Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

There is still good stuff here: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/audio-video-courses/

And they are still adding new courses. Maybe I’m just out of the loop and 10 years of course materials have accumulated out there from hundreds of universities and is ready for me to consume it.

If anyone has a rosy view of the open course movement I’d be very happy to hear it.

I would love it if I could just download and seed a torrent of some CC-licensed course materials from any number of universities — especially for some niche courses rather than just the “giant lecture hall” 101 courses.

I think the ADA lawsuit against Berkeley probably really damaged that dream, but in general I see it as a very disappointing failure of open / libre culture ☹

About 10-12 years ago, I was super hopeful about the promise of open university courses. I taught myself economics and many other subjects by carving out some time each day to watch a 30 minute video, take notes and do some homework.

The catalogs from many universities were already quite large at the time and I figured that in time you’d be able to get something close to a full undegraduate degree’s worth of classes at home from watching videos.

I am very sad that MOOCs (synchronous, time-limited, graded courses behind walled gardens) sucked so much air out of the room.

New head canon: the word Noël is actually Santa Claus’s Kryptonian name.

I will not be taking questions at this time.

I think his fondness for trash robots was inspired when we stumbled on this instructable from M.C. Langer: https://www.instructables.com/Making-Quality-Toys-From-Plastic-Trash-a-Beginners/

He’s got a ton of other great little projects: https://www.instructables.com/member/M.C.+Langer/

Was playing with my son on Saturday when he said the words every weird hacker dad wants to hear: “Papa, let’s make robots out of garbage!”

My co-worker Peter sent me an article on privacy in ML ages ago, but I’m only now getting around to it. Or, in other words:

Peter picked a privacy paper, but Paul procrastinated, putting it in the pile of papers to peruse.

I imagine at the time the people in the cartoon were immediately recognizable (even including the one whose face is pointing away from the viewer!) and the meaning was clear, but from our viewpoint it’s downright inscrutable. Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose.

Was recently looking for cartoons in the public domain that I could re-caption for a point I wanted to make in my talk. This was a runner-up to the one I chose. I feel like it could easily be an exploitable template, though I have no immediate caption for it.

Also a worry is that I don’t understand the original context. By itself a man riding a zebra could fit a few metaphors, but as far as I know the original cartoon was making the point that America is better off with slavery or something 😛

For the festive conspiracy theorist in your life, who wants to decorate for Christmas, but also wants you to know that Santa Claus is a lizard person.

Doing reviews is also incredibly valuable, IMO, which is why I always take them seriously. Looking at someone’s work and then figuring out what could be improved and how to justify why it’s an improvement teaches you so much about how to produce that kind of work.

You can apply the skills you learn from reviewing to your own work, but you can’t gain quite the same skills by critical reviews of your own work.

I think the first draft of my #PyConfHyd2020 keynote is the best first pass at a talk I’ve ever written, and I feel like implementing the feedback I’ve gotten from the few people who’ve already seen it has made it so much better.

Good reviews are so valuable.

When PEP 621 is implemented in setuptools, using PEP 621 for your metadata spec will also work (and is probably the best option): https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0621/

With the right implementation in setuptools, 90% of packages will start cutting releases with reliable dependency metadata without any action needed by their maintainers.

You can ensure that your package will have properly annotated reliable metadata by either:

Specifying install_requires in setup.cfg or by using literals in your http://setup.py. If you have conditional dependencies, use environment markers:

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0508/#environment-markers

For some background on one problem this solves, see @di_codes@twitter.com ‘s 2018 article “Why PyPI Doesn’t Know Your Project’s Dependencies”: https://dustingram.com/articles/2018/03/05/why-pypi-doesnt-know-dependencies/

PEP 643 can’t 100% fix this, but it makes it possible for a project to indicate that it doesn’t have this failure mode.

I am happy to announce that I have accepted PEP 643: Metadata for Package Source Distributions, which has the potential to dramatically simplify Python package metadata resolution in the future. https://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0643/

Soon you may be able to build reliable dependency graphs!

Finding old summaries of the history of X, then following any archive links (or just believing the summary) helps somewhat.

Any time I do historical research I feel like a pre-search engine internet user. I’d love to be able to search “the internet as of 2005” or something of that nature, but I think many pages from that era that still exist aren’t even indexed anymore!

As an interesting aside, it seems that Python itself was on PyPI at the time (2004-04-13): https://web.archive.org/web/20040413032446/http://www.python.org/pypi?:action=display&name=Python&version=2.3.2