Brian Danielak @capbri@social.cleverlibre.org
Super sad that I'm not at #positconf this year. Really disappointed at missing the chance to see @kellybodwin and @Cmastication and @amelia
Brian Danielak
boosted
Mozilla's new report on the data privacy of modern cars is nightmare fuel. Enshittification has definitely hit the car industry: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/
Brian Danielak
boosted
I wrote about the idea of craft -- a concept I've been hearing a lot lately in conversations about software work and often find myself wrangling with. But it also turned out to be about my grandpa. In a year of many losses, I have been thinking a lot about those I love and try to take with me in everything I do.
Brian Danielak
boosted
I'd worked for a year as an instructional technology assistant for a college where everyone talked about the students this way. I'd suggest some creative, exploratory assignment structure, or an application of open-ended writing exercises, and I'd get back, "But our students can't even spell! They don't even know proper grammar!" My repeatedly ignored response was that students need to feel like they have a stake in academic discourse to want to participate in it on its own terms. 2/
Brian Danielak
boosted
Instagram just told me to "take my power back from Mercury Retrograde." I have enough going on without fighting a planet.
@ben any chance you could send me a pre-print of this?
Are there any #rstats academics (or recovering academics) out there who are using Rmarkdown/Quarto to generate their curricula vitae? I'm having some trouble with Nick Strayer's data-driven cv package and I'm wondering if there's an easier way. @kellybodwin @kjhealy @travisgerke
Brian Danielak
boosted
Struggling a lot to find maker time these days and it's really having an impact. To be a researcher you need to be a reader, and you need to iterate, and you need to design....we're not vending machines of insight that people can just line up to put quarters into. But it does feel like research gets treated that way sometimes!
Brian Danielak
boosted
This is probably the best thing I ever posted on Twitter. The memory is pretty dear to me; I'm sharing it here so it still exists somewhere if that place collapses.
Brian Danielak
boosted
@gruber if the original Yankee Stadium is the second-finest ballpark ever built, what's number one?
@gvwilson I get that ArduinoC is low-level and possibly needs to be to be able to handle directly reading and writing to pin, but come on. My students shouldn't need to learn pointers just to de-complexity their repeated instructions.
@gvwilson For many students in my class, this is their introduction to programming. I hate to think they'd walk away feeling like programming is about repeating a bunch of instructions over and over, instead of, to paraphrase Abelson and Susman, the act of managing complexity.
I teach an Introduction to Engineering Design course where students program Arduino-powered robots to autonomously navigate an obstacle course. I keep wishing I could have a conversation with @gvwilson because I think ArduinoC actively encourages *bad* software engineering practices. Yesterday I had to tell a student that it would be more trouble than it was worth to try to extract repeated behavior into something like a function, and my heart sank.
Brian Danielak
boosted
Some journals think I'm a great expert when it comes to reviewing for them but a terrible researcher when authoring a paper 🤔 🤔 🤔
Brian Danielak
boosted
Please, please, stop using "foo" and "bar” in code documentation. Give us real examples that mean something. Not "if (foo > bar)," but “if (height > limit)." Not “foo++” but “counter++”. Give us a logical hook to hang our hat on, not nonsense words.
Brian Danielak
boosted
“The reason most public transportation is seen as ‘losing’ money is precisely because it charges for trips. If you don't charge fares, suddenly it can't ‘lose’ money. It just costs money, the same as the roads.”
This random comment has given me my new favourite argument for removing fares from public transit.
Brian Danielak
boosted
We are dropping the Dilbert comic strip because of creator Scott Adams’ racist rant: Letter from the Editor - cleveland.com https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/02/we-are-dropping-the-dilbert-comic-strip-because-of-creator-scott-adams-racist-rant-letter-from-the-editor.html
Brian Danielak
boosted
Expanding Tidy Data Principles to Facilitate Missing Data Exploration, Visualization and Assessment of Imputations by @njtierney and @visnut #RStats #DataViz https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v105i07
