cproctor

I find ledger's timeclock format [1] to be helpful for tracking my time. I wrote a simple CLI tool to log into and out of nested accounts, effectively billing my time to different categories. I like this because it's simple, human-readable, but structured to support lots of post-hoc analysis.

[1] https://hledger.org/timeclock.html

There's some argument that the limitations of this format (compared to open-ended parser games, or the very open-ended AI Dungeon posted here last week) are a benefit. Ian Bogost's piece in the Atlantic a couple of years ago, "Video Games are Better Without Stories" [1] argued that narrative in games can't deliver on its promise--you can't craft a story while also letting the player explore. To my taste, games like Inkle's 80 Days and Heaven's Vault, and Nicky Case's games like the Coming Out Simulator [2], make effective use of the constraints of the medium. They do feel more like literature than games, which might feel overly conservative to folks primarily interested in the phenomenological possibilities of games.

My project, Unfold Studio [3], makes use of the affordances of Inkle's Ink language for teaching CS in the context of students' existing identities and concerns. Here, the limitations of the format are again useful. Students can create small playable worlds in a way that's still manageable and which makes CS concepts rhetorically powerful--they are immediately useful for creating particular experiences for the user. Here's an accessible piece [4] on how this approach could support marginalized youth in developing criticality: understanding and challenging unfair techno-social conditions.

I'm always looking for collaborators!

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video... [2] https://ncase.me/cos/ [3] https://unfold.studio [4] https://chrisproctor.net/publications/proctor_2019_voice.htm...

I was grimly amused by a thought along the lines of Asimov's "Nightfall." Researchers started to piece together evidence of a million years of rain driven by CO2 emissions, just as the really big storms started...

Thanks and congratulations! This may be the project that finally gets me to invest in learning go.

Yeah, not that hard to do manually--I have a nice script for that. But I haven't looked into the logistics of hooking into the wifi connection process and doing this automatically :)

The problem with constantly shuffling MAC addresses is that they are used for device authentication on corporate/school/university networks. Does anyone know of a utility that generates MAC addresses as a hash of the SSID?

Also for the purpose of lawsuits against their customers.

"In September, the website went after David Ollila, a serial entrepreneur who in 2010 created a short ski for climbing snowy hills he called the Marquette Backcountry Ski...Backcountry.com argued that Ollila knew he was intentionally abusing the Backcountry.com mark because he had ordered products from the website in 2002 and 2010."

Can somebody please create a Babbage-style infinite scroll interface?

So much for education for democratic citizenship.

Someday I will help lead a school whose software is written by students and whose policies are debated by student government, faculty senate, and the PTA.

I have been using this system for about a year, and it works great. I generally use the pattern yourdomain.com@accounts.mydomain.net. However, I have found from time to time that I never get account signup/confirmation emails to these addresses. It seems like they're being silently rejected. Does anyone know if there's some kind of email validation service that might be filtering these?

I guess I could use a hash of the domain (eg asdffdsa@accounts.mydomain.net) to make my strategy less visible, but that feels like I'm probably overthinking it.

That's a cool idea! What resonates most with me is starting somewhere in the middle of the ladder of abstraction, low enough that a lot of the fundamental CS concepts are visible, but high enough that beginners can make something real, now. I like that networking would be built in from the start.

I'd also want to teach beginners in a way that lets them keep building and tinkering outside the environment I provide for them. This is where I'd love to see schools providing and encouraging the use of hosting space and resources like Minio, so that students can just count on them being available.

No, Papert's constructionism is exactly what I'm pointing at. My phrase, "making with code," was meant to suggest that like maker education, this approach to introductory CS emphasizes personal relationships with powerful ideas, through personally-meaningful projects done in a community of practice. By leading with Terminal, I hope to emphasize students' laptops as tools for making things, not just providing access to content.

A lot of current approaches prioritize scalability over everything else, leading to canned and sandboxed curricula.

I'm curious, though, whether this is in tension with your understanding of constructionism.

Sort of as a response, I'm currently developing/piloting a 9th grade CS curriculum designed around constructionism ("making with code"). The first unit spends a lot of time introducing students to Terminal. By the second unit, assignments are git repos.

To a computer science teacher, this feels like trying to walk up a down escalator.

