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joshklein

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I live in Brooklyn, a spatial subset of New York, United States, North America, Earth, Sol, Gould Belt, Orion Arm, Milky Way, Virgo Supercluster, Observable Universe.

https://szed.org

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My "never again" story was around a decade ago. Thoughtworks had me interview with roughly a dozen people over half a dozen or more interviews, lasting ~20 hours (if you include the proctored Wunderlic test they administered to me on premises). At the end of that lengthy process, they said they would have loved to bring me on but "didn't have any open positions that fit my set of skills". You know, that set of skills I listed next to my work experience on my 2-page resume.

I no longer submit applications to any job until I've spoken to someone who works there to ask hard questions of them before I interview. I also no longer consider any job that lacks clear articulation of the platonic ideal of a candidate.

You can find some interesting starting points at kaggle.com if you want e.g. a large set of photos of agricultural plants labeled as healthy or diseased (allowing you to immediately start in on building a classification model without all the upfront grunt work).

Printvideo.com 5 years ago

You are observing the video of the crab playing over an SSH connection inside PuTTY, a terminal emulator.

SpaCy 3.0 5 years ago

I haven’t written about it or made results publicly available yet, but I do intend to. I can make a note of the email in your profile and ping you with a link when it is available if you’d like.

SpaCy 3.0 5 years ago

I want to personally thank you for your work, and let you know I couldn’t have done an important project of mine if spaCy didn’t exist, and if it were not a free resource.

Your project was 1 of the 2 instrumental tools in my project to structure the transcripts of every word said on the floor of the New York State Senate over the past ~30 years in order to develop a topic-based “proximity” heuristic (based on CorEx, the 2nd instrumental tool) for which state senators were focused on which issues, based on the things they actually said on the record, not based on their press statements or their voting records (the latter of which doesn’t capture all the information you’d hope it would due to procedural nuances too obscure to detail here).

Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I suppose it would depend on what one takes “open source project” to actually mean. You’d have to reject contributions from your community if they weren’t interested in giving them back upstream in a way compatible with your commercial license, and you’d probably be forever open to claims you violated some individual’s GPL contribution of a feature you may or may not have seen if something similar makes its way into your commercial project.

There are obviously lots of open source projects that find a way to navigate this world via dual licensing, and I’m neither a lawyer nor an expert on the subject, but those projects don’t really fit my own personal definition of “open” (as I derive it from the Unix philosophy instead of the GNU is Not Unix philosophy).

I agree that X is the odd duck out in its attempt to follow the Unix philosophy. Wayland further pursues the “GNU is Not Unix” principle by introducing a modern desktop paradigm to pair with its modern application busses and other modern features.

Fair. The point I’m trying to convey - without burdening the reader with too many specifics - is that there isn’t really any problem with Wayland on non-Linux systems per se, but rather fundamental philosophical and design differences that spiral way out into other parts of the operating system and beyond (into hardware).

A question like whether or not IPC and application buses are managed by a supposed display manager is a more complicated decision than it appears on the surface, with lots of questions that need to be asked that feel like you’re challenging the literal meaning of words depending on which contextual paradigm you’re approaching the discussion from.

The net result is Wayland being a reasonable solution to a real problem that still further isolates Linux into a GUI desktop silo. The result is only “cross compatibility” if you consider the “cross” to mean across Linux distributions, which - in fairness - is actually what most people DO seem to mean.

Windows & Mac are already on exclusively Wayland-style compositors

Only in a narrow sense; nearly all of the features one might reasonably consider fundamental parts of Windows/Mac are “out of scope” for Wayland. Wayland relies on layers upon layers of other solutions for things like central registries, interprocess communication, and negotiating hardware access.

From the Wayland perspective, this is all perfectly reasonable. It’s just how software gets made.

From the perspective of someone who isn’t already running a Linux kernel with evdev + KMS + DRM, we aren’t able to even find common language to discuss what being “a compositor” means to Wayland.

OpenBSD uses and actively supports a customized (not forked) X called Xenocara, which takes the opposite philosophical route from Wayland by putting a wider part of the ecosystem of X features into one coherent project so it can be maintained, improved, and culled (simultaneously, and without committees). You can learn about it on the Xenocara project pages and in its robust manual pages.

If you read other comments in separate parts of the threads here, you’ll see people describing re-scoping certain elements “out” of Wayland and “into” other layers to fix “broken” parts of X. Those “widely agreed upon” solutions for other layers exclude considerations for the way OpenBSD works in fairly fundamental ways that make it seem (to me, at least) there is no practical purpose in exploring Wayland on OpenBSD beyond the point it has already been explored.

I’m speaking about the coherent and supported OpenBSD operating system, not what can be found in packages.

If there ever become features fundamental to the current user-developers of OpenBSD that are enabled by Wayland, I would expect them to further modify Xenocara to support those use cases, but it is hard to even imagine what those could be. Most of Wayland’s promised future features are anti-features to the OpenBSD approach.

I expect that in 5-10 years, many user applications will be Linux-only, and there will be many conversations about how stubborn BSD (and Windows/Mac) designers are for not aligning to earlier decisions made on their behalf.

