College Prof in the US, focus areas are Human-Computer Interaction, Cybersecurity, and Machine Learning

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I’m glad that the server team is experimenting and trying new things out. This looks really cool for someone!

    I just really hope this isn’t a preamble to becoming the new default theme, because I really dislike this. It reminds me of other social media services that I go out of my way to avoid.

    I particularly dislike the infinitely scrolling dark pattern, but I also don’t like that it displays all content immediately, wasting bandwidth, making it difficult to see headlines, and more difficult to ignore previously seen content.








  • I’m game.
    I’m currently reading “Don’t Make Me Think: Revised Edition” by Steve Krug. The book is primarily about website design, but anyone with half a brain could translate the design principles and main ideas into a game development context. I just finished Chapter 10(?) all about designing usability tests and how to get a feel for where the main issues are with your design.
    After that, I’ve got “Design is Storytelling” by Ellen Lupton and “The Animator’s Survival Kit” by Richard Williams queued up.



  • “We choose to go to the moon and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. This is just one of those other things.” - My dad quoting JFK at me to get me to do the dishes as a teenager. I don’t think he would remember even saying that to me, but has always stuck with me. Something said about something so monumental being applied to something so benign. But that wasn’t the point, because it was hard for me.


  • Teaching also involves stating an idea - which the author forgot to actually do. If it is your article that I am criticizing, I’m sorry for being crass, but make no mistake, the writing is half-assed. An article whose primary piece of advice is to “focus on the datatypes”, shouldn’t avoid the word “datatype” until the 2nd to last header.

    Truthfully, the article would be better served by removing the first and 2nd to last section and instead be titled “Why I dislike working with monads in languages that support monads.”


  • Holy cow! What an absolute slog of a read. I’m not an AI model, but I’ll do my best to summarize that link:

    [When writing code that works with non-trivial and null-able data types,] use a data structure that makes illegal states unrepresentable. Model your data using the most precise data structure you reasonably can[, …] as quickly as you can. [W]rite functions on the data representation you wish you had, not the data representation you are given. The design process then becomes an exercise in bridging the gap.

    There. Hopefully someone out there learned something cool without having to read a 25-minute striptease before the author rushes through their main idea in the span of two bullet points found in the final 25% of the article.







  • I was really active in that sub at the time. Fox or CNN or something contacted the moderators about an interview. The mods discussed it and decided to decline. IIRC, they later made a post about not accepting interviews until they felt they were more ready to present clear goals, and maybe pull someone from the community to be a “official” spokesperson.

    Then a mod went rogue and did the now infamous Fox interview. That was bad, but recoverable. It was further shenanigans by the moderators in the immediate aftermath that caused the schism into work_reform. Before my exodus from reddit, I followed that community closely, but never got as involved. At the time, I remember thinking that the mods felt more reasonable than in antiwork, but that quickly changed too. Eventually they effectively became mirror subs.

    Then RIF got shut down and someone told me about this lemmy federation where I could post about all the gay space communism and fringe technology I wanted. I think that I am happier now overall.