“We strive to make the Disqus experience as personalized and relevant as possible for all users. In doing so, we collect non-personally identifiable interest information to deliver targeted content and advertising on websites that use Disqus as well as other websites you may visit.”
Wtf does that even mean? In what world is that consistent?
Imagining a goal regression planning system built on Org Mode which helps to figure out what to work on each day. Extend it with mental contexts and calendar awareness to minimize context switching; load balancing to avoid burdening you with too many items at once by rescheduling tasks as needed; and a preference function to let you encode “ideal days” as archetypes it tries to mimic.
“[O]nce a program has built in enough implicit and explicit dependencies, it has passed the event horizon, and it can no longer escape (because it would be easier to rewrite the program from scratch).”
Speaking of which, I’m making some progress getting my Pi environment set up to my liking. The hardest part so far is that my monitor is massive — I have a work-provided ultra wide display that the Pi has a bit of trouble driving. Trying to get the mouse to stop being so janky at the moment, but everything else is working reasonably well now.
I think the reflexive thought "but this solution must work in every imaginable case" that most engineers have when confronted with a problem is the cause of a ton of unneeded complexity.
My dad used to have to tell the engineers working on his projects "it doesn't need to go to the moon" — the inherent complexity is enough, don't add more.
“Even though Donald Knuth himself has suggested a few areas in which TeX could have been improved, he indicated that he firmly believes that having an unchanged system that will produce the same output now and in the future is more important than introducing new features. For this reason, he has stated that the "absolutely final change (to be made after my death)" will be to change the version number to π, at which point all remaining bugs will become features.”
We should aspire to stability.
Thinking of ways to index physical items using QR codes printed on stickers. The stickers would point to some location on your computer where information about that object is stored: project logs, inventory sheets, book lending records, etc.
One thing I’m wondering about is how to make the looks stable, so if you move around the digital side then the physical side remains valid. Perhaps having a little intermediary which records both sides of the link is a valid approach here.
Going to RMA the thing to Apple via the mail, but due to COVID they're expecting it'll be several weeks until the repair can be done. Even then it may be too expensive for my taste.
Looks like I'll be doing a lot more work on my Pi in the next few weeks!
Also, my Macbook Pro has finally decided that it's time to kill its screen. Can't open past 90 degrees without it blanking.
Setting up CI for my Forth-ish PCB design tool, FR4. Not exactly the most fun part of the project, but I like knowing that I haven't broken things as I mess around.
I'm fascinated by learning, thinking, and computers.
At my day job I work at the intersection of autonomous systems and satellite engineering. I make some things on the side, when I feel like it. I travel when I can; I like to take photographs. Occasionally I'll have an interesting thought or two.