These are just my personal opinions with no inside knowledge from any part of this intellectual territory, and I do not accuse or blame ANY developer on ANY project for working on what they are interested in, but I expect this unified Linux (and Linux-only) outcome is the unstated but express purpose behind promoting Wayland for some of the commercial interests that support it.

I want to doubly emphasize that I am talking about the motivations of executives determining the allocation of capital and human resources, not about the motivations of the developers, which are clearly to facilitate cool or useful new things.

I recommend “Procrastination” by Burka & Yuen.

For the kind of person who frequents this site and endures suffering due to procrastination, even seeing their clinical definition of maladaptive perfectionism (and learning why procrastinating provides relief from it) could reduce your level of anxiety and self-flagellation, if not help you change your behavior.

The first section of their book provides a framework for understanding what is happening when you procrastinate, then orients your investigation into the underlying causes specific to you (or those not applicable to you). The book's second section offers self-directed cognitive behavioral therapies.

"Procrastination" is based on decades of the authors’ clinical experience. The 25th anniversary edition pulls in updated academic research from as far afield as behavioral economics (future discounting) that didn't exist when the book was first published.

[This comment is a reposted version of one of my own previous comments]

I recommend “Procrastination” by Burka & Yuen.

For the kind of person who frequents this site and endures suffering due to procrastination, even seeing their clinical definition of maladaptive perfectionism (and learning why procrastinating provides relief from it) could reduce your level of anxiety and self-flagellation, if not help you change your behavior.

The first section of their book provides a framework for understanding what is happening when you procrastinate, then orients your investigation into the underlying causes specific to you (or those not applicable to you). The book's second section offers self-directed cognitive behavioral therapies.

"Procrastination" is based on decades of the authors’ clinical experience. The 25th anniversary edition pulls in updated academic research from as far afield as behavioral economics (future discounting) that didn't exist when the book was first published.

[This comment is a reposted version of one of my own previous comments]

they serve two different purposes

I agree, but I'm also painfully aware of man page incompleteness every time I'm on a non-OpenBSD system. I'd be grateful to anyone who chipped away at proper tagging for any GNU software. One should be able to :t to jump to the reference for any flag.

I agree on the substance of your comment re: interfaces, but let’s not put too much stock in a random tweet. He might not mean any of that.

In any case, this release of Elementary isn’t any more paired down than the latest GNOME shell.

They seem to have a relatively sane approach to building GUI toolkit (though “sane” is relative given this particular domain) so I’m curious to see where they take things even if I don’t use it.

It does have global menu. Figuring out what things are called in the new language of plasma and plasmoids takes some reading to figure, but that particular part of the UI is fine on KDE once you configure it to your liking.

Replying to myself with more info:

This is proving exceptionally hard to search the web for, so apologies if this is out of date, but it seems the answer was “no, and it never will be, so stop asking” as of 2018: https://twitter.com/danielfore/status/991836014070022144

Was this from before Elementary was positioning as the MacOS replacement? I can’t be the only one who thinks the global menu is one of the MacOS interface’s killer features.

I understand why it’s been hard under the X paradigm, but those crazy dbus people are pushing entire application interfaces through IPC now.

Is global menu possible on Elementary yet? Searches only turn up old links for the now-dead unity style, but nothing based on libdbusmenu.

Still seems to me that Plasma with libdbusmenu-qt5 is the closest interface paradigm to MacOS for people trying to swap (not that there aren’t other problems), but glib and gtk versions exist so someone out there must be working on it?

Between this and the challenges around OpenMP (now generally solved), setting up a Linux workstation just for experimenting was easier than getting it working on my “pro” Apple hardware.

You raise a fair general point about Python dependencies, but that issue is usually related to poorly considered use of third-party dependencies or the need to distribute binaries and leverage C bindings.

But here we have exactly the kind of project that should be written in Python, forked and cloned by you, then tweaked and maintained as if you wrote it yourself. From a brief glance through the code, and taking the submission title at face value, this project is a refreshingly appropriate use of the right language. I offer this as someone who writes Python and Go, generally preferring Go anywhere possible.

I plan to poke around some more in this repo to see if I can easily replace my use of Hugo with this, since I use only a tiny fraction of the features in Hugo and have found it challenging to hack on it as a low-priority weekend project.

For turning personal blog posts from markdown to HTML with some general convenience functions around maintaining the front-matter and templates, I can’t think of something more appropriate than a Python script sitting inside your blog directory with all of its dependencies except the interpreter itself checked in with your templates and content.

This article is about a suit from The California Trucking Association, a trade group and industry lobbyist representing corporate management, not truckers. You can learn about them on their website if you're curious. The only source providing a statement in the body of this article is the association's head lobbyist. Background sources seem to include a politician and an academic institute. No truckers.

I don't have any comment about the suit or the law, but I do think this is fine opportunity to discuss the nature of propaganda.

I’m not sure you understand. Shouldn’t the people who want to plug their new iPhone into their new laptop be less inconvenienced when those products are all from Apple, not more inconvenienced? People with modern Thinkpads could use their iPhone out of the box while those with MBPs could not.

If Apple can’t be bothered, what a strange thing to blame me for.

If Apple had provided me the cables to connect the current generation of their two products to each other, I would use them.