acowley

@acowley@mastodon.social

Functional roboticist. Robots, Haskell, Rust, nix, emacs, FPV… and the rest of life, too.

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acowley, to random

Software engineers tend to underestimate the value of contextual pressure when evolving a large system rather than rewriting it. If you have a big, working, complex system, replacing a part of it while it’s running keeps you honest. Yes, you have to evaluate if the constraints imposed by the live system are essential or accidental, but so many of those constraints represent hard-won lessons that a green field rewrite can easily forget.

chris__martin, to random
@chris__martin@functional.cafe avatar

Disregard Data.List; we should stop making streaming an advanced topic and just do it all the time https://open.substack.com/pub/typeclasses/p/disregard-data-list?r=27q3sd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

acowley,

@chris__martin Any thoughts on how the community can’t settle on a streaming abstraction? I have the impression that streamly has the mindshare these days, but the divergent ecosystems associated with every approach have left some pretty significant scars.

acowley,

@chris__martin I’m afraid not. I feel like the typical arrangement of Stream m element result also makes the usual type classes not always what one wants. Do you want to map over the elements or the final result, for example? But it does seem like you could establish a common API over at least some common operations. I’m not sure where such efforts run out of steam; I’m sure people have tried.

pervognsen, to random
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

Days like today I look at my food log and realize being a fruitarian wouldn't be half bad.

acowley,

@pervognsen That’s remarkable consistency, congratulations! Seems like a faster than typical loss rate to me. I’ve done 0.5 kg/week for extended stretches twice, and enjoyed it, but I think doubling that would be tough for me.

acowley, to random

I’ve always loved this take on holistically considering how you improve and grow a large system: okay code doing the right thing is better than great code doing the wrong thing. However, I hold within me a second wolf: try improving the existing code before switching tracks to a whole new set of unknown unknowns. Everyone loves pitching a rethink, but what you already have is almost certainly limited by being quickly written and of mediocre quality! (meme from @Rickasaurus on twitter)

acowley, to emacs

This post on -roam resonates very well with me, to the point that I actually double checked that I didn't write it myself. I've been fortunate I suppose to not have problems with org-roam's database for several years now, and I think it does make some sense to go ahead and build around a proper database layer rather than beat around the bush. It's something of a rejection of YAGNI, but I think people often wear YAGNI blinders. https://edstrom.dev/wzvdr/2023-02-26

acowley, to emacs

I think ~100% of the hangs I experience in are due to tramp. I really envy people for whom it works reliably, as it can be so empowering. For me it's almost an anti-feature since not only might it not work, but while it's busy not working I will be locked out of doing anything else.

demofox, to random
@demofox@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

New Blog Post about Company Stock Benefits
"What I wish I knew about ESPP and RSUs sooner (company stock benefits. 2024, USA, California)"
https://blog.demofox.org/2024/03/17/what-i-wish-i-knew-about-espp-and-rsus-sooner-company-stock-benefits-2024-usa-california/

acowley,

@demofox Very nice how you boil it down to ways of treating these things simply. It’s so strange to me how offering continual tie-ups — like the RSUs in your article — is so much less common than as part of the hiring package.

Migueldeicaza, to random
@Migueldeicaza@mastodon.social avatar

I thought it was a done deal the kids would get these MacBook airs for school next year, but after reading this, maybe the pro is a better model:

https://appleinsider.com/inside/15-inch-macbook-air/vs/m3-15-inch-macbook-air-vs-m3-14-inch-macbook-pro----comparison

acowley,

@Migueldeicaza Comparing the MBP with the 13” MBA is the one I think is a bit harder. The weight and cost savings are more substantial… but the nicer MBP screen is still hard to assign value to.

acowley, to photography

Nice end to the weekend.

MonaApp, to random
@MonaApp@mastodon.social avatar

Thank you for your continued support! I’m pleased to announce the next big upgrade, Mona 6, will be globally available on the App Store starting February 26, 2024.

Mona 6 includes a redesigned picture description editor, improved post composer with post scheduling and automatic thread conversion, and also, a long list of new shortcut actions for automation and the Action button on iPhone 15 Pro. Please stay tuned. https://geo.itunes.apple.com/app/id1659154653

acowley,

@MonaApp Do you have any plans to provide a digest-like feature similar to https://github.com/hodgesmr/mastodon_digest ?

sdw, to random
@sdw@mastodon.social avatar

After some time with the Vision Pro I think I've arrived on a judgment of it being super impressive, but not a useful device to me. I think I'll be returning it this week.

acowley,

@sdw I'm guessing you tried photo editing with it. Did you find the ability to scale and position windows around you at all useful? I also wonder if the mix of eye-tracking and trackpad for clicking when mirroring a Mac display is either something it would take time to get used to, or a temporary state of affairs. Though Apple not really having pushed the iPad very far as a Mac replacement -- perhaps in part due to the tension between touch and mouse/trackpad GUI design -- gives me pause.

acowley, to emacs

Donating money to development is one of my favorite ways to spend a little money. It is amazing to me how much work is poured into it. What's striking is that from the outside it doesn't look like it’s a giant effort because makes things look so unassuming, but what the developers do is continually tackle the hard and awkward problems of corralling a multitude of software.

christianselig, to random
@christianselig@mastodon.social avatar

YouTube wouldn't build an app for the Apple Vision Pro, so I did! Introducing Juno, an Apple Vision Pro app for YouTube, now available at http://juno.vision 📺🥽

acowley,

@christianselig Really appreciate the blog post as I was very interested how you were approaching it, and it'll be interesting to see if/how Google responds! The app looks fantastic, and is a surprisingly effective enticement to justifying a Vision Pro as YouTube is something I tend to watch alone more often than video from other sources.

geekmomprojects, to random
@geekmomprojects@mastodon.social avatar

This project started with a simple idea to use my new hat press (Michael's impulse purchase) to iron flowers onto a baseball cap, but somehow (🤷) expanded in scope. The LEDs were inevitable.

