benrbray

Presentation matters. Good documentation is evidence of a library that has been carefully thought through. Slop in the readme suggests slop in the code.

Really cool! Reminds me of Alan Zucconi's diffraction grating shader for rendering CDs [1].

[1] https://www.alanzucconi.com/2017/07/15/cd-rom-shader-1/

upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life

It also upset paying customers. It's no longer possible to _own_ Adobe software, and so I don't anymore. Up until just a couple years ago I was still using the copy of Photoshop CS4 I paid for (as part of the Master Collection CS4, Student Edition) in 2008.

A monthly subscription is a complete non-starter for me.

Eastern Europe it looks like, but this story is remarkably similar to my experience as a graduate student / technical staff at public research institutions in both the United States and Japan.

I'm sorry, but your reply suggests an incredible disdain for both technical expertise and for educators. There is value in depth&breadth of knowledge, and it takes great skill to craft a good curriculum.

From a US perspective, students paying $50,000+ per year in tuition deserve better than an overworked PI who has crammed C++ over the weekend.

Somewhat related, I used minisat.js to generate Boggle boards that contain a given list of words!

[0] https://benrbray.com/projects/unboggler

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: No

Technologies: TypeScript, Rust, Haskell, Scala, C#

Résumé/CV: https://benrbray.com/about

Email: benrbray [at] gmail [dot] com

I'm an American software engineer living in Tokyo with 5+ years of professional experience (plus an additional 15+ years of hobbyist experience!). I got my start in high school uploading Flash games to Newgrounds, and learned early on to love the work that I do.

I'm a strong believer in local-first, interoperable, configurable software. I'm seeking to work on a product built to empower users, not lock them in.

I'm particularly interested in working on: rich document editors, programming languages & developer tools, game dev & simulation.

Please visit the about page on my website to learn more about my past work!

https://benrbray.com/about

fwiw Chrome on Linux has no WebGPU support or hardware acceleration, so I often use Firefox for e.g. playing Ruffle content. The story is different on different platforms, and will slowly improve.

Most (all?) vscode extensions are hosted on GitHub, is it not possible to reuse them with a custom build?

I live in Tokyo which arguably is one of the most transit friendly cities, and still bus to the nearby Costco to load up every month or two. Sometimes you just need a suitcase full of mozzarella sticks, no questions asked.

Howdy Elfman, fancy meeting you here all these years after the Game Trailer Collab! Thanks for the nostalgia trip :)

I think something like datalog queries would be perfect for refactoring and searching tags. Would also let you declare relationships between tags, like "tagged(x, calculus) -> tagged(x, math)"

Driving without insurance is illegal in virtually every state, and the supreme court has ruled that driving is a "virtual necessity" [1] to American life. I am normally very r/fuckcars but this sort of thing affects everyone and as surveillance becomes cheaper and cheaper we may not have a choice.

(if cars are dangerous, which they of course are, the way to fix it is to build walkable cities, not to charge higher rates for the graveyard shift workers who have no say in the matter)

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/430/705

As a simple example: I wouldn't want to work with ten copies of myself. It would magnify my strengths but also my weaknesses. It's much better if a team is comprised by people with different backgrounds, different strengths, different weaknesses. Of course, it is helpful if everyone has some common ground, to facilitate better communication. Diversity in college admissions is one way to create an environment where these sorts of teams can form organically.

Of course, the devil is in the details. I tend not to agree with how most diversity programs are implemented, despite agreeing with the mission.

For me it's the ability to type math in LaTeX notation on the slides. Google slides doesn't support this and neither did PowerPoint last time I used it many years ago.

When I was a TA I used a plugin to let me display Jupyter notebooks as a slideshow, that was really handy. Much better editing experience than ppt plus you have readable diffs with git.

One side effect of this inane policy is that it is becomes very difficult for US citizens living abroad to invest their money, due to the tax consequences of holding foreign stocks, as well as the fact that very few US exchanges are willing to open accounts for expats.

I live in Japan, and holding Japanese stocks will get me in trouble with the US government, while holding US stocks can dramatically complicate my Japanese taxes. Because I reside outside the US, I cannot have a 401k or Roth IRA, but it is also impractical for me to take advantage of the Japanese equivalent (NISA) due to the prohibitive cost of correctly reporting my holdings to the US. In some cases there is also double taxation.

