mturk

I actually struggled a bit with OBS yesterday, getting it running. Flatpak was not behaving nicely, and then I ran into issues with various .deb's. I have very little doubt that it's something particularly skewed with my specific desktop setup (lots of leftover cruft, probably missing a number of xdg libraries or something, who knows) but eventually I got it working. I genuinely like OBS, and have liked it for a while, but it definitely took some getting used to. And I've had to reset my dock positioning via editing the ini files more than I would have expected.

I noticed in the release notes that they dropped Ubuntu 24.04. I'm kind of surprised by this and made a mental note to dig in as to why...

MESA, a piece of software referenced in this article, is a pretty incredible system. (Even referring to it as software underplays the extent of its community and impact.)

Many people are involved in MESA and Bill Paxton was always quick to point out the many new folks that worked on it, but this article does a great job of celebrating his impact:

https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/news/an-accidental-astrophysicist

It's amazing to me that he went from being the voice on the other end of the Mother Of All Demos to having such a major impact on stellar astrophysics during his "retirement." He passed away in 2025.

I'll still be around on Oct 1.

I bought a Pixelbook during the middle of their product lifetime, and it was one of the best laptops I ever had. I genuinely don't know how broadly that sentiment was shared, but the cancellation of the product line suggests "not that broadly." Google has changed since that time and I am a bit skeptical this will meet that specific niche for me.

I am genuinely delighted that `dcc` (the system I play with my friends) is in the list of systems currently supported: https://rpg.actor/systems and I might participate as a result. Very cool.

Ghidra is a very impressive piece of software with a deep bench of functionality. The recent couple major releases that move to a more integrated Python experience have been very nice to use.

Kaitai is absolutely one of my favorite projects. I use it for work (parsing scientific formats, prototyping and exploring those formats, etc) as well as for fun (reverse engineering games, formats for DOSbox core dumps, etc).

I gave a guest lecture in a friend's class last week where we used Kaitai to back out the file format used in "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego" and it was a total blast. (For me. Not sure that the class agreed? Maybe.) The Web IDE made this super easy -- https://ide.kaitai.io/ .

(On my youtube page I've got recordings of streams where I work with Kaitai to do projects like these, but somehow I am not able to work up the courage to link them here.)

Larry Smarr recently spoke at NCSA and they wrote up a fair bit about the history of the institution: https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/homecoming/

It has links to some of the panel reports that led to the founding of NCSA, but the OSTI website has been having intermittent 502s for me this morning.

The original "black proposal" was online on the NCSA website, but seems to have been missed in a website reorg; wayback has it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161017190452/http://www.ncsa.i... . It's absolutely fascinating reading, over 40 years later.

That's the one! And all this time I'd been holding on to something I read on a mailing list or website back then, attributing the reading to Brian May "just because he liked that book."

I read this in high school, but not because it was assigned. At the time I was really into "rare" Queen MP3s, and there's a studio recording of the fast version of "We Will Rock You" where Brian May reads a passage from this book before the music starts. An odd way to be inspired to read a book, but I still think I got a fair bit out of it.

I do so love the TI-99/4A. I've been going through some TI-99/4A disk archives from the Chicago Texas Instruments User Group (which streams its meetings every month) and one of my favorite finds so far was this fun demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejGlI0yxqGA

Over at https://js99er.net/ there's a fair bit of software available right from the web interface, as well.

I don't think that it's fair to compare the rendering to what is currently in use in the scientific community, for two main reasons:

The first is that different types of rendering have different uses; typically in scientific visualization this is broken down into essentially "viz for self, viz for peers, viz for others" and oftentimes the most well-used rendering engines are targeted squarely at the first and second categories. The visual language in those categories is qualitatively different than that used for more "outward facing" renderings.

The second reason is that I disagree with your assertion about the quality of the visualization techniques in use within science. There are some truly spectacular visualization engines for cosmology and galaxy formation -- just to pick two examples off the top of my head, the work done by Ralf Kaehler or that by Dylan Nelson. (There are many really good examples, however, and I feel guilty not mentioning more.)

As I said in another, rather terse and unelaborated comment, though, this is really, really impressive work. I think it's important that in praising it, however, we don't discount the work that's been done elsewhere. This need not be zero-sum.

This is really impressive.

Not a dumb question! Markwhen has a CLI: https://docs.markwhen.com/cli that I used.

I used Markwhen recently to make an interactive Gantt chart for a proposal to a collaborator and it went swimmingly. (We got the gig!) So, thank you!

For the record, I used the Obsidian plugin to develop, then deployed as static HTML.

