AcademicalNerd @academicalnerd@social.cleverlibre.org
People are more important than wires.
Joined Jan 2021
2021-02-07, 08:27, Sunday
Not a standart devblog because the project is almost done, now it's necessary to finish an article and submit it. And I don't really feel like telling about work , so here goes something.
So I visited a stand-up event yesterday. It happened in a small but cozy basement bar where comedians, apparently, test their jokes before telling them to a bigger crowd. Which I never thought existed, but makes a lot of sense. One could call it "a debugging of humor"; here the equivalent of console prompt is a small bar with five tables full and three empty and two barmens sitting on chairs at the counter, cracking at jokes.
Once I approached the bar counter, barmen (26 yo woman, as I found out later) stated:
- Now, tell me.
I resisted the urge to tell her a "long time ago in a galaxy far away", but that would be cliche even by my standards. I haven't tried beer before and in this place they serve exclusively beer and cider. I asked for "something bitter" and wasn't dissapointed. The label is below, the thing even feels "heavy" to drink and almost as smoothingly bitter as coffee. Turns out a nerd likes beer, who knew.
#beer #story #life #student
2021-02-06, 09:00, Saturday
It is very satisfying to see a huge, long-time-in-the-making project come to an end. All the problems are solved, the code compiles and runs perfectly and displays validated output. Feels almost like defeating the strongest boss in a videogame, but without the bitter feeling of "ending", because there is no ending, at least not in my lifetime. Science is too vast to have one.
#stem #programming #life #coffeenotes
2021-02-05, 07:18, Friday
I realised today rhar I need to make a website this weekend if I want to have it up at all. Because studying starts on Monday and there will be no time.
Also, I seem to have overworked myself with the last project. I'll finish the last tasks today and send everything to my advisor, hopefully there will be no follow-ups and I'll be able to focus on making a website. Or a gemini capsule, I'm not quite sure yet.
2021-02-04, 07:04, Thursday
Hab to buy a new bag of coffee. The one I opened recently was a gift and the roast is very dark. Too dark, I should say, there wass nothing but bitterness in my cup.
Anyhow, I rewrote the script yesterday.
###Developer note: separating writing and editing works in programming as well as in creative writing.
I tend to launch or at least build my code very often to see if I broke anything. This at some point starts taking a lot of time, because I have to write small chunks and make them compatible with the rest of the system.
Yesterday I was working from my laptop. Wrote 2 hours worth of matlab code from vim and then debugged it from console (opengl gui breaks on xmonad for some reason).Seems like I tend to be too paranoid when programming.
2021-02-03, 07:37, Wednesday
So I happen to be a morning person. Which means I usually habe to grind my coffee the day before, because the grinder is loud and wakes up the entire family. This is why I have to resort to tea for today, sadly.
It is very important to differentiate solving a problem from creating a product, or a framework, if you will. When there is a single problem (or a set of similar problems) that require a one-time solution, one can get by using spaghetty code and non-optinal solutions without getting into much trouble.
If the code is to be maintained and expanded, then you are writing a product. Now you shouldn't do spaghetti code or omit documenting. This is not about just you anymore, so minimize your succesors' suffering by putting extra effort into cleaning your code.
This seems obvious but is important to keep in mind. I found myself overoptimizing a peice of code required for one-time use.
Oh well, I finally managed to finish my xmonad config. It is now fully usable. Turns out, it's possible to control sound from haskell without any additional tricks. Neat.
Tiling WMs are my sinful love < 3
I will, of course, spend some time ricing it properly, but this will work for most things. Also, yes, this is xmonad config on pop os instead of the usual arch. Because I'm too lazy to reinstall linux on laptop - there is a plethora of apps and packages and I don't want to deal with this now.
2021-02-02, 06:45, Tuesday
I am slowly getting back to my normal schedule, since uni starts on the 8th in February and it seems like we'll have offline classes. Which sucks, because I'll have to commute up to two hours daily in underground during rush hour. The number of new cases is still quite high in Moscow, so it's concerning. Also, social media in Russia now have to delete everything that contains swearing and a list of things including "encouraging unlawful behaviour" and "irrespecting the government", yes, it is the citation.
