fcatalan

"Emergency" WFH at my workplace have been slashed, everyone back in full since the start of the month. No reason publically given, been privately told "not about people like you, but some others have taken a 2 year vacation so management is fed up". I have emails from the CEO personally thanking me for my commitment in going way over what was expected when basically saving the institution during lockdown, so now I also feel kind of personally insulted and victim of ham-handed collective punishment.

I hate being back: My gear at home is better, I have to work in uncomfortable clothes and at a room temperature that makes me sweat within minutes. I have to work in an N95 mask since we are packed in small 4 person cubicles and COVID numbers are still too high in my area. I'm spending more on gas and wasting time in traffic. I'm eating worse quality food. I keep getting interrupted by exactly those sames guys that took the 2 year vacation. I feel hard to concentrate and I'm angry all the time so my output has suffered.

I keep sending IMs to people I work with, we never need to actually meet.

Now you have to apply for a new more restrictive WFH scheme. Those wanting to sign up to it had a meeting with our direct manager where he tried to discourage us with thinly veiled threats about "special performance measuring procedures" and trite arguments about how it is unfair not being here for the people that want to come.

We applied the same, but now HR is telling us that they can't approve our WFH requests since they can't guarantee that our screen setup at home is safe and we haven't completed a "Data Display Device Setup and Handling" course in the last three years. They don't know when the course will be offered again. I've been programming for more than 35 years now, so again I kind of feel doubly insulted, both by the bare faced obstructionism and ridiculous particular hurdle.

I'd leave, I even feel I'm morally in the wrong for not leaving. But the thing is that the pay is good, that I'm of an age prone to experiencing ageism in the job market, and also this is a place where I have ample slack for tuning my output and inmerse myself in side projects or personal improvement, so their loss...

I've sat twice in the last month with my 9 year old to start making simple games with Scratch following a book someone got him for Xmas (Coding Games in Scratch by Jon Woodcock).

So far it's going pretty well, the concept introduction and presentation seems well done and paced. He understands what we are doing and how it's done and naturally experiments by changing parameters and graphics. So he's learning and we are having some fun times.

I have not any special desire nor dislike about him becoming a full on programmer, but I keep seeing people around me in all kind of jobs that would be quite better off if they faced some of their tasks with a bit of a "programmer's stance" or could even write simple small scripts to automate stupid chores.

I loved following this one a few summers ago and even went beyond the end of the tutorial adding functionality and trying more advanced data structures. I think I would have ended with a completely usable hyper-personal editor but unicode support didn't look like fun.

The same exact people that I saw domain squatting and left behind when told to put pop-unders on our pages are now closing their scammy SEO outfits to go full web3.

But the project isn't pointless!

For example, most of my help was to make sure she took 10 different containers and placed them in different locations around the house to increase the probability of getting a few decent crystals. I discussed redundance with her in the context of explaining why some of her friends were not getting results from their single try. I think that these practical thought patterns are extremely valuable, better than creating a miniature jaded adult...

When I was a kid I never got help from my parents either and I now think that I would have benefited from a bit of closer attention. I developed a huge spectrum of bad practices and behaviours that I'm inclined to think I could have avoided at least in part. I want to think there's some space between doing their homework for them and not caring about the minutiae of their education, and I want to be there.

My daughter has this as an school assignment, with some implication that it is some sort of a contest, and we managed to grow quite a few of similar quality to the seed crystals on the site in 4 days, which was the original (poorly thought IMO) deadline. The trouble is that no one else was able or cared to do it so fast, so the deadline has been slipping for a couple weeks now, with our best crystals going to school and back a few times, getting scratches and broken bits instead of nicely growing undisturbed. A bit discouraging. I'm now remembering how frustrating was for me to take school related things too seriously and discover you cared more than your teachers when I was her age.

I guess I'd buy an NFT from someone as a means of directly supporting their work, say as an alternative to a donation, patreon, twitch subscription... Other than that I must be old because I don't see the point of the whole thing.

In our initial trials involving about 5 people the software systematically failed to recognise one woman just because her (pretty standard) hairstyle. It also failed to detect my kids coming up on camera a few times.

We tested a couple eproctoring products last year while we geared up to move every exam online. We disliked them on ethical grounds, but also as ultimately unpractical. I had also a bad feeling about the vendors, there was a strong whiff of "bad used car salesmanship" in the whole interaction. I also felt there was a correlation between the push for these tools and bad or antiquated teaching methods.

Then to our relief the education authorities in our region straight banned the practice so we just drew up a document with various ideas about how to go about online assessment in a humane and reasonable way and we went through thousands of online exams with very few incidents.

I have another personal angle on this: I'm not very social. I do enjoy conversation or dinner or visits with friends or coworkers, occasionally, but not the constant barrage of invitations, events and obligations that was normal before the pandemic. So while I understand things will eventually go back to that normal for the obvious benefit of the majority, personally it feels like the end of a long, quiet vacation that I will remember and miss.

So I'm pushing back on people that want me to meet or party too soon. I'm writing this minutes after my second vaccine dose so it won't be long before my own kind of freedom runs out.

