Ben Matthews @ benjhm @sopuli.xyz

- New here on lemmy, will add more info later ...

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2 yr. ago

My boys have chromebooks, it’s almost mandatory for school now, and I get why teachers need the whole class to have a similar locally-networked tool. Problem is we as parents can't set anything, as we don't have 'developer' access, and the school controls their accounts. So at home, they do stupid stuff. The hardware is ok, I wish it was just linux. About what google gets - I doubt the current data is so valuable, they play a long game hoping to lock young people into their ecosystem, to profit from people with cash/energy in their 20s.

One reason people stick on Lemmy and other fediverse communities, is the choice of quality over quantity (in this case - wrt comments). So quality over quantity could also apply to platforms like Codeberg. Github has so many abandoned student projects or forks going nowhere - maybe making the effort to look beyond the obvious is an indicator of serious (new) projects and contributors ?

Saw same band (±) perform this in Norwich almost 30 yrs later, classic. As students we used to add 'actions' to dramatise it.

Being good at passing exams ("majoring") is just the first stage, continuing in the topic as a career depends more on networking skills.

I began programming java climate model with UK keyboard. When I moved to the continent, switched to swiss then belgian keyboard to better type emails/docs in french, but it was so tedious for code brackets {[()]} and some other punctuation, eventually switched back. Recently converted whole codebase to Scala 3 (here's the model), now can drop most of those brackets. I speculate whether one motivation for creating scala3 (made in in Lausanne) was swiss/french keyboards.

Hmmm, so maybe such a search engine could began with a whitelist of 'real' journalistic sites from around the word, inviting suggestions for more, keeping a reputation score for each, evidence of plagiarism / AI risks to be dropped. If the list is smaller, the searching task is easier. It shouldn't be funded by advertising, as that provides bad incentives. Maybe small subscriptions both for searchers and sites on list, to balance incentives.
Fediverse likes / votes / boosts could also help provide rankings for such an engine (evaluating external links, not message content), as real people here are checking stuff, and it’s less distorted by commercial clickbait motives.

Good article, big problem, but I doubt email lists are a solution. I have over years subscribed to many email lists, they get filtered to mailboxes by topic, which I'm afraid to open because overwhelmed by messages. I prefer to find specific news items recommended by communities as here on Lemmy. As for AI dominating SEO for google, it seems there could be an opening for a new search engine that guarantees only content from original-sources, neither AI nor content-farms.

I like Scala:

• multi-paradigm, you can explore many ways of doing something, within one codebase - arguably the most complex language, if you want, but doesn't have to be: start simply, later scales robustly
• compiles and interoperates with JS, JVM, native
• Scala3 dropped brackets - easily readable like python
• great tooling (recently) - compiler infers so much -> less puzzles / testing
• developed mainly in europe, not controlled by big-tech

Fwiw, here's my interactive climate system model running in pure scala.

Too true.
I still remember when java5 came out, many new features, great potential for a massive refactoring of my interactive climate model. Within that, I had an idea called "parallel worlds" for comparing scenarios, whereby for efficiency data was shared for parts of the system, and split across parts that varied as user adjusted parameters. So I pulled apart the whole codebase, and joined it back together again... - about two years later, by which time colleagues had given up interest.
[ story simplified to relate to point of OP - not only task in two years! ].
Now I develop a derivative climate system model in scala, but evidently it's more interesting to develop some new complex part of the science code, than fix a graphical interface for beginners. But moods vary - some days lacking energy for refactoring, could be satisfied ticking off a few small tasks in a todo list. Yet after some time, brain craving for another big new complex idea...

In defence of the jack-of-all-trades, if everybody is a cog in the machine, nobody sees the overview of how the cogs could connect.
For what it’s worth, here's an overview of some cogs made by a j-o-a-t, for whom software developer is just a sub-role, within understanding complex climate system.

It's only 5th December, seems unusually early for -58º. From Wikipedia - Yakutsk, maybe daily min should be about -37º now. I recall crossing Siberia by train in early December, rain in west, fresh snow in east, lakes still water, yet coming back in April you could still walk on Baikal. Seems odd, but they get extra problem of fires in winter, as fire hoses freeze, can't extinguish them. Anyway polar vortex went wobbly recently, so we get alternating cold and warm waves - always look for both sides of regional anomalies.

I couldn't find any related 40% in the report pdf. However there is a difference between fraction of capacity, and fraction of consumption - not all capacity is used, maybe that explains some of the gap?

Hi, thanks for the encouragement, delayed response due focusing on the code, and a related conference, and now trying to keep up with the COP. As it happens, the "ratchet" system of pledges created in Paris (COP21) is an iterative algorithm - start with wild guesses and gradually improve them by feedback - this made sense given the weaknesses of diplomacy, but it’s hard to summarise this mess with neat code in a compact model.

Well, for example if I could reply to a mastodon post from my lemmy account - the poster would see that there (not here - but could show up on my profile page), and might follow it, so it could gain followers. To write such a reply, I'd need to somehow view the original post while logged into lemmy. My comments here do federate to mastodon, and if somebody searched for related words (at least from the instance from which I followed my #lemmy account) they should find this. Your "virtual community" seems like a mastodon list (I have a dozen such topic lists, that system could be better, but is improving), indeed it would be helpful to consider that alongside a lemmy community for similar topic.

the Lemmy devs tell you to use Kbin or Mastodon or anything else

So to reply to Nutomic's closing remark on github:

I dont see why Lemmy should also implement that.

Because - if I could post to Mdon or reply to a Mdon post from my Lemmy account, some Mdon users (more numerous) might think - hey that's interesting, I'll follow that guy, then see my other posts to Lemmy, click and open up the whole thread (yes that works), and so eventually come to contribute to Lemmy too.

I don't find that - using Mastodon (4.2) I can see threaded discussion in Lemmy - each comment as a post - but have to start somewhere.

I succeed to follow my own Lemmy account from my Mastodon account, it works (initially seems empty, but new posts/replies show up later). From there I could potentially boost or reply. If somebody clicks on my comment in Mastodon, they'll find the whole Lemmy thread. This should help (more numerous) Mastodon users to discover Lemmy.

I discovered Lemmy via links from Mastodon, and so found i prefer these threaded communities. Nevertheless individual "status" posts have a purpose too, we need both topic-focused and people-focused structures, these should overlap and connect better.
As my Mastodon account follows my Lemmy account, my posts/replies get into that system, more might be discovered if I included hashtags here. However I can't do the reverse - follow a Mastodon account, or reply to or boost a post, from Lemmy. Communities might grow more if we could enable such interaction.

This principle works most but not all the time. I develop an interactive climate-system model that evolved with many small steps over 23 years. So it has many patchy fixes as climate policy structure changed, gases and sectors added etc. Then converted from java to scala module by module (out of ±50) , each step checking the plots looked as before. Result is it works, but parts are messy with legacy options and outdated code style. So sometimes it's necessary to radically rethink the structure, take big bold steps before it works again, that's hard. Scala strong type system, with hints from compiler (and "metals") help make such refactoring easier.

Some of us will even remember when compilers ran on big central computers, and you might have to wait 15–30 minutes to find out if your code was syntactically correct (let alone if it worked.)

My father remembers when he wrote code printed on a set of punched cards, they traveled several hours on an evening train to a warehouse with a big government statistics computer (that was too busy during daytime), the result came back by train next morning. Syntax error? try again tomorrow...