A beige baseball cap with a 3D printed white, 8-petaled daisy surrounded by black fleece fabric sewn onto the front. When the switch in a battery holder attached to the back of the cap is flipped, the petals and center of the daisy light up in different, changing colors.

acowley,

@geekmomprojects The diffusion you're getting on the LEDs in your projects is really fantastic!

Migueldeicaza, to random
@Migueldeicaza@mastodon.social avatar

The vision hardware looks lovely, but I am more impressed by the depth of the user experience, the guidance to developers, the design system, the operating system and the tooling to support it.

Previous headsets have been cool and exciting (I own pretty much one of each), yet none got this level of necessary scaffolding in place, so the experiences are a mish-mash of half baked ideas.

We finally go from “this is a neat idea” to a viable platform.

acowley, (edited )

@Migueldeicaza What's so hard is to polish things while keeping open the option to adjust course when contact with the public reveals actual popularity of different use cases. What I don't really get about Vision Pro thus far is that the weight and battery life seem calibrated for relatively quick use sessions, but the vibe they're selling seems more like settling in for an un-rushed session. Gaming focused headsets lean more into quick intense sessions from what I've seen.

acowley, to emacs

I put together a flake for the helper program emacs-lsp-booster that aims to improve LSP performance in emacs by converting between JSON and emacs-lisp plists more efficiently than emacs can parse JSON. I first tried it with a test project, and then used it for real with a large repo I work with all day yesterday and it seems to work. A bit hard to say how much impact it has; curious to hear if others have tried it! https://github.com/acowley/emacs-lsp-booster-nix

djrmarques, to NixOS
@djrmarques@emacs.ch avatar

Does anyone here use with the unstable channel? How often does it break?

I am considering trying it out, since it would mean I would just treat Nix os as a rolling release distro (which I like).

acowley,

@djrmarques The breaks are rare (once or twice a year, but depends entirely on how many things you use), but they can be particularly awkward as they may well occur when you’re updating for a reason, making a rollback not very appealing. That situation can lead to you needing to panic patch whatever’s blocking you. It’s nice if you can use a stable release for most things, then pick and choose a couple tools from unstable.

acowley, to NixOS

Something I don’t love about is using specialArgs to plumb an argument to a module, and then shifting to extraSpecialArgs when working with home-manager. I think I have a bad reaction to the naming, but I’m sure any other name would have its own baggage.

johncarlosbaez, to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Some news! I'm now helping lead a new Fields Institute program on the mathematics of climate change.

You may have heard of the Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious math prizes. But the Fields Institute, in Toronto, holds a lot of meetings on mathematics. So when COVID hit, it was a big problem. The director of the institute, Kumar Murty, decided to steer into the wind and set up a network of institutions working on COVID, including projects on the mathematics of infectious disease and systemic risks. This worked well, so now he wants to start a project on the mathematics of climate change. Nathaniel Osgood and I are leading it.

Nate, as I call him, is a good friend and collaborator. He's a computer scientist at the University of Saskatchewan and, among other things, an expert on epidemiology who helped lead COVID modeling for Canada. We're currently using category theory to develop a better framework for agent-based models.

Nate and I plan to focus the Fields Institute project not on the geophysics of climate change — e.g., trying to predict how bad global warming will be — but the human response to it — that is, figuring out what we should do! This project will be part of the Fields Institute's Centre for Sustainable Development:

http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/centres/centre-sustainable-development.

I'll have a lot more to say about this. But for now, let me just say: I'm very excited to have this opportunity! Mathematics may not be the main thing we need to battle climate change, but there are important things in this realm that can only be done with the help of math. A lot of mathematicians, computer scientists, and others with quantitative skills want to do something about climate change. I aim to help them do it.

acowley,

@johncarlosbaez What a wonderful opportunity to bring your skills to bear on an issue directly effecting all of us!

eff, to passkeys
@eff@mastodon.social avatar

promise to prevent . What are they and how do they work? https://www.eff.org/what-is-a-passkey

acowley,

@eff @Axman6 I really like the phishing resistance aspect of the approach, but don’t like the options given for using passkeys. Namely, a dependence on a physical security token or an ecosystem managed by a particular company. It’s not clear to me how browser plugins for 3rd party password managers that can offer paper backup would weaken overall security that much.

chris__martin, to random
@chris__martin@functional.cafe avatar

Played pickleball for the first time yesterday, and that game rocks. It very obviously succeeds at being something that people of mismatched ages and athleticism can have fun together at

acowley,

@chris__martin I think the most boring part of tennis for people who aren’t yet very good at it is double faults. Agreed that pickleball is great. We took it up this summer, and it’s wonderful how everyone can enjoy it while also taking on less risk of injury.

maralorn, to random
@maralorn@chaos.social avatar

Why, in the year 2021, can‘t I login into every service I use via public key auth? I am sure we can even do this in a way, that every service sees another public key from me, so that they are uncorrelatable.

I am sure there are solutions in this direction. Can you point me to them?

acowley,

@maralorn Wow, glad to hear this! While passkey always sounds like it has some great aspects, the ecosystem / portability part has seemed like a potential deal breaker.

acowley,

@maralorn I’m referring to the usual issues with passkey portability as discussed here https://community.bitwarden.com/t/passkey-portability/59177/14

Maybe Bitwarden has solved this, which is why I was glad to hear it!

acowley,

@maralorn Bitwarden’s current (I think) docs say, “Passkeys imports and exports will be included in a future release.” https://bitwarden.com/help/storing-passkeys/

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