acowley

Functional roboticist.  Robots, Haskell, Rust, nix, emacs, FPV… and the rest of life, too.

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acowley_at_mastodon.social@mostr.pub

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Last Notes

2024-09-30 00:18:56

Apropos of the earlier posts about the MicroHs #haskell compiler, you can try it out using #nix with:
```
nix run github:acowley/microhs-nix
```
I haven't done much more than make that work at https://github.com/acowley/microhs-nix, but I let out an audible sigh of relief at all the standard language extensions enabled by default when playing in the interpreter 😅
I pushed an aarch64-darwin build to cachix, but haven't setup GHA so there's no linux cache yet.

2024-09-07 20:15:36

Trying to see how addressing a group of people as Chat sits with me. It’s feeling inevitable that it will spread.

2024-09-07 20:15:36

Trying to see how addressing a group of people as Chat sits with me. It’s feeling inevitable that it will spread.

2024-08-06 13:16:20

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@npub1j55…p4t9 Oh, that does look promising! It’s a really cool project, I hope you share more as it progresses!

2024-08-06 12:53:29

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@npub1j55…p4t9 Do you have narrow gauge rail running through your yard?

2024-07-23 02:24:16

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@npub1c9m…9xjd You’re brave. Report back on whether or not said bravery was ill advised!

2024-04-10 01:39:56

My 7yo will invent words so confidently that he sometimes gets away with it. Today he flew too high when he casually dropped “halgbean.” I said, “What?!” And he just straight faced goes, “Yeah, you know, the hair between your beard and the hair on top of your head… the halgbean.” Sorry sideburns, you had a good run but it seems you’ve been replaced in this house.

2024-03-13 13:48:17

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@npub1src…fms4 Comparing the MBP with the 13” MBA is the one I think is a bit harder. The weight and cost savings are more substantial… but the nicer MBP screen is still hard to assign value to.

2024-03-12 14:00:37

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@npub19d9…f02p @npub17cu…y38u I think it’s a good idea, but I wonder if this might increase the risk of increasing your own role in the evaluation. For instance, if you come up with an idea you like during the session, you come away feeling good about everything. But if the research area stretches your comfort zone, maybe you feel somewhat negative because you didn’t make interesting contributions.

2024-02-23 15:01:34

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@npub1svs…p66u Do you have any plans to provide a digest-like feature similar to https://github.com/hodgesmr/mastodon_digest ?

2024-02-02 13:33:17

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@npub1p9k…865w Really appreciate the blog post as I was very interested how you were approaching it, and it'll be interesting to see if/how Google responds! The app looks fantastic, and is a surprisingly effective enticement to justifying a Vision Pro as YouTube is something I tend to watch alone more often than video from other sources.

2024-01-22 14:47:23

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@npub1src…fms4 What's so hard to is to polish things while keeping open the option to adjust course when contact with the public reveals actual popularity of different use cases. What I don't really get about Vision Pro thus far is that the weight and battery life seem calibrated for relatively quick use sessions, but the vibe they're selling seems more like settling in for an un-rushed session. Gaming focused headsets lean more into quick intense sessions from what I've seen.

2024-01-02 14:51:51

I’m pretty sure my work computers took longer than usual to boot up on the first day back after vacation, and it’s touchingly endearing.

2023-12-22 13:40:20

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@npub1960…w6j3 I really appreciate the papers you select to share, they’re consistently interesting!

2023-11-29 14:55:02

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@npub12jq…hq6m @npub1yy8…yfzq Is there a way of constructing things to protect investment that doesn’t lead to a consolidation end state with one or two remaining players?

2023-11-29 14:15:29

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@npub1yy8…yfzq That aspect of preserving inventions also seems somewhat at odds with the legal monopoly aspect in that the way you describe something for the purposes of preservation is going to be pretty wildly distorted by the incentive to broaden the claimed scope of the invention. Whenever I think in detail about writing something like patent law I conclude that I’m glad I’m not a lawyer.

2023-11-29 14:03:09

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@npub1yy8…yfzq Yeah, I think you’re right. Patents so often seem like an own-goal by a society that loses perspective on their limitations. With RF and video, you sometimes see the interesting developments in countries not inclined to adhere to IP protections. It can be hard to see much of an upside to centralizing the opportunity to innovate in these spaces in a couple giant corporations.

