Topolomancer

Meta: Ironic how the website does not render correctly in Google Chrome on Android. I feel that web design has become rather complicated these days, but surely it's not an impossible task to make websites work for more than one device?

My first IDE when I started to be excited about programming! I vividly remember a book that was about teaching C++ to kids; I devoured it and spent a glorious summer just fiddling with what I thought was very complex code at the time. How time flies...

Couldn't agree more!

Turning this around somewhat: in some sense, the focus on luck can also hurt people. If it's "just luck" that you did _not_ get the promotion or whatever despite trying and training for it, does it mean that you are "cursed by fate?"

I think it's super hard to balance "agency" versus "random factors beyond my control" on a daily basis. I agree that embracing the role of luck is one step forward, but I also wonder whether we'll ever get there.

Getting major Thomas Aquinas vibes from your comment! Are you by any chance aware of his works? The idea of a choice, of love as selfless "willing the good of the other" is a central definition for Aquinas.

Plus, there is a large degree of "orthodoxy" in these grants, even most of them proclaim that they are "high-risk, high-gain". In the end, it seems that if you are too much on the "risk" scale, you will not get the funding since committees prefer "a little more of the same, please" to more wild ideas. I realise that such ideas are of course hard to classify in terms of their feasibility, but that's the main purpose of science, right? Venturing boldly into the unknown and all that; sometimes you come back with the treasure, sometimes you come back with lessons learned.

Sorry, stupid typo, I meant to write KeepPassXC :-|

I find KeePassX plus Owncloud to be perfect for my needs. I have all my passwords with me and even if there are some synchronisation issues every once in a while, it works out sufficiently well and is very low-maintenance.

May 2023 be a good year for all of us. Thanks for engaging discussions, inspiring comments, and for being a beacon of interesting things in a web that is becoming increasingly bland. I appreciate the views of this community, even as they are challenging my own! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I think I know the type of interactions you mean, and I wonder whether it's a cultural thing or a language issue of which I am not aware: I have received a bunch of e-mails from strangers telling me something along the lines of "I request you to do X", where X is something related to a project of mine. I always tried to see this as a sample of "inexperienced person not expressing themselves politely." It's the most charitable explanation, but maybe someone else with more knowledge about the cultural differences can comment on this?

I also received such messages. I think I could sleep more easily if there was a notice on the Slack website as well concerning this issue.

I searched briefly but couldn't find one; does anyone else know more?

There are some very good points in the article. As someone whose adviser proved troublesome when it came to graduating and letter writing (a horrible practice as well!), I second most of the points made.

At the same time, there's also reason for cautious optimism. In the German system, for instance, PhD students are paid (mind you, it's an academic salary, which is not a lot but a first year PhD student with a full time contract already makes more money than the median German salaried worker) and new graduate school regulations are supposed to crack down on advisers abusing the system.

Yes, not everything is perfect, and there's a bunch of people in academia that are trying hard to keep the status quo, but things are shifting slightly.

The most worrisome trend, also mentioned in the article, is that there are just so many highly qualified academics. If the trend I see in machine learning continues, the next generation of PhD students will require multiple publications before being admitted to a job... That's highly problematic in more than one way.

The examples mentioned in the article are geared towards exploiting certain innate desires of many humans. IG and Meta are not "static" constructs but continuously updated services that want to maximise the time people spend with them.

I don't think it is an indictment of society if teens, a group of people usually endowed with special legal and societal protection, use IG for highly detrimental social status comparisons. I wonder whether the author considered that there are people out there that are not yet fully aware of all the implications of social media usage.

I don't want to paint these companies as the antichrist either, but they don't get a free pass from me---that is just absurd.

The Catholic Church, despite any other misgivings one might have, has always been open about the "mission" aspect of their establishments. I would not call this indoctrination: they offer to teach you a trade and earn a BA in Catholic theology; knowing that education in the US often puts you in dire straits financially speaking, this place could make a difference for many people.

Don't understand why this keeps being downvoted. NLP is still in its infancy when it comes to detecting nuances of human communication. These are valid objections.

This seems to be very hard to pull off, though, given the way people regularly cite work in some scientific domains. For instance, unless specifically comparing to an approach, researchers in ML rarely endorse or disavow a specific approach (just my observation in graph learning).

Not related to the content, but does anyone else get a 403 error when using a smartphone with Chrome to visit the link? I have to explicitly check "desktop site" to get access here.

Thanks for the clarification—I appreciate it! I will delve more deeply into these definitions. One overall thought, though: is it not within the creator's rights to curtail the rights of the user? (I don't mean this in the sense of "This is how it should be" but rather in pure legalistic terms. My overall point was "Hey, if you don't find a good license and keep the code for yourself, _at least_ put it under CRAPL." I agree that there are better licenses.)

What's specifically irksome about CRAPL, though? The way I see it is that this at least makes the code available, which is better than nothing.

(NB: Matt refers to this as an open source license)

Living in Germany, I can state that the costs are very low: 10 EUR for a DVD/CD/other media are the typical ballpark. You are essentially just paying a fee for an administrative assistant to pull your files and give them to you.

That's the joke :)

I guess my point is: Make sure the software you already have is configured the right way before adding more software on top.

Couldn't agree more!

Couldn't agree more---let me point out that our (i.e. the German) government started sanctions along with the rest of most (all?) European countries. It's not our choice any more---my dad used to believe in the 'Ostpolitik' of Willy Brandt, and he's heartbroken to hear about the horrors of war :(

(my research institution has also put a stop on all projects involving Russian collaborators at the moment; on the one hand, I can understand this reaction, on the other hand, it creates even more problems and, as you say, does not distinguish between those responsible for the conflict and those who are not. This is not really not an easy space to navigate.)

Not an option for me, but thanks for the suggestion. I don't want to erect a geo-fence here.

Not sure I understand the point of Tailscale. The server should expose these ports to the internet...that's part of its purpose. Admittedly, I have never heard about Tailscale until now; it appears to solve a different kind of problem than the one I am interested in.

That looks gorgeous, thanks for sharing it!

That's an excellent point. I painted myself into a corner here because I am letting some of my friends use the server as well. Have to gently transition them to public key usage only now.

(Posted this above as well) I saw a spike in traffic after the invasion; this prompted the whole thing. Turns out it's not coming from Russia, though.

Yes, because I saw a spike in traffic that made me scratch my head. Turns out it's not originating from there, though :-)

Thanks!

I was debating the nonstandard port, but I left it like this to simplify connections for my users. If the traffic starts to continue like this, I might be forced to switch, though.