They should be legal, but expensive. If it is so valuable to companies that their workers not leave to work for competitors, they should be required to pay 100% salary for the non-compete period.

Meanwhile houses here have no insulation or double-paned windows so it's still not cool enough and my electric bill is through the roof!

I've come to appreciate function application / composition syntax and think it allows for much more clear and readable code, compared to e.g. Scala which can be quite verbose and obscure the compositional structure of functional code.

On the other hand, I agree that lack of a good solution for record syntax is a huge wart on the language that regularly gets in the way.

recipe sites with select/copy disabled, or worse, sites that modify the copied snippet

password fields which are not appropriately marked so that autofill / generate secure password does not work

no sign in button on the homepage, only a sign up button

you have used up your 5 free articles for the month, please subscribe

scrolljacking

with each UI update comes an additional 0.5em of padding / line height

huge margins / useless sidebars which make it impossible to read the page with the browser window at half-width

need to use a VPN to access sites in my home country when traveling

need to use a VPN to get English subtitles on Netflix when traveling

Can you give any examples of useful non-terminating programs?

It seems to me all useful programs are terminating (or, we truncate some non-terminating procedure by some convergence criteria). The question is only whether we have the logical tools to prove termination at compile time.

Tokyo.

That's a rough commute indeed. I do wish American cities (for instance, idk where you are) made it simpler to live close to with without sacrificing too much in other areas of life. It's one reason I now live in Tokyo.

Other than the commute, I think those are all things that a cohesive team should be able to resolve. It's definitely important to set boundaries in a shared space. I don't agree that the answer is to entirely retreat from the office though, as much as I do understand that inclination.

Also, just a thought: your colleagues might find the discussions they have with you to be really valuable to their own productivity / job satisfaction.

The one group of people I don’t get are the ones who suggest people should be forced to work from the office, and not able to decide for themselves.

I guess I can give a bit of perspective. I don't think people should be "forced" into 100% office work, but I can say that as a junior engineer, I am wildly more productive when I'm in the office with my co-workers compared to at home alone.

I graduated into the pandemic and my first job out of school was full-remote. My company had no idea how to effectively manage remote workers and after two years I knew barely anything about my coworkers except their names, and I could feel my career stagnating. WFH was lonely, inefficient, and since my home was my office, I had no escape from the stress of work. Whenever I was at home I felt guilty for not working.

I recently quit that job and started a new one. The first thing I asked prospective employers was whether they had office space I could work from. I'm much, much happier working from the office and benefit greatly from my other coworkers who choose to commute.

Part of the problem is that the benefits of in-office work are long-term and asymmetrical. You might not benefit from being in the office, but other people might benefit greatly from having you there. Senior engineers should consider passing down knowledge as part of their responsibilities -- there might be ways to accomplish that remotely, but a lot of that transfer happens organically when colleagues share meals, walk outside together, etc..

Being in the office also gives me a chance to interact with people at the same company who I don't directly work with -- sales people, office managers, etc.. For me, WFH takes all the enjoyment out of work, leaving only the bad stuff.

Wikipedia is can actually be a great source of high-quality mathematical exposition. It is often not the best source, but I often use it as a jumping-off point for learning about advanced topics. It helps me turn "unknown-unknowns" into "known-unknowns".

If you want more theory, I recently stumbled across some great lecture materials [1] for a course on coalgebra, which is a category-theoretic way of modeling state-based systems, as well as familiar computer science concepts like (co)data types and (co)induction.

[1] https://cs.ru.nl/~jrot/coalg18

I recently had to switch to Mac for the first time for work and knowing you worked on both Nautilus and Finder I'm shocked that my favorite features from Nautilus are nowhere to be found in Finder:

Right click in Folder > Open Terminal

Right click in Folder > New File

Thanks anyway though for your work :)

One thing to consider is: If the child realizes that Santa Claus isn't real before being told by their parents, they will experience the feeling of months or possibly years of all of the adults they trust lying to them. That is not a good feeling to have.

Some universities are already accepting more students than they can afford. When I was a fully funded grad student at Georgia Tech, I earned a $2.4k/mo stipend but had to pay surprise "student fees" to the tune of $1.5k/semester, including the summer term. That's a big deal when rent is $1000+/mo. I've heard many public universities, such as Berkeley, also do the same. I imagine the GT graduate students will unionize within a few years if they haven't already.

Zotero is the open source [1] alternative, to Elsevier's Mendeley.

[1] https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/source_code