2023-11-29 13:52:31

I’d love to learn more about an effort like Apple’s to develop their own 5G modem. Are all the difficulties related to patents, or is there something intrinsic? I feel like RF is a weird field where you encounter solutions that are plainly superior to alternatives to the point where it seems like magic. https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/29/apple-5g-modem-discontinued-reports/

2023-11-13 13:21:52

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@npub1sqf…5skr @npub1flh…lt3n I really like the phishing resistance aspect of the approach, but don’t like the options given for using passkeys. Namely, a dependence on a physical security token or an ecosystem managed by a particular company. It’s not clear to me how browser plugins for 3rd party password managers that can offer paper backup would weaken overall security that much.

2023-10-30 12:36:06

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@npub1aq0…py77 Did you try helping, and, if so, do you think the puppy thought more or less of you for it?

2023-10-23 03:56:13

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@npub1960…w6j3 I do love how “virtual environment” gets innocently shortened into the names of different tools.

2023-10-23 01:07:22

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@npub1960…w6j3 I mostly get by with venvs. Maybe I let bad experiences in the bad old days impact my perception too much, but the last time we had problems at work with paths due to Google’s Python packages wasn’t that long ago.

2023-10-23 00:42:49

Over a few days I wrote a bunch of #C++, #Rust, #Haskell, and #Python. Something I don’t get is that while I might say that Python has the most extensive ecosystem, it seems to have the worst tooling in terms of package management and LSP features (clangd, rust-analyzer, hls, and pylsp). How does that happen? Why don’t the economics that plow programmer hours into Python libraries raise the level of its tooling?

2023-09-02 23:35:44

Always blows my mind when someone goes to the trouble of writing a programming tutorial and leaves off the import statements. Makes me skeptical that they’re going to make any effort to actually put themselves in the shoes of learners.
It’s bad enough that tutorials tend to be a fait accompli rather than a collaborative exercise in building something, but to present non-working excerpts as the only artifacts just leaves me gobsmacked.

2023-08-11 13:30:49

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@npub1su4…a0dw Good time to run an article reviewing options for USB attached storage devices!

2023-08-09 13:58:51

Interesting how #robotics can suffer from the same over-inflated expectations caused by demos as #MachineLearning: people see an example of a thing doing something surprising, and their imaginations run wild. But people’s imaginations are fueled by extrapolations based on intuitive statistics and human capabilities, so tend to get things wrong when extrapolating what the robot or ML system can do.

2023-08-09 13:53:14

Thinking about SQLite, and how native support for it in #emacs is opening doors, reminds me of something that kind of bugs me about my old Frames (data frames) library in #haskell. Something that I really like about it that I wish wasn’t so buried is the ability to decide on streaming vs in-memory representation, and if you’d like an array-of-structures view over the data. Having a SQLite back-end would be nice.

2023-08-09 13:14:47

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@npub1j55…p4t9 Really love this! Do you provide djinn-style implementations as autocomplete suggestions, too?

2023-08-04 13:11:56

Can’t decide if I get unreasonably upset or reasonably upset by doctors that require a phone call to make an appointment. The soonest available appointment is 6 weeks out, so I’m leaning toward “reasonably,” when all is said and done.

2023-06-13 12:38:20

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@npub1a4c…t2kf Guilt and laziness. The odds of any particular change are low, but some change always happens. To the specific of websites, giants do topple so it's foolish to think they can not.
If you want to be really charitable, and the glee is not mean spirited (e.g. "Of course it didn't succeed" vs "Those who tried are idiots"), then there can be an element of shared humility. We've all tilted at wind mills at one time or another, and it's good to have perspective.

2023-06-01 13:14:16

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@npub1047…3m5f @npub1qva…fuzz This is a good plan! I use my HM configuration across NixOS, Ubuntu, and macOS, where HM is the common interface to my usual tools no matter which setup I’m using. I do use non-nix things on the Ubuntu and macOS machines, the main thing to be careful with is trying to mix nix and non-nix dev tools.