No, I've never done model building before. No, I've never built a robot before. No, I don't have enough time for this. Nope I don't really have the space either.
While devising my masterplan for the OOO part of the year, I decided maybe auto-response asking important queries to be directed to a single email address (like some.ooo.prefix@domain…) that allowed breakthrough to SMS forward would be the ultimate in not having to open my inbox at all over the holidays.
But it looks like email-to-SMS gateways are just not a thing that Australian carriers do anymore. I thought maybe my Fastmail plan might have some functionality for it on their side? Nope. Maybe I can just email to my iMessage address? Nope.
Surely there is an option for this that is not “pay some unrecognisable middleman company to provide completely un-auth-ed forwarding”?
@chrisjrn the thought of paying by message to something publicly accessible is a bit scary - the two halves of the equation, email and SMS, are products I pay high but fixed rates for having unlimited amounts of - but it does look possible.
I’ll have a read what their protections are for people just spamming you to cost you money. Thanks!
@jimbob weird scrolling through Launceston Memes on Facebook a few months back and being served this ad, which turned out to be a) super wrong and b) about specifically my work that isn’t even done yet 🤔
This whole conference debacle is so disappointing. Speakers, when invited to a conf will say “who alls gonna be there?” I’ve my rules for participation posted on my site - including an inclusive lineup - for years. I was duped by the fake speakers also.
I remind all conf organizers that there are THOUSANDS of speakers of all walks of life, genders, ages, backgrounds. I offer 920 for you to invite to your confs http://hanselminutes.com/episodes inclusion means doing the work. So, do the work, friends.
@shanselman I’m curious to see what happens, whether
a) the event will go ahead and pretend this didn’t happen and try to explain away that half their speakers dropped out, or
b) the organisers will just ghost with all the ticket money.
Either way, that organiser is so screwed right now.
oh good, now they’re coming for autistic people’s right to drive, saying we have unique tendencies that make us worse at tasks and a danger to others. nobody could have seen that coming…
@mattcen I was living (and driving) in Queensland when they first made this law, but at least it was vague and unenforced.
Looks like rather than stepping up driver fitness regulations overall (e.g. re-test and -license everyone every few years), they’re just going down the list of people they can pick on without consequences—so they look like they’re doing something about road safety.
Over time, I use more and more programming languages in my work. Most contracts I do require two or three, every so often I get to try one I haven’t used before. Most days lately I work across four or five in the same day. And yet, one of them is always Python.
Like sand, #Python really does get everywhere... 🐍💪
…updating old MATLAB code? Well, nobody has licenses anymore [so you should probably port it to Python].
…a basic shell utility? ___ [Might as well make it Python, since anyone who uses it will have Python installed anyway and then at least they’ll know how to modify it for their needs].
@juandesant because there was a point where macOS has a breaking change from Bash to ZSH default shell so for a while there anything I would write a tiny shell script for I just did in Python, and I wanted to automate the creation of invoices for clients but I was too lazy to genericise a document class properly so I just inject arguments into the a template document and run the build.
There's lots of noise in SF about homeless people "refusing shelter" and "They want to live in tents!" And that we should force them to accept the shelter against their own will, "for their own good!" Many SF folks rationalize their desire to not see homeless people, by convincing ourselves that refusing shelter is an irrational behaviour, and that we know better.
We don't consider the fact that people might be refusing shelter when that shelter is worse than a tent.
@mekkaokereke this is very true. There is also an added level of complexity: even a good shelter is not theirs.
If you are sleeping rough on the streets, or even in a tent city, you have things that are yours. Not much, but some. Your scarcity makes you protective of your things, and the hostility of the general public makes you fearful of others. Homeless communities are rife with substance abuse, mental and physical health issues, and occasional interpersonal politics among those who have been there the longest.
Many shelters also come with weird assumptions—strict religious values, personality judgements, little health support, arbitrary rules that infantilise you—and most reach capacity or shut down or kick you out at some point. So if you leave your spot (or swag, or tent, or trolley) to go a shelter, you feel like it will just be taken from you soon and then you’ll be back here but without your spot/stuff. And maybe having rubbed others in your community the wrong way.
Starving and exposure and scarcity and fear changes you in a way that makes it more difficult to re-integrate than simply being given things or opportunities or aid.
Nature's Warnings: Classic Stories of Eco-Science Fiction
This volume explores a range of prescient and thoughtful stories from SF’s classic period, from accounts of exhausted resources and ecocatastrophe to pertinent warnings of ecosystems thrown off balance and puzzles of adaptation and responsibility as humanity ventures into the new environments of the future.
@appassionato@bookstodon 'The Man Who Awoke' remains one of my all-time favourite books. To think, Manning foresaw all these revolutions so long in the past.
And funny that it could fit just as easily in your previous toot, Menace of the Machine.
> "Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot."
Look, I respect the heck out of the technical implementation of LLMs, but let's be honest: statistically they produce average code at best and misunderstood/invalid code most often. They re-implement old bugs and obfuscate programmer intent and anyone who is leaning on them for more than a pair assist is making software harder for the rest of us.
The problem is even worse for niche or domain-specific tools, because Copilot acts like it knows what they are - even when it has little to no examples to draw from.
The amount of people showing up in the #YarnSpinner Discord and similar spaces, trying to get other people to spend their free time debugging code the "author" themselves don't understand and couldn't be bothered writing has already exceeded my quota for giving a f*ck about this whole debacle.
A good talk from @TheMartianLife at PyConline AU 2021 that gives an overview of the hardware and software being used to manage the growing problem of space junk in orbit. Python plays an important role in this endeavour in the realm of signal processing, data analysis, and predictive modelling: https://youtu.be/jcgaU1mgS0A #python#foss#space
@dwarmstrong oh hey thanks! I was a total novice at online talks at the time (talking to a camera with no audience is super weird) but I hope the enthusiasm makes up for it 😆