Ryan the Robothead @luckierdodge@mastodon.online

Hello world!

For those of you that don't know me, I'm a Computer Scientist and full-time student in the US. I have strong opinions on obscure technology topics, and I hope to share them with ya'll whenever I can find the time!

Cool thing of the day: wheel-legged robots https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/wheels-are-better-than-feet-for-legged-robots

I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen more of them in sci-fi depictions of robots. They seem like a natural combination: you get the advantages of both form factors while mitigating their weaknesses.

Couldn't get horovod installed and working on any of 4 different machines, with either tensorflow or pytorch, GPU or CPU install. Docker container worked first try. God bless containerization.

In some news of a personal variety: my first published paper as a First Author just got publicly released! It's only a workshop paper, but still feels like an accomplishment.

Open access link, because all good publicly funded science should be publicly accessible: https://github.com/HPCSYSPROS/Workshop20/blob/master/Log-based_Identification_classification_and_behavior_prediction_of_HPC_applications/ws_hpcsysp106s1-file1.pdf

Just learned that apparently people are making "Fog Computing" a thing. Basically cloud computing using edge devices, from what I've gathered.

I have mixed feelings about this.

I get if you don't want to make your industrial biorobotics interface code open source (I don't like it, but I get it). But at least give me some APIs or a way to interact with it besides your menace of a GUI. A robust CLI, perhaps.

Otherwise I have to figure out how to puppet it using an AutoHotKey script, and nobody wants that. Not you, not me, not Dr. Steve the biologist who has to rely on my ability to foresee every corner case of interacting with your GUI. Ugh.

Podcast intro music at normal speed: thoughtful, chill, upbeat. The theme song for a quirky indie reporter

Podcast intro music at 1.5x: oh god oh fuck we gotta GO there's some shit to LEARN

I don't think I realized until this pandemic how much of my own sense of self worth was tied to my ability to be relentlessly productive. Also, how remarkably fragile the careful balance of my various workloads is.

Update: it turns out the problem was with the renderer, and not my bezier patch code. My honor as a Computer/Math nerd is restored.

You would think that I, person with a degree in both Computer Science and Computational Mathematics, would be able to deftly convert complex equations into code.

You would think...

Nothing kills a vibe like those 2 dreaded words: Segmentation Fault

Update: it's been so long since I've used Unity. I've regressed. Also, they've changed some stuff in newer versions (I think). This'll be fun!

Been playing Black Ops 1 Zombies with the roommates lately. Kinda want to make my own version in Unity, just for kicks, especially since later entries seem to have really diverged. It's pretty cool how doable that actually seems.

My personal struggle with tech is that I know the coolest, "best" gadgets and software and tech that I have always been passionate about is inextricably tied up in large, amoral, fundamentally profit-seeking and privacy-eradicating megacorporations with incentives that fundamentally do not align with their customer's and user's best interests. But I still love the tech, and then just end up feeling guilty and sad every time I think about it.

https://newrepublic.com/article/159339/biden-democrats-2020-campaign-promise-good-governance

"It is incumbent on those who reject revolution to make the current system not require it" and "simply fix shit and govern well". The most succinct summary of my feelings about the world I could ever hope to synthesize. Seriously, I just want a government that works well for all its citizens.

Every time I think about Oculus's acquisition by the unspeakable evil, it makes me a little sad for the future of VR. A once bright future tech already corrupted by the sins of it's forebears.

I want to love snap packages, but it's so damn hard when everything works just slightly worse than the non-snap version.

Bit the bullet and picked up a used OP-Z today. Never really done anything with synths before, but I'm excited to see if it's something I can get into. If nothing else, I'll just leave it on my desk and obsess over the beautiful hardware and design.

For someone who got into their field specifically for the programming...I don't do nearly enough programming 🤷‍♂️