Ummm no. In fact the relationship between Spain and Guinea is surprisingly tenous considering the colonial past.

Guinea hardly makes it to the news and it isn't in the "national conscience" at all. The average educated spaniard would have to be reminded of the whole story.

Diplomatic relations are somewhat cordial, probably protecting some remaining economical interests, but a bit at "an arms length", as with other dictatorships.

Opposition politicians routinely seek refuge or meet in Spain without any trouble. If anything they decry the "hands off" stance of Spain, hardly the same as a "de facto colony" situation.

COVID lockdowns had already started the chess surge, for example look at the numbers for chess streams on Twitch: https://twitchtracker.com/games/743

I started playing in June after reading this: https://www.wired.com/story/hikaru-nakamura-twitch-chess/

My kids are a bit younger, but the article reads a lot like our life during the hard quarantine period in Spain.

They couldn't set a foot out of the door for 52 straight days and only walk around the block for a few more weeks, but they adapted perfectly, slept more, never were bored or sad, did great with their remote school tasks, enjoyed the extended family time and even had a fun and instructive peek into adult work life: they were surprisingly insightful and critical about the good and bad aspects of mom&dad jobs.

And while the reason for it was bad and my wife and me were worried, anxious and sleepless, in retrospect our life was good in a lot of ways: The kids were OK, we ate better, we exercised, work got done beyond expectations, we had more free time and discovered that many of the disagreements and tensions in our marriage come from the outside. Being together 24/7 was easier than getting along living the usual crazy "normal life".

I'm 45. I got started by books when I was about 8: The little public library near my home had translations of the Usborne BASIC guides and Tim Hartnell's game books and I devoured those without having a computer to try them on. Then my uncle bought an Spectrum 48k and I spent every Saturday morning going to his place, playing some games and typing some code from one of the books, or modifications I had concocted in a notebook during the week. My parents bought us an MSX, probably by 1986 and I kept doing some BASIC (but mostly playing games).

Then came an hiatus, from 1988 to about 1993 I became the stereotypical teenager, so motorcycles, booze and girls seemed way more interesting. I always regret it a bit, because I feel I could have learned a lot during those years.

In 1993 I started Physics at college and my parents bought me a 386 PC. That thing must have costed like $3000. I did little Physics, but sure gamed an awful lot on that thing. But I also taught myself C.

Then in 1995 I discovered a little room in the Physics department that had two unsupervised old PCs connected to something called the Internet. I was hooked instantly and squatted that room for hours every day with a bunch of similarly inclined students. We downloaded NASA pics, connected to chat rooms and MUDs and hacked into the mail server to steal unused email accounts for ourselves. One day someone from that room handed me a bunch of floppies with Slackware Linux on it.

I switched to CS the next term, and finished it, but on the side: by 1996 I had a web dev job.

Most of the jobs I've held have been pretty full-stack: from sliding the servers into the rack to whipping up a decent logo in Gimp and everything in between. I keep doing the same and I love being self-sufficient, but sometimes envy people that are really really good at something. But I never found anything I would leave all the rest for.

I strongly disagree. Grammar is a great tool for an instructor to organize their teaching, but a terrible way for students to think about language. Yeah, to read or speak you need to internalize those rules, but you don't really need to put a particular technical name on them, or think directly about them.

I think the step from "slowly doing grammar while I try to understand" to "I'm so good at grammar that I just understand" doesn't work that way.

I was taught English from 6 to 18 in a very traditional, strict, grammar-driven way and learned nothing. All spaniards go through the same type of lessons and very few can understand anything at all after years.

At 18 I stopped any classes or studying but I got satellite TV, English computing magazines and shortly afterwards the Internet and then just learned all the English I needed to get by without much conscious effort.

A few years ago I got interested in Danish and in about 4 months I could read regular novels at a decent pace just from Duolingo, newspapers and subtitled TV series. I probably could do the same with any language just with enough motivation.

Or maybe if the lectures are online they should be paid proportional to the effort involved, which can't be possibly the same if you have to come up with new materials, find new methods of teaching and engaging the students, etc...

I'm still developing web services connected to an Ingres instance running on a rickety ~22 year old Sun server with lots of bits and pieces cannibalized from its long dead siblings.

We have the replacement system almost ready but won't really be able to swap the thing until the project owner retires (yay politics!).

It's important but not time-critical, so if it dies before he goes we can just eat the downtime and take a couple of weeks to migrate.

I personally remember that couple of years, 95-97, as ripe for coming up by yourself with things that are now considered "obvious" or just the way things are done. Things happened fast: by the start of 1995 the concept of networked computers was a vague thing from the movies to me and by the end of 1997 I was an "experienced" web developer. We had websites, but we didn't have good search, so you still had to learn many things the old hard way.

The biggest thing I remember to have "invented" by myself in early 1996 (at the same time as thousands more) was the database driven website: I was tasked with creating a "virtual campus" kind of website with forums, chat, assignments, calendar, grades, news... and the sparse examples and models I had found for all those functionalities used plain text files as storage.

