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!

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.

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