Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

Ok kids, here we go:

#Bandwagon, the open #Fediverse alternative to #Bandcamp is ready for its first steps into the light.

I have a waitlist online at
https://bandwagon.fm if you'd like to try it out.

I'm planning to build the first (dozen? I don't know) profiles in the waitlist personally, with an email questionnaire and FaceTime follow-ups if necessary.

Once I'm confident in the UX, we'll open up self-serve signups for everyone.

How many professional programmers are working on pointless and/or actively harmful products?

Give me your best guess.

(If you vote, please boost to diversify the results. It’s polite.)

@scottwilson @b0rk I remember when people who wrote in Visual Basic were scoffed at but there was a lot of industry-specific software written by subject matter experts that wouldn't have been written at all without access to easy-to-learn and understand languages.

If you are drafting figures for a scientific paper or presentation, remember that https://scidraw.io/ exists: a repository of free SVG cartoons for science.

#SciDraw is supported by the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre.

All content on SciDraw is shared under creative commons license (CC-BY) unless stated otherwise.

#inkscape #SVG #science

Vaults are the most mysterious things inside the cell. This profile of Leonard Rome - the Vault Guy - is fascinating.

#cellbiology

https://www.science.org/content/article/biologist-aims-solve-cell-s-biggest-mystery-could-it-help-cancer-patients-too

Check it out, the #Shiny extension for #VSCode now supports both Shiny for R apps *and* Shiny for Python apps in everyone's second favorite IDE!

Along with the updates come a few neat features for deploying your Shiny apps as serverless ShinyLive apps using https://shinylive.io, or for saving a ShinyLive app as local #RStats or #Python files.

Learn more and see the extension in action in our release post: https://shiny.posit.co/blog/posts/shiny-vscode-1.0.0/

I am so deeply, deeply tired of every god damned "can be answered with a tutorial" technical question search being overwhelmingly flooded with videos. I don't want videos. I don't want to *listen* to something I can read. I am at least 50% deaf. GIVE ME WORDS DAMN YOU. WOOORDSSSSS!

I collected all my writing on PCA into a free long-form math book.

https://peterbloem.nl/publications/unraveling-pca

It's called "Unraveling principal component analysis" and it contains a narrative explanation of PCA all the way down to the foundations.

That means it discusses eigenvectors, singular value decompositions, the spectral theorem, low-rank decompositions and much more.

The solar eclipse inspired our new puzzle design! It's double-sided: the sun on one side and the moon on the other. By flipping pieces over, you can gradually eclipse the sun turning day to night https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/blog/?p=9636

I put Breakout (aka Brick Breaker) inside Google Calendar! It lets you decline any meetings you shatter.

blog info + chrome extension link in thread!

Few things bring home how much big tech caring about diversity was a zero interest rate phenomenon like Women Who Code shutting down due to lack of funding.

https://womenwhocode.com/blog/the-end-of-an-era-women-who-code-closing

Wow, after 25 years of Unix experience, I learned that you can filter output in #less.

Press ampersand (&) and enter a regex to show only lines matching the regex.

Press ampersand (&) and then exclamation mark (!) to apply an inverse filter.

I have programmed a small #rstats script combining the web-based #API of our SolarEdge #photovoltaic system with the local API of our go-e #wallbox.

If the car charges, the script looks up the production of the PV system and increases/decreases the charging current for the car accordingly. This makes the most of the collected #solar power. What now runs on an old #Raspberry Pi would’ve easily cost us 500 EUR + installation costs – and I have full control over everything! 🤓🤩

Because they bring me such joy, I will share with you all the software testing videos I share with my Software Design and Development students.

Video 1/3: “We don’t need user testing! We already know our users”

"It's difficult to judge the quality of someone's work," you tell me, "especially these days when so much is being published every day."

And you're right. Good work in many areas or research is difficult to pick out, obscured by a rising flood of self-promoting bullshit. /1

#statstab #64 Using tidybayes with the posterior package by @mjskay

Thoughts: Going #bayesian means a lot of wrangling the posteriors to get the info you want. A crucial skills I'm still learning, but invaluable.

#bayes #rstats #tidybayes #brms

https://mjskay.github.io/tidybayes/articles/tidy-posterior.html

Reminder: MIT Libraries have been out of contract with Elsevier for four years now.

Bravo MIT!

More like this please. Paying the ransom only encourages the robber-barons to crank-up the ransom price the next year. We need to break the cycle. Don't feed the monster.

Professors: you can use yt-dlp to download YouTube videos and add them to directly your presentations.

I've seen so many lectures get derailed by an embedded YouTube video breaking in PowerPoint. Or they minimize their presentation, open up a browser and navigate to YouTube (revealing embarrassing personal recommendations), then make a lecture hall full of people sit through an ad for some fly-by-night home security system or whatever.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

#education #teaching #academia