Oliver Kennedy @okennedy@social.xthemage.net
Oliver is a Prof at UBuffalo's CSE Dept. He enjoys western martial arts, cooking, and coding random stuff.
[He/Him]
Joined Nov 2017
@Tay0 @martijnbraam @PINE64 Agreed. I'd love to pick up just a cover!
@someunexpectedsparks @agx +1! Phosh is (as it should be) one of those elegant pieces of technology that just does what it's supposed to do and fades into the background. I don't have to think about it. Serious props to everyone involved in making it happen!
@elb I just got a https://remarkable.com/ a few months ago. It is a bit pricy but *amazing* for paper/epub reading and note-taking. It definitely hits your points 1, 3, 4. I'm not aware of any support for metadata though. It has a pretty good open-source ecosystem, and you can SSH into it. In particular, there are a few SCP-based sync scripts available. I did run into a little difficulty uploading a 100+MB PDF, but the reader renders it smoothly now that it's on there.
https://danielbmarkham.com/the-platform-is-the-enemy/
The conclusions are not surprising, and the author's binary applications of AI is really more of a gradient, but the argument is interesting. Centralization of information services offloads responsibility for assigning ambiguous class membership (good restaurants, permitted speech) to a single authority. Because there is only one authority, a single assignment has to be made, and we lose the critical grey areas in between.
Oliver Kennedy
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The rain held off long enough to let us go for a walk in the morning at Coney Island, 9 Jan 2021. Among the things spotted as this wonderful architecture that looks like a miniature pile of logs created by the caterpillar of a Bagworm Moth (Family Psychidae).
A nice start to observations in 2021. 🙂
On iNaturalist [ https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/67786373 ]
#iNaturalist #Nature #Singapore #Photography #Insects #Moths #Lepidoptera
Oliver Kennedy
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RT @EU_Commission@twitter.com
Today we are proposing a set of new rules for all digital services: the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act.
We want to make sure users have access to a wide choice of safe products and services online, and that businesses compete fairly and freely.
#DigitalEU
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/1338870807561461762
@craigmaloney The repo head appears to compile correctly for me, so I can't help directly with debugging. Usually that specific error means that you have a math-only character (it happens for me all the time with underscores _ ).
Oliver Kennedy
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Imagine there existed a cooperative dedicated to bringing GNOME forward, and its members worked full time on polishing the ecosystem.
If the designers and engineers announced their projects, and a communication team kept you posted of progress.
Would you throw money at it? And how would you contribute?
🔄 boosts welcome
@elementary I ended up switching away, but one of the things I miss (from both OSX and Elementary) is column view in the file browser.
@agx Nifty overview of the ecosystem state. Although I’m not involved in the project, I appreciate the shout outs to Mobian. Many companies might be tempted to see a community led effort like that as a competitor. I’m glad to see folks at Purism see opportunities for synergy instead!
ScalaJS + React... this seems worth looking into:
https://github.com/japgolly/scalajs-react/blob/master/doc/USAGE.md
Oliver Kennedy
boosted
Oliver Kennedy
boosted
@j1mc @sir The other problem is one of scale. Programmers feel like they're allowed to create things that Might Not Work because a) they don't value their craft and b) the worst case that they can think of is that it will segfault.
The first one is a problem with how the craft is obtained. You're not going to value something that you learned in a month at a bootcamp, you can't appreciate anything about the actual Craft of it at that level yet, because you haven't grown the lenses appropriate. People spend like, the entirety of their lives growing up seeing Good Art, so by the time they come to do artwork, they have a model of what's appropriate. When you start programming that's almost always the first time you've seen code, there isn't that run-up period that allows you to discern what is and isn't Good Code.
The second one is a problem with scale. The craft of programming is so removed from the effects, that you can't accurately understand what the effects will be. The solution here is teaching, and accountability. Civil Engineers know that if they build something that fails, people will very likely die, and they, personally, will be inspected. Programmers need to be taught that if they fuck up, not only will they caused a lot of stress (Which honestly, is underappreciated in our current Zeitgeist), and time-loss, but they will likely cause environmental damage (Because of the sheer fucking heat and power that are used and put out by server farms), and they can ruin people's lives (Bad notification times have social consequences on people's social groups and also mental state).
But teaching isn't enough. Because programming is most of the time used in building products, and the rotation period of employees is very short, not to mention that so many people touch a codebase during it's development, it's impossible to develop an accurate idea of what you should be accountable for. It's a firing squad mentality, where nobody knows if the bullet that they shot caused someone to die. You cannot have any sort of accountability in that environment.
The first one is a problem with how the craft is obtained. You're not going to value something that you learned in a month at a bootcamp, you can't appreciate anything about the actual Craft of it at that level yet, because you haven't grown the lenses appropriate. People spend like, the entirety of their lives growing up seeing Good Art, so by the time they come to do artwork, they have a model of what's appropriate. When you start programming that's almost always the first time you've seen code, there isn't that run-up period that allows you to discern what is and isn't Good Code.
The second one is a problem with scale. The craft of programming is so removed from the effects, that you can't accurately understand what the effects will be. The solution here is teaching, and accountability. Civil Engineers know that if they build something that fails, people will very likely die, and they, personally, will be inspected. Programmers need to be taught that if they fuck up, not only will they caused a lot of stress (Which honestly, is underappreciated in our current Zeitgeist), and time-loss, but they will likely cause environmental damage (Because of the sheer fucking heat and power that are used and put out by server farms), and they can ruin people's lives (Bad notification times have social consequences on people's social groups and also mental state).
But teaching isn't enough. Because programming is most of the time used in building products, and the rotation period of employees is very short, not to mention that so many people touch a codebase during it's development, it's impossible to develop an accurate idea of what you should be accountable for. It's a firing squad mentality, where nobody knows if the bullet that they shot caused someone to die. You cannot have any sort of accountability in that environment.
Oliver Kennedy
boosted
Honestly if I could boil all design advice down to a single tip, "make it difficult to do the wrong thing" would be it
@kyle I’ve had my canon ip4500 inkjet since 2006 or so. I’d been happily printing on it for over a decade on MacOS, manually flipping pages when I needed a 2-sided print until I switched to Linux and noticed a duplex option in the setup (which was not there on the Mac)... ☝️
For B/W it really is plug and play, but color needs work. Color printing just worked on OSX, while I still haven’t gotten my color profiles right on Linux. Another (extreme) case: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article757/the-english-book-printed-project-production-report-3
Oliver Kennedy
boosted
The Oatmeal - Comics, Quizzes, & Stories / I have a hard time taking compliments
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http://theoatmeal.com/comics/oracle_compliments
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A comic about taking compliments.
In memory of the many lost, and the one who brought us joy. May they always know where their towel is.
Oliver is a Prof at UBuffalo's CSE Dept. He enjoys western martial arts, cooking, and coding random stuff.
[He/Him]
Joined Nov 2017
