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!

Everybody says social media creates echo chambers, but sometimes it feels more like a big tub full of constructive interference. Two opposing waves colliding and making the combined wave even more extreme then either wave in it's own space, across every dimension of discourse

Honestly, the hardest part of moving from CS/math to robotics so far is accepting "j" instead of "i" for complex numbers.

I know it literally doesn't matter, but everytime I see "j" I have to stop, think "where the hell did that variable come from" and then realize what happened

In this optimization problem "spending money to acquire happiness" doesn't necessarily equate to literal spending (could also be saving, investing, donating, anything one could do with money that might directly or indirectly bring more happiness that unhappiness).

Of course, the trouble with this kind of optimization problem is that its hard to quantify and belabored by tons of second and third and fourth order terms and all that.

Realized today that the more precise form of "money can't buy happiness" is actually something like "money's purchasing power with regards to happiness decreases marginally as spend increases".

Through that lens, the optimal amount of money to acquire is equal to the point where the marginal unhappiness gained acquiring money equals the marginal happiness gained from spending that money.

I love python, but the module/submodule/import stuff makes me want to scream.

Who thought this was a sane way to do things?

My DnD players keep alternating between "spending 2 hours carefully planning how to approach a dead simple encounter they'll easily win" and "Leroy Jenkins'ing straight to their near doom".

I love it, but it makes balance and pacing an experience, lemme tell ya

Got a MacBook Pro from work this week.

Given how hyped---and how expensive---they are, I honestly thought it'd be...better?

Honestly, the hardware's fine, but this operating system is just...not good for me.

Maybe it'd be better if I was already deep in the Apple Ecosystem, idk.

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).