After completing a prototype I was obviously sick of dealing with those files and suddenly thought: "hey, dumping all this crap on a few tables in a database would make everything so much easier!" It felt a bit mind-bending, because you were taught that databases were for internal "databasey" things: Accounting, addresses, customers, widgets and their prices, that kind of stuff. Using a database as storage for a forum or a public-facing website felt almost like a revolutionary concept.

By the end of the project I was quite bored of writing plain SQL and I had something very close in spirit to many ORMs/ the Active Record stuff from Rails. So I sort of "invented" that too.

Another thing to reflect on is that I wrote all that as plain C through CGI. The database was mysql. I tried to run it a couple years ago and it compiled and ran almost straight on a modern Linux system, after like 20 minutes fiddling with Apache and the makefile, 20 years after the fact. My current projects seem to rot every time I take a short vacation.

I was in charge of ensuring the TLS 1.2 compliance of hundreds of old sites in my organization. 2 weeks ago I was well on track to have it finished in time. Now I'm tasked to just keep up essential systems that are straining under the work from home onslaught, with two suddenly homeschooled kids needing my support

I'm also so overstressed and worried that can only sleep on Xanax and have an asthma flare-up that looks like covid19 symptoms at times, adding to the anxiety.

This will be a good and needed change, but it can wait.

If you just care about understanding most of the written language this can be done a bit faster in a very similar way: A few years ago I started watching Danish TV shows and went through a few months of "Danish obsession".

-I started Duolingo Danish, only 15-20 minutes every day, just unlocking stuff, not completing evey level. I never completed it all, but there's not much left.

-Then I followed a couple major Danish newspapers on Twitter. This is good because it is just incorporated in my couple daily sweeps through my timeline, provides a little "cultural immersion" and the translate button is sitting right there to help with those couple of words you didn't already know.

-The Twitter thing also works well to give a sense of progress: After a while you find you don't have much trouble with the tweets themselves and start clicking on some links to get a harder challenge with the articles themselves.

-When you can make out what most of the press articles say, you can start trying with some fiction: In my case I chose ebook Danish translations of the Millenium novel series, for no particular reason (just more Nordic noir). I had not read them previously.

I read them using my phone and set up the reader to provide Google translation by selecting words or sentences. I found out I could in fact enjoy the novel and had to use the "dictionary" less and less as I went on. I read the two first novels and the average speed was about half of English or my native Spanish.

- Since my Danish reading was by now quite effortless, for an aditional challenge I tried the third novel in the original Swedish. This was viable and still fun, but certainly more belabored.

All this took about 3-4 months.

So now I can read Danish, Norwegian and Swedish newspapers but I can't really understand the spoken language. (In fact spoken Danish is notoriously difficult to understand). I can catch the drift of conversation, recognise words and phrases but not really understand or speak myself. I can surprise Danes by greeting them and exchanging some smalltalk, but not really keep up a conversation. But hey... it was all pretty much effortless, so RoI is great.

Nowadays I'm doing the same with Russian. It goes slower because I'm not as obsessed and stop from time to time, but I can understand tweets from Komsomolskaya Pravda pretty well by now.

Reads to me as an allegory very loosely based on the very real and sad story of Ignaz Semmelweis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Well, whats good for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary should be ok for Google.

http://judiciary.house.gov/index.cfm/2015/3/at-the-flick-of-...

So now stop a bit. Reread what you wrote, think about what you did and the outcome. Harrowing isn't it?

Seems like a genetic algorithm would be a great fit to produce a letter arrangement given a target silhouette

I've been working from home for 8 months this last year and point 2 was the biggest pain. Even after setting some initial rules, there was this almost imperceptible but continous pressure to do stuff just because you were at home. It's hard to stop because every little request or exception looks perfectly reasonable and is asked in good faith, so you feel like a jerk if you invoke the rules at every chance. The pressure kept building up to the point that I was always irritable and it was hard to get any work done if I had a chore or errand in the horizon that day. So at the end I was glad to go back to the office.

There's a great article describing the start of Erlang as a Prolog metainterpreter. It's very accessible, at least I can follow it with my month old Prolog knowledge and it's quite impressive to watch as the interpreter goes from nothing to basic concurrency in a few lines of code:

http://www.sics.se/~joe/pubs/prac_appl_prolog.ps‎

I'm taking a class that has some Prolog content and I've been playing with my own toy implementation. Fun stuff.

It might be a problem to keep your best developers working in Barcelona on Spanish level salaries if they are good, young and fluent in English. It's not just the absolute salary numbers: the relative purchasing power of even decent Spanish salaries is pitiful. I only stay here because I'm not so young anymore and have a family, but otherwise I would move somewhere that might be twice as expensive but pay more like 3x.

A great post about the same problem but from a Math/CS perspective, and as fun to read: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/918.html [Cosma Shalizi's "In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You]

I've been helping test Quolony for a while and the potential for this technology is great. In particular using it as a browser extension with the instant link sharing and cobrowsing gives those otherwise solitary web browsing sessions a certain feel of the metaverse that could be. As the meme goes, this puts Internet on your Internet.