Notices by chris martens (chrisamaphone@hci.social)

@dalias @pfriedma @0ddj0bb I don’t think what you’re saying conflicts with OP. the point is that no one’s hand is being forced here; this is google (etc) showing us who they really are

@dalias @0ddj0bb @pfriedma it *does* matter in the sense that we should not put up with“they made me do it” as an excuse

some opinions about academic conferences:
- i think talking to each other in person is good and important.
- the ideal of the "inclusive international conference" doesn't exist. one can only make intentional decisions about what kinds of inclusion to prioritize.
- it's a problem that junior folks are expected to attend big international conferences regularly in order to advance their careers, especially when their circumstances are by default *not* prioritized as inclusivity criteria

@samth @adrian @palvaro thank you please keep me in the loop

also considering renaming my grad class to Special Topics in Programming Languages: Intensive Principles of Woke Gender Ideology

noticed someone saying they're learning tech skills as a fallback for their art career. meanwhile i'm leaning harder into art skills in case this computer science thing turns out to be impossible without Complying

i continue to feel that we do academic conferences in a fundamentally broken way that doesn’t change because we’re in a local optimum wrt small perturbations (in terms of things like governance and budgets). but i think of things like fan conventions and burning man-genre festivals and industry events like strange loop… where there is so much more democratic participation in the process, and i wonder if we will ever break out of the golden handcuffs of “professional societies”

:= is pronounced Walrus
::= is pronounced Spider Walrus

“I know, i’ll put my jacket, scarf, and gloves on the coat rack, rather than carrying things around to every talk and coffee break! this is a great idea with no downsides”

*forgets to get things from coat rack after conference*

“it’s fine, i’ll get it tomorrow morning”

*flooding emergency renders area with coat rack inaccessible*
*it’s the part of the venue that got the most water damage*

now that @simrob has done #AoC twice with the logic programming language we built, Dusa, i would like to more confidently encourage people to tinker with it: https://dusa.rocks/docs

start there, with the docs page (which you can also access by clicking the "?" from the web editor, which is the default view from dusa.rocks/). there's an intro for if you're familiar with datalog, answer set programming, or neither. you can get quite far by playing around entirely within the browser-based editor

@monnier (this is a salient subject for me because I the issue with people listening to things on the train sans headphones has become really intolerable to me here… i feel that some kind of basic transit etiquette has failed to be passed down)

@monnier listening to music or an audiobook on the train is messages from the oligarchs?

people who work on types and formal methods have a long tradition of motivation through fear — “software can break catastrophically! our stuff will prevent the bad thing!”— and one of my life missions is to figure out how to motivate through love instead

@aburka @inthehands haha i was coming into the replies about to say exactly the same thing

only reply to this if your avatar has a similar color palette to mine (boosts welcome)

if you're someone who's been struggling lately to get consistent work, make sense of your career, find a place in the world where your skills are simultaneously valued with money/recognition and also contributing something you find genuinely positive to society, i want you to know that i'm incredibly fucking proud of you. please don't give up.

@dalias copycatting? not as disdainful but short and widely understood, not sure if it carries the meaning you want

i guess i need to remember about video games again since i have to teach about them in the spring

when you decide to create or work with a new material, you start by trying to use your existing tools with it, but sometimes they don't make sense and you have to invent new tools that are more compatible with the way the material encourages you to think about what you're doing and what's possible

a material does not prescribe a particular purpose. it has affordances that might be interestingly different from those of other materials, and suggest possible forms one could shape it to (using tools!) that wouldn't be possible with other materials. when you work with a new material you get new ideas!