#earlymorning #thoughts #Russia
For my fellow matlab users out there: minimization produces two different results with the same equation, when different units of measurment are used. Which kinda sucks, because I now need to make ugly convertation patches to see if the code even works properly.
#matlab #programming #grind #lsqnonlin #optimizethehelloutofeverything
2021-02-01, 07:08, Monday
Now, while I'm writing this, optimization code is running in the background. I'll need to finish the calculation this week, ideally today, and submit article draft by the 9th of February. Hopefully I'll manage to pull this off.
Yesterday I have more or less finished my xmonad desktop on laptop. It's now mostly functional, except for sound, but I'll fix it soon. Then I'll hopefully be able to tweak config to my liking and upload it somewhere. Maybe I should after all build a website.
2021-01-31, 09:00, Sunday
This month I am trying analog bullet journaling as opposed to last year's heavily digital planning. It works surprisingly well for me, I've been posting here consistently for a while, and other habits I am trying to build seem to work better, too. We'll see how it holds once the semester starts, of course.
The most important benefit has been the fact that I detach from my screens (PC, laptop, phone) more often, both to plan and/or journal and for other things too. Slowly breaking an addiction, one could say, although there is a long way to come.
Also, a screw has just fallen out of my chair. Gotta fix it before It breaks apart.
#bulletjournal #bujo #journalling #thoughts #planning
I am going through the process of creating my first video on youtube. This will probably be a series about thermodynamic modelling, which is a subject I am interested in. The question is: should I make it in matlab (which is easier for me and very fast) or in python (which is way too slow for anything serious but which more people know)? People of QOTO, what are your thoughts on the subject?
#STEM #help #question #thermodynamics #programming #matlab #python
2021-01-30, 10:57, Saturday
I am now on the train, going home from countryhouse. It's snowing outside, the view is great for once. On the subject of views - it's amazing how ugly winter gets in the city, snow of the road turns into slit and snow off the road turns gray and black. Most of the time winter in the city leaves nothing but disgust and piles of trash after the snow is molten.
Looks ike tomorrow there will be more protests in the city centre. A few metro stations will be blocked officially, in advance, and god knows what will happen. This wont be peaceful, I'm afraid. Probably should stay away from the center.
#Moscow #winter #thoughts #journalling
2021-01-09, 08:06, Friday.
I can't have my cup of coffee early in the morning because my sister is still asleep and the grinder is very loud. Oh well, I probably shouldn't whine about it. Coffee can wait.
What amazes me in the modern society is how people point out the problemn and expect it to solve itself somehow. So there was a viral tiktok recently about how google knows everything about you. Seemingly, there is not much to talk about - yes, it does, if you don't like it - degoogle, spend a weekend hosting a mailserver, nextcloud instance, switch your browser to brave (since mozilla isn't really an option anymore) with duckduckgo or other as a primary search engine. Yes, there is also your phone, but there are ways to partially de-google it. You don't even have to invent the solution, it exists. Not enough for you? Install linux, get a librem (or try to boot your phone with free OS), and stop hyping the non-existent problem.
2021-01-28, 11:50, Thursday
I am a programmer and a scientist, and my work as such mostly consists of fighting with frustration. And this is a surprisingly accurate description for everythiog that involves building things, especially for ones with fixed variables, like experiment results or required features for code. No matter how much you yell at the screen, the numbers won't change, and it's your job to build a somewhat decent model to approximate them, or rather use the existing model and tweak statictical weights until it works well enough.
Apart from beung frustrated most of the time, the experience of getting it right after numerous iterations is worth it.
AcademicalNerd
boosted
# 3 weeks of Mastodon@QOTO
So it's 3 weeks since I joined Mastodon@QOTO. My motivation was a low threshold scrapbook place were I can throw whatever I want to remember and/or share with friends.
