AcademicalNerd @academicalnerd@qoto.org
People are more important than wires.
Joined Jan 2021
2021-02-08, 09:28, Monday
Let's make things clear, I am arrogant as hell. Which doesn't mean that I'm not good at things I claim to be good at. Sometimes being humble is harmful, because you can't be a professional unless you consider yourself one. Know when you are good enough at someething to step up and say "I know what I'm doing and here is the right way to make things work".
Be arrogant, be blunt; you might screw up and lose other's trust, but these are the stakes here. They aren't the reason to not do things, they are to be taken into account when making a decision.
This paraphrases "Dr. House", of course. A good thing to consider nonetheless, especially if you are insecure as a person.
2021-02-08, 07:00, Monday
The semester starts today, hooray. Except, two classes are cancelled so I'm left with only two English classes, one of which is supposed to teach me "technical translation". Ironically, I'll be translating an article about the last project for publication during the class itself.
And yes, for now we are studying remotely, I hope is stays this way.
Yesterday we celebrated my colleague's birthday in a restaurant with surprisingly good sushi. Everyone else was freshmen there and I'm in my third year. I remember being way more insecure than they are in my first year and it's been a long and tough ride to who I am now, maybe more tough and longer than I remember. Courtesy of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and, to some extent, J.B. Peterson.
2021-02-07, 08:27, Sunday
Not a standart devblog because the project is almost done, now it's necessary to finish an article and submit it. And I don't really feel like telling about work , so here goes something.
So I visited a stand-up event yesterday. It happened in a small but cozy basement bar where comedians, apparently, test their jokes before telling them to a bigger crowd. Which I never thought existed, but makes a lot of sense. One could call it "a debugging of humor"; here the equivalent of console prompt is a small bar with five tables full and three empty and two barmens sitting on chairs at the counter, cracking at jokes.
Once I approached the bar counter, barmen (26 yo woman, as I found out later) stated:
- Now, tell me.
I resisted the urge to tell her a "long time ago in a galaxy far away", but that would be cliche even by my standards. I haven't tried beer before and in this place they serve exclusively beer and cider. I asked for "something bitter" and wasn't dissapointed. The label is below, the thing even feels "heavy" to drink and almost as smoothingly bitter as coffee. Turns out a nerd likes beer, who knew.
#beer #story #life #student
2021-02-06, 09:00, Saturday
It is very satisfying to see a huge, long-time-in-the-making project come to an end. All the problems are solved, the code compiles and runs perfectly and displays validated output. Feels almost like defeating the strongest boss in a videogame, but without the bitter feeling of "ending", because there is no ending, at least not in my lifetime. Science is too vast to have one.
#stem #programming #life #coffeenotes
2021-02-05, 07:18, Friday
I realised today rhar I need to make a website this weekend if I want to have it up at all. Because studying starts on Monday and there will be no time.
Also, I seem to have overworked myself with the last project. I'll finish the last tasks today and send everything to my advisor, hopefully there will be no follow-ups and I'll be able to focus on making a website. Or a gemini capsule, I'm not quite sure yet.
2021-02-04, 07:04, Thursday
Hab to buy a new bag of coffee. The one I opened recently was a gift and the roast is very dark. Too dark, I should say, there wass nothing but bitterness in my cup.
Anyhow, I rewrote the script yesterday.
###Developer note: separating writing and editing works in programming as well as in creative writing.
I tend to launch or at least build my code very often to see if I broke anything. This at some point starts taking a lot of time, because I have to write small chunks and make them compatible with the rest of the system.
Yesterday I was working from my laptop. Wrote 2 hours worth of matlab code from vim and then debugged it from console (opengl gui breaks on xmonad for some reason).Seems like I tend to be too paranoid when programming.
@FailForward Maybe you'll find "Games People Play" by Eric Berne interesting. It describes disfunctional interactions (usually between two people) as "games" where the roles are chosen or, more often, forced upon one of the participants. It also gives a useful framework, as well as this triangle concept.
@FailForward
A quick question about thew scrapbook: do you keep zettelkasten-type system alongside or is it just a collection of notes now? Personally I couldn't really stick to traditional ztk the last time I tried it. Seemed like a lot of trouble to go through for a set of notes.
