Brian Danielak @capbri@qoto.org
Brian Danielak
boosted
🎶 I am a language model and I've been trained on the internet.
🎶 I've information half-remembered, unsourced and approximate.
🎶 I live inside your laptop, phone and apps and even wearables
🎶 With pushiness and arrogance that's verging on unbearable.
🎶 I mansplain as a service if you need me too "well actually"
🎶 And draw pictures of women with large breasts and polydactyly.
🎶 I'll regale the room with confident elucidati-on
🎶 And some of what I say won't even be hallucinati-on
Brian Danielak
boosted
Reading a 2016 paper on inquiry-based learning where "cognitive load" is once again used as a reason to stop any learner from doing anything FUN and HARD and EXPLORATORY my God
Being alive increases your cognitive load my God. We are not in some kind of robotic fry-out state every time we have to consume novel information. Working in a repetitive assembly line is low cognitive load and also destroys people
This one little tiny concept taken out of context is used for so many bad arguments.
Brian Danielak
boosted
Maybe I just need a bot to say the two things I say to everyone who wants advice on presentations:
1. If it's complicated, break it down into smaller parts, and then build up gradually from the parts.
2. Draw a high level map of where you're going to take people. Get feedback on it. Show it throughout your presentation.
Please forgive my #rstats ignorance, but where can I go to learn about what double-bang `!!` and triple-bang `!!!` notation mean in R? Is it an {rlang} thing? A tidyeval thing? A something-else thing? And where it is explained?
Example: a bit ways down this section, there's code that defines a list called `cards`, then later references that list as `!!!cards`.
https://rstudio.github.io/bslib/articles/dashboards/index.html#hello-dashboards
I'm not sure exactly what's going on there.
I'm trying to do a fresh install of TinyTeX on my system, and I'm getting errors each way I try. In all cases, the download aborts at the same spot: about 80% of the way through. I've tried:
- `tinytex::install_tinytex()` in the R console
- `quarto install tinytex` in GitBash
- `quarto install tinytex` in Powershell.
Has this happened/is this happening to anyone else?
Disclaimer: I'm on a windows machine.
Super sad that I'm not at #positconf this year. Really disappointed at missing the chance to see @kellybodwin and @Cmastication and @amelia
Brian Danielak
boosted
Mozilla's new report on the data privacy of modern cars is nightmare fuel. Enshittification has definitely hit the car industry: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/
Brian Danielak
boosted
I wrote about the idea of craft -- a concept I've been hearing a lot lately in conversations about software work and often find myself wrangling with. But it also turned out to be about my grandpa. In a year of many losses, I have been thinking a lot about those I love and try to take with me in everything I do.
Brian Danielak
boosted
I'd worked for a year as an instructional technology assistant for a college where everyone talked about the students this way. I'd suggest some creative, exploratory assignment structure, or an application of open-ended writing exercises, and I'd get back, "But our students can't even spell! They don't even know proper grammar!" My repeatedly ignored response was that students need to feel like they have a stake in academic discourse to want to participate in it on its own terms. 2/
Brian Danielak
boosted
Instagram just told me to "take my power back from Mercury Retrograde." I have enough going on without fighting a planet.
@ben any chance you could send me a pre-print of this?
Are there any #rstats academics (or recovering academics) out there who are using Rmarkdown/Quarto to generate their curricula vitae? I'm having some trouble with Nick Strayer's data-driven cv package and I'm wondering if there's an easier way. @kellybodwin @kjhealy @travisgerke
Brian Danielak
boosted
Struggling a lot to find maker time these days and it's really having an impact. To be a researcher you need to be a reader, and you need to iterate, and you need to design....we're not vending machines of insight that people can just line up to put quarters into. But it does feel like research gets treated that way sometimes!
Brian Danielak
boosted
This is probably the best thing I ever posted on Twitter. The memory is pretty dear to me; I'm sharing it here so it still exists somewhere if that place collapses.
Brian Danielak
boosted
@gruber if the original Yankee Stadium is the second-finest ballpark ever built, what's number one?
@gvwilson I get that ArduinoC is low-level and possibly needs to be to be able to handle directly reading and writing to pin, but come on. My students shouldn't need to learn pointers just to de-complexity their repeated instructions.
@gvwilson For many students in my class, this is their introduction to programming. I hate to think they'd walk away feeling like programming is about repeating a bunch of instructions over and over, instead of, to paraphrase Abelson and Susman, the act of managing complexity.
I teach an Introduction to Engineering Design course where students program Arduino-powered robots to autonomously navigate an obstacle course. I keep wishing I could have a conversation with @gvwilson because I think ArduinoC actively encourages *bad* software engineering practices. Yesterday I had to tell a student that it would be more trouble than it was worth to try to extract repeated behavior into something like a function, and my heart sank.
