imneme's recent activity

  1. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    imneme
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    In terms of open-source stuff people can use, I made Web Book a thing you can use to put a book (e.g., a novel) up on the web with static site and a simple reader interface. Nothing super fancy,...

    In terms of open-source stuff people can use, I made Web Book a thing you can use to put a book (e.g., a novel) up on the web with static site and a simple reader interface. Nothing super fancy, but quite nice. I did use a bit of AI to help throw it together.

    Also I'm continuing to work on Inquizitivity, a home-grown learning management system for the courses I teach. It's designed to be the system that I as a CS professor want to use, creating a mostly-static site with minimal support infrastructure required. So it has sources for pages in markdown, on-line lessons that track student progress, questions for enagement with nice feedback (LLM-based for free-form answers), and needs minimal infrastructure. It's used for multiple courses at my institution, but not quite ready for broader usage yet. But I do so like it; I love that if it doesn't do something, I can whip up some code and then it does. Today I improved support for variables (you know, like SEMESTER) where you can now say “NEXTWEEK = WEEK + 1” and that works.

    3 votes

  2. Comment on What's the benefit of avoiding the debugger? in ~comp

    imneme
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    One thing here is that there are a ton of different ways to use the debugger. If you just want to say “where exactly did it crash”, maybe your system tells you that, or maybe you need a debugger...

    One thing here is that there are a ton of different ways to use the debugger. If you just want to say “where exactly did it crash”, maybe your system tells you that, or maybe you need a debugger to know. And then there's what counts as a debugger. Is valgrind a debugger? Are the various -fsanitize options.

    Overall, I do agree broadly that in all things to do with coding, you need to engage your brain in the process. You need to be thinking. If using the debugger is a substitute for thinking, it's a poor one. If it can drop some evidence that helps it, then that's great.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on On being officially classed as a robot in ~tech

    imneme
    Link Parent
    Yeah, I read a bunch of things about the ethos of the site and it really felt like a breath of fresh air. Pretty much everything I do, from the PCG random number generator to my other academic...

    Yeah, I read a bunch of things about the ethos of the site and it really felt like a breath of fresh air. Pretty much everything I do, from the PCG random number generator to my other academic work to the things I do for fun is shared with folks in the hope that they be glad to discover it, maybe learn something. Hopefully saying something like “hey look, Advent of Code, running on a ZX Spectrum!” isn't self promotion, it's just a moment of “whoa!” (and yeah, those were the bulk of the posts reddit destroyed with their nonsense).

    And of course, the vast majority of my time is commenting on something cool someone else did or is telling us about.

    8 votes

  4. Comment on What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga) in ~anime

    imneme
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    Watching the first season of Kamisama Kiss. The second season is due to come out on Tuesday. We liked it so much we bought the entire manga too, which I've started but may wait until I'm a bit...

    Watching the first season of Kamisama Kiss. The second season is due to come out on Tuesday. We liked it so much we bought the entire manga too, which I've started but may wait until I'm a bit less overwhelmed with work before hand. It's just really cute, but also I love the “oh, I'm accidentally a God” aspect too, as it relates to some of the kinds of things I love exploring.

    We also finally got around to finishing Ranma ½. The last part of the last episode is so cute with a line from Akane saying she doesn't mind what physical form Ranma has. And, FWIW, there's a whole story there about how I ended up here, as documented in this Tildes post, but the tl;dr; is that my spouse and I accidentally wrote a pretty awesome fan-fiction novel, as discussed in this blog post; whee.

    2 votes

  5. Comment on On being officially classed as a robot in ~tech

    imneme
    Link
    One potential positive outcome of this episode is that my blog got a bunch of traffic from this very post on Tildes. At the time, I didn't know what tildes.net was in the referrer field of the...

    One potential positive outcome of this episode is that my blog got a bunch of traffic from this very post on Tildes. At the time, I didn't know what tildes.net was in the referrer field of the server logs and looked into it, and as a result I discovered Tildes, and well, here I am. So not only did I gain a button machine and a whole new hobby, but maybe a nicer alternative to reddit, too. (Yes, I'm the author of the linked post.)

    32 votes