After these couple of weeks, I can say this:
* works - kind of. Feels a bit weird, probably because I never did this kind of stuff in public before
* obviously what I am doing is not very standard (more than 200 chars), but within the design envelope of Mastodon and QOTO (kudos for all the customisations, I like it!)
* probably what I am doing would be better called mini-blogging (more than Twitter, less than a blog). When called this way, I took a look at services which do that (e.g., Tumblr) and the usage pattern fits
* timelines are somewhat distracting, but I'll try to use this in a somewhat introvert mode anyway
* interactions are not a bad part of the experience, but need to be managed - can be easily distracting
* lots of strange stuff fly around, but can be filtered out when needed
* the images people post are a throwback into 90's when we were sending this via e-mail (I still have a couple of GBs in my mailbox archive just funny pics and powerpoint slidedecks full of one-off jokes). Since I left this subculture, I never thought it still clogs the Intertubes elsewhere. Still fun, but I could do without.
* tooling: Tusky proved useful, `toot` is good too, web interface a bit overwhelming and distracting
* still need to work out how to deal with hashtags - probably will ignore
2021-01-27, 06:17
I am currently on the train, going to meet my gf on the railway. Had little (or rather not enough) sleep but it's okay. Realized what is this that I want to do as a hobby yesterday. Challenging endeavor, but not impossible. Stay tuned for news on that.
Also, I sometimes forget how big my country is. It took my girlfriend 17 hours on train to return here and it's not that far for this place.
#life #Russia #thoughts #earlymorning
Just to clarify - I am NOT an anti-vaccine person. I know that vaccines are necessary and useful. My main concern is the lack of data and the massive propaganda around the subject. Actually, this includes a bunch of bloggers posting themselves getting a vaccine. Be sensible, consult your doctor, read up, do a research and then maybe, if the risks are low enough, take a vaccine. It is an important thing to do but it's not a "no-brainer". Nothing is.
2021-01-26, 06:50, Tuesday.
No coffee today since I'll need to do a blood test.
I am deeply concerned about the situation with COVID19 vaccine in my country. One of them is being used countrywide already, and this is an adenovirus-based vaccine. Some pharmacy companies has interrupted their trials of adenovirus based vaccines because of the side effects like polyneuropathy or cardyomyopathy.
But these are commercial companies that are interested in their own well-being. If they cell a vaccine and it kills or injures people, they will suffer consequences. Now, sputnik is a vaccine that is pushed a lot by the government that has a very long story of avoiding consequences of it's actions and ignoring the harm it caused.
So, today I'm doing this blood test to see if I even can take the vaccine because I am allergic to some things. And when the time comes I'd like to make an informed choice about which caccine to use and when.
#Russia #thoughts #vaccine #covid19 #vaccination #life
2021-01-25, 14:30, Monday.
Today I was doing a bunch of C++ programming and fixing linker issues caused by my ignorance and lack of attention to details. The thing I want to share is a stream I randomly stumbled across, from George Hotz/GeoHot (link below), which starts with casual computer architecture axplanation and proceeds to deconstruct a bunch of things from software engineer's and scientist's perspective. I rarely see things like getting a girlfriend or, say, earning $1m deconstructed using input-model-output approach, although it is a very good way to think about some things. I hope this is helpful.
2021-01-24, 12:52, Sunday.
Well, today I'm writing in the afternoon, since the morning was preoccupied with some work. Yesterday's events in Moscow led my thoughts to an interesting conclusion: convenience usually leads to cavpivity. Here in Moscow the majority of transportation (some trains, subway, buses and trams) works with so called "troika" cards which you can top up. Each card is unique and they are usually bought and topped up using your card. So you are identified by these cards; more so, if you choose to buy a ticket, it is also identified with a number and there are more than enough cameras to identify you. But they can't store this footage indefenitely, right? But these tickets expire very soon,m my guess - as soon as the data is purged, a few months I believe.
Actually, think China, these guys dont need to use tickets! Facial recognition and virtual wallet tied to your ID. Oh, how convenient, right?
#survelliance #thoughts #Russia #Moscow #life #privacy
