Important tip for those protesting: use the Signal messaging app. SMS can be intercepted, and while I don’t know of any specific threat, prevention never hurts.
Roxy's Blog
Reaching Consensus
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Roxy Light
(This post started off as an email to a colleague. They asked me for feedback on how to speed up an agreement on technical issues. Halfway through my response, I realized the advice I was giving was broadly useful and I wanted to write it up more thoroughly.)
So you want to write some code or do something that affects more than just you. Great! Whenever this happens, you will face three basic challenges:
- Find the stakeholders.
- Explain the problem to the stakeholders.
- Listen to and address concerns that the stakeholders have.
Once you’ve done all three, you’re done! The actual work is usually straightforward once your team is supporting you.
Allegory of the Witness
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Roxy Light
SPOILER WARNING: I wanted to share my views on the subject matter in The Witness. By necessity, this article does discuss the ending of the game in general terms. However, I do my best to avoid talking about specifics.
When I started writing this review, it began with “I liked The Witness, BUT…” I was frustrated. I couldn’t fathom what the ending meant. What I was supposed to glean from this experience? How do the voice-overs fit together? Why was I shown this?
But then I had an epiphany: I felt this same frustration before. Many times. Every time I solved a puzzle in the game. And so I began to see the prevalent puzzle mechanic as a metaphor for the game itself. “Solving” the story isn’t the point.
I recommend The Witness. If you’re considering playing it, do it. But bear in mind that it’s not a traditional story, and you may be disappointed if you treat it that way.
if you understand the categorical terminology, this is actually a really good way to learn about monad behavior imo
for those of you who don’t get the underlying joke here, monads are usually the first really difficult concept people run into when they start learning about functional programming.
since “a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem?” is not illuminating to most, the burrito analogy has seen widespread use trying to illustrate monadic behavior, but often ends up being a gross oversimplification.
the state of introductory materials for people getting into FP (especially if their entry is via Haskell) is rather abysmal, so the author is poking fun at that here in what is an (imo hilarious) recasting of the burrito analogy back into category theoretic language to make things difficult again.
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cardcpx: a Go/AngularJS project
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I’ve posted a project I’ve been hacking on to my Bitbucket account: cardcpx. This has nothing to do with my day job, it’s just something I did to help out on a film shoot (which also had nothing to do with my day job).
From the README:
cardcpx is a specialized UI for copying files from a camera card to 1+ replicas. The replica copies happen concurrently, so if you are copying N bytes to R replicas, the time is O(N) instead of O(N * R).
The interface also has includes simple scene/take ingestion, which is stored in a CSV transaction log. Selects will be copied first, so you can do a proofing check on a fast disk while your import finishes.
cardcpx supports a flat directory structure as well as the RED camera directory structure. It assumes that your clip names do not overlap. Attempting to copy the same file name will not overwrite data.
It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but I’m happy with how Go allowed me to compose a fairly complex a tool out of easy-to-understand pieces. This was my first excursion into writing a frontend with AngularJS, but I’m also similarly pleased about the design.
Everything’s open source. Feel free to dig in and use. I’d love to know if other people find this program useful.