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!

Love talking with my former-Microsoft-employee dad about tech, because he's got some of the most arcane "grumpy old man" tech opinions.

My favorite from today is "wikis are just a stupid branding gimmick". Whatever that means.

There's a very particular kind of person who beefs with the concept of wikis, and boy is he exactly that kind of person.

Hmm...I'm a bit conflicted on the Copilot "training ML on GPL code is a license violation if Copilot isn't also GPL'd!" discourse.

It kinda seems like everyone's confidently asserting that Copilot MUST be a derivative work, which...doesn't seem as cut and dried to me.

If I, a human being, learned to code using a bunch of GPL code samples, would every piece of code I wrote from then on need to be GPL licensed as a derivative work? If not, why is it different if the computer does it?

The irony of crypto promising to save everyone from hyperinflation, and then accidentally creating a hyperinflating crypto, is not lost on me, I assure you.

Has Hyper-V ever actually helped anyone do anything, or does it only exist to make other things not work on Windows? I swear, WSL2 is great but every time I trip over Hyper-V trying to do something interesting I want to wipe the whole thing and install Linux.

Very cool 5-min video about a robot that builds structures using fibers: https://vimeo.com/507950769 Would love to see more theses and academic papers with these kind of summary videos/demos

Let me introduce you to the less well known sibling of

"No ethical consumption under capitalism",

my good friend:

"no unalloyed goods for the poor".

Everything's a tradeoff, and you always seem to be trending towards that dreaded zero line.

Ah, it's because of the whole "replacing emojis with embedded images" thing...

And one of these is much nicer looking than the other.

Granted it gets interpreted to https://xn--ml8h.ryandlewis.dev/, but the link is still valid!

Funnily enough, Mastodon's parser doesn't seem to like https://🎵.ryandlewis.dev, but that's actually a valid url (try it in your browser bar!)

Writing my thesis is fun because two different sections can be "we needed a supercomputer and 6 weeks to crunch this data, here's some relevant statistical results" and "I made some pretty charts on my laptop, see that little bippity bop there? That's probably important".

Jupyter Notebooks have the code and markdown, and can even do rudimentary LaTeX, but no drawing to speak of. OneNote has the drawing and some LaTeX-lite syntax for equations, but no code or Markdown. Various markdown/LaTeX editors exist, but don't support drawings or code (certainly not both).

I have this dream, of a magical note taking solution that combines the best aspects of OneNote, Markdown, LaTeX, and a computational notebook. Just a workbench where I can write MarkDown (my preferred method of organizing notes), use the really quite fantastic drawing tools that OneNote seems to be unrivaled in, write equations/formal notations without wanting to rip my hair out, and be able to run code.

Celeste is a weird combination of brutal, serene, charming, and challenging. But somehow it works? I was dubious before I started, but I'm definitely seeing that the praise is well deserved.

Took a break from writing my thesis to write some fun nonsense about a programmable mechanical keyboard: https://ryandlewis.dev/posts/mck142pro/

My favorite part of Machine Learning is that there's a thousand ways to do anything, and they're somehow all wrong.

Email alerts from my selfhosted servers and VMs:

Pros - I find out when stuff goes wrong pretty quickly.

Cons - the single long, continous buzz of a storm of incoming notifications is very anxiety inducing while I'm trying to deal with catastrophic failure

Currently LARPing Frostpunk while my apartment's furnace is broke and it's subzero outside. But we made it through the night without the pipes freezing so we'll probably be fine.