One feature of DOSBox-X I've come to really appreciate when reverse engineering is that you can toggle the debug log on and off. Additionally, it can display the current VGA palette in the main window.

Sure -- the other comments have done a good job of explaining my usage of "sentence fragment" (which was what we referred to it as in my composition classes in high school, although I now see this may have been more colloquial than I realized) but the fragment in question was of the form:

"A special thanks to [name] for [carefully proofreading]."

What really got me is that I probably even thought I had written "goes to" or something, since that (with the verb) is the type of construction I often use!

My now-spouse, then-new-SO, proofread my thesis for grammar, clarity, etc. At the time, I had written my acknowledgments, but after the proofreading, I added a thanks to her to it at the end just before submitting it and finalizing it.

But, I was a bit careless, and my post-proofreading addition, designed to thank her for improving and checking my grammar, ... was a sentence fragment.

I've worked at NCSA (to one extent or another) for about a decade. It's pretty remarkable to hear (from people who both pre-dated and post-dated the browser work) about the suite of tools being developed around that time. Many had a deep focus on collaboration, but none took off quite as much as Mosaic. A few are harder to find out about -- like the XCMD extension to HyperCard that added support for animations right off the Cray, or Contours, or PalEdit, or Montage for collaborative environments -- and others, like Habanero a few years later ( https://www.hpcwire.com/1999/04/16/ncsa-habanero-hot-java-ba... ) left comparatively bigger footprints.

The TI-99/4A community is really (and somewhat surprisingly) still very active. Among other things, the monthly stream from the CTIUG on YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/@chicagotiug5404 ) of their monthly meetings at the Evanston Library is actually quite fun, and the js99er.net (somewhat recently rewritten in Angular) emulator is just amazing.

I was listening to the audiobook of "The Future" by Naomi Alderman, and it spent a fair bit of time talking about MENACE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matchbox_Educable_Noughts_and_... which I had not heard of before.

Inspired by this I've spent some time thinking about how to encode games of battleship, and honestly it's genuinely a fun problem to explore. (I'm not going to share any of my ideas because I've deliberately not looked into the literature on this and I'm sure it's well-explored.)

This has been my experience too, and it has reached the point that my (young-ish) children have commented on how poorly they understand and respond to things. I suppose it doesn't help that the Home devices used to be able to tell stories from Frozen, but the license expired and now they no longer can.

I have found them consistently useful as broadcast devices from Home Assistant, however -- sending media from plex, etc. I haven't yet tried to utilize them for interacting with Home Assistant directly.

Anecdotally, I also found the music selection accuracy went down considerably once Google Play Music was merged into Youtube Music.

The answer to your first question is more philosophical, and I think outside the scope of what I am able to reply to here.

But for the second, I think while there are similarities, the details are awfully important for galaxy formation simulations. That being said, there have been comparisons between large scale structure and things like slime molds [1], but beyond techniques we do not expect identicality to the level of precision that is the current state of the art.

[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab700c

I am genuinely surprised they did not even mention J. Allen Hynek [1], who was department head at Northwestern for a long time. There was even a TV show (sort-of) about him a few years back!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Allen_Hynek

A project I work on is currently working through a bunch of performance issues that arose because we had inlined functions in `pxd` files that we did not declare `noexcept nogil`. So, heads up if you see similar regressions! We saw a ridiculous slowdown (7s to 100m, for one suite) because they were inside some awfully tight loops. But the fix was pretty straightforward once we worked it out.

I kind of dislike the "Google graveyard" discourse, but ... I started using Pocketcasts after the demise of Google Listen.

I mean, I guess I should have been more obviously self-aware in my original post, but yes, my intent in that comment was explicitly to bemoan that I was not able to take the deal they offer for education and that my precarious freeloading led to a change in plans.

I'll be honest and say that I - not even that long ago - held similar attitudes and slowly made a series of compromises (to myself) that led to this point. While I'm not sure I fully regret it I do think it was ... not as well-considered as I'd like. ("I don't even know who you are anymore!" he said into the mirror.)

We mostly use a locally-hosted jupyterhub, but for JS work often used other environments. For JS, we made the switch to observable from iodide (after it was wound down) and I think I will re-evaluate platforms again, including JS kernels in Jupyter.

I have to think through how this will impact my usage of observable when teaching. I'm not sure how I feel about asking my students to utilize it if part of using it is that all of their notebooks are instantly public, or if that will run afoul of university-level policies about disclosing class rosters etc.

I suppose that is exactly the reason that they offer educational programs, but for my class size and the resources available for my classes I'm not sure that is available to me.

This is a much better idea than the d216, and probably a lot more fun.