@FailForward
Thank you for you advice! It has already proven to be helpful: this morning I had to rewrite the code I referred to in my last post pretty much entirely. Changed variable names and sorted some spaghettiness that accumulated, now it's easier to debug.
2021-02-03, 07:37, Wednesday
So I happen to be a morning person. Which means I usually habe to grind my coffee the day before, because the grinder is loud and wakes up the entire family. This is why I have to resort to tea for today, sadly.
It is very important to differentiate solving a problem from creating a product, or a framework, if you will. When there is a single problem (or a set of similar problems) that require a one-time solution, one can get by using spaghetty code and non-optinal solutions without getting into much trouble.
If the code is to be maintained and expanded, then you are writing a product. Now you shouldn't do spaghetti code or omit documenting. This is not about just you anymore, so minimize your succesors' suffering by putting extra effort into cleaning your code.
This seems obvious but is important to keep in mind. I found myself overoptimizing a peice of code required for one-time use.
@zpartacoos
I am actually reasonably satisfied with this one. It does the job and I don't need that much from it anyway. Maybe I'll make it transparent, but that's pretty much it. I also have dmenu for launching stuff and it's all I need.
Oh well, I finally managed to finish my xmonad config. It is now fully usable. Turns out, it's possible to control sound from haskell without any additional tricks. Neat.
Tiling WMs are my sinful love < 3
I will, of course, spend some time ricing it properly, but this will work for most things. Also, yes, this is xmonad config on pop os instead of the usual arch. Because I'm too lazy to reinstall linux on laptop - there is a plethora of apps and packages and I don't want to deal with this now.
2021-02-02, 06:45, Tuesday
I am slowly getting back to my normal schedule, since uni starts on the 8th in February and it seems like we'll have offline classes. Which sucks, because I'll have to commute up to two hours daily in underground during rush hour. The number of new cases is still quite high in Moscow, so it's concerning. Also, social media in Russia now have to delete everything that contains swearing and a list of things including "encouraging unlawful behaviour" and "irrespecting the government", yes, it is the citation.
#earlymorning #thoughts #Russia
For my fellow matlab users out there: minimization produces two different results with the same equation, when different units of measurment are used. Which kinda sucks, because I now need to make ugly convertation patches to see if the code even works properly.
#matlab #programming #grind #lsqnonlin #optimizethehelloutofeverything
2021-02-01, 07:08, Monday
Now, while I'm writing this, optimization code is running in the background. I'll need to finish the calculation this week, ideally today, and submit article draft by the 9th of February. Hopefully I'll manage to pull this off.
Yesterday I have more or less finished my xmonad desktop on laptop. It's now mostly functional, except for sound, but I'll fix it soon. Then I'll hopefully be able to tweak config to my liking and upload it somewhere. Maybe I should after all build a website.
@nwerneck
This sounds interesting, thanks for info! I decided to stick with octave for my next project, but Julia looks like something worth learning.
@zpartacoos
Yeah, would be nice. I think I'll opt for Octave for now since it's a decent replacement for matlab. And my love for c/c++ is mostly irrational because it's the first language I learned and keep using to this day.
@zpartacoos
It is true, but I'm more interested in native features, to be honest. Also, lack of semicolons triggers me :D
Plus for every package there is a syntax to learn, which kinda makes it troublesome. I am considering Julia, as @nic@nwerneck pointed out, it is an option. I might go full out nerdiness and code in pure c/c++, though...
2021-01-31, 09:00, Sunday
This month I am trying analog bullet journaling as opposed to last year's heavily digital planning. It works surprisingly well for me, I've been posting here consistently for a while, and other habits I am trying to build seem to work better, too. We'll see how it holds once the semester starts, of course.
The most important benefit has been the fact that I detach from my screens (PC, laptop, phone) more often, both to plan and/or journal and for other things too. Slowly breaking an addiction, one could say, although there is a long way to come.
Also, a screw has just fallen out of my chair. Gotta fix it before It breaks apart.
#bulletjournal #bujo #journalling #thoughts #planning
@nwerneck
Matlab is fast enough for the most part, to be honest... Are there good nonlinear optimization libraries for julia? I remember trying like 1.0 version, wasn't exactly smooth.
