kind of grid and then all of the items in the grid change because the algorithm or whatever finished deciding what I get to see. I hate it. Also I always only want the same (minimal) set of cookies and we really need a way for browsers to just say that to sites