First-year CS students (middle school or high school) with experience using Apple products don't have a concept of a filesystem. The shift to auto-saving documents also corrodes the intuition that files get stored on disk in some non-magical way. In the same way that it's now easier to teach networking and graph theory because youth experience identity and relationships this way, it's now a lot harder to teach lower-level abstractions. In my experience, this has changed over the last five years.

My take was a little different; I wanted a CLI app that lets me search my recipes, put menus together, and then see views for shopping and cooking: https://github.com/cproctor/cookbook/

One thing I'm looking forward to adding is tagging recipe steps as do-ahead, mis en place, early, late, and last minute. This will make it a bit easier to think through the mental gantt chart I use when cooking a dinner composed of a bunch of dishes. Also a simple scraping utility for importing.

The thing all these have in common is that they're reactions against the festering cesspool of hostile-UI, low-information-density, pages full of affiliate links that are today's cooking sites. (NYT cooking very much excepted.)

I wish we had a better mechanism for including more people in the project of iteratively refining the way we think about life tasks and improving the tools we use to think with. I think this is a great conversation and wish more people who like to cook could participate.

You can make $42k teaching computer science at a private school in silicon valley.

Fun fact: there's no way to do logical grouping for head elements. (eg no divs allowed)

I miss ShitBegone (http://www.shitbegone.com/), which we used to buy for our coop house.

I've wondered whether cash serial numbers are scanned at ATMS and bank deposits. The metadata could be quite informative.

It's so lovely! You can see your reflection in the water.

How do you jump?

I've been having trouble getting GitHub to send me a verification email (after adding a new email address) for over a week. Anybody else having this problem? I wonder if it's connected.

In these cases, I've had good luck just emailing them with a clear notice that I'm cancelling my account (and telling them I think it's rude not to support cancelling via the same media used to sign up). I'm not going to go through your manipulative user-retention flow.

Some big hospital chains are starting a nonprofit generic drug manufacturer, Civica Rx. This seems like a promising step forward. For those more inclined to direct-action, there's Four Thieves Vinegar [1].

[1] https://fourthievesvinegar.org/

Dietary advice lives longer when it contains less processed food.

Right--it could work at the DNS level. Yuck.

Hmm, good point. Though it's not like we're headed in a particularly appealing direction as it is...

From a technical standpoint, I don't understand why the adtech companies don't just serve ads via APIs consumed by website owners, and served to clients via the primary domain. This seems like it would obviate current adblocking and third-party cookie blockers.

It would add a bit of technical complexity for site owners, but that seems manageable, particularly for b2b relationships.

Obviously, I hope this doesn't happen, but it seems like an obvious strategy and I don't see the flaw.

btw, my email to Fastmail:

After reading GMail's announcement about dynamic email and your position statement on AMP, I am thankful to have switched to FastMail and looking forward to remaining your customer. I'm writing to ask you not to implement AMP dynamic email. Even though you don't have a huge slice of the email market, your customers are probably disproportionately privileged and informed (they choose to pay for email...), which positions you to resist these erosions to privacy and democracy in ways that individuals can't.

More pragmatically, I see your non-support of AMP as a big feature. If you don't support AMP, companies can't as easily put pressure on me to use a communication channel where they have all the control.

Thanks!

I started transitioning away from Gmail (to Fastmail) last fall, forwarding my gmail and using a signature asking people to update their address book. This is a good day to make the hard cutoff.

One strategy for explaining the problem to non-technical people is by comparing regular email to the walled-garden email used by some banks, phone companies, and the like--where you have to log into their website to see your 'inbox' and use a web form to send messages. It's super annoying and the other party has complete control of the communication channel.

"Dynamic email" could be implemented to inject this kludge into your email client, giving the AMP sender (who likely has more power than the user) the same level of control over the channel. Imagine opening your email client and finding a message which asks for two security questions and a captcha, then lands you in a messaging interface which limits you to 200 characters and denies basic affordances of email like archiving and forwarding.

I find the arguments that email is already mutable because images are externally-loaded unpersuasive. In 2013 Google started caching images in gmail "to protect you from unknown senders who might try to use images to compromise the security of your computer." [1] Email marketers were upset at losing engagement metrics. Now a practice that used to be considered abuse is being rolled out as a feature.

[1] https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html