chunkyks

I revisited this in 2020 and found some additional things, separate from that errata. All my code is available here: https://github.com/RANDCorporation/milliondigits

And there's a news article about it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/rand-million-random-digits-numb...

The "Adobe PDF Experience", for me, is "locks up if I try to use it for smartcard signatures", which is 98% of the reason I open a PDF outside the browser.

Add a sprinkling of "spend money to upgrade" harassment and you've really got the "experience" ready.

The prospect of adding this "experience" to a browser... No. Stop. Go away.

RAND Corporation | Research Software Engineer, Data Scientist | In-person/Remote, Santa Monica, DC, Pittsburgh

The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. https://www.rand.org

I'm a Research Software Engineer at RAND; I've been here for 14 years, and during that time I've worked on a range of projects. Recently, for me, it's mostly modeling and simulation doing AI and Reinforcement Learning in Python. We also work daily with R, STATA, SAS, Javascript, C, C++, FORTRAN, Java, and an array of domain-specific languages. We have a crew of folks doing web application development using the latest and greatest tools.

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Research Software Engineer: https://rand.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External_Career_Sit...

I work at RAND; I saw James give this talk, and it was fascinating.

To my recollection, this was in the wake of the Project Maven debacle [1], and was trying to answer the question about whether the aversion was a vocal minority of Silicon Valley or if it's a truly pervasive opinion.

It also addressed the a wider set of questions about missions: We can mostly agree that unsupervised killer robots are bad, but how do people feel when the DoD helps with disaster recovery and just wants to use AI to help?

My current title at work includes the words "software" and "engineer", and thus I have a natural mutual predator-prey relationship with infosec and compliance/IA.

Which brings me to the point: Compliance isn't just there to cargocult and boxtick. It's there because, left to their own devices, most organisations/sub-organisations will end up, at pinnacle-best, half-assing security.

Compliance is an easy way to force everyone to three-quarter-ass, possibly even hit 90%. It's true that, without compliance, some orgs will hit 99%. It's true that some compliance requirements force you to be less secure than you might otherwise have chosen [1]

But it's also true that for every org that would hit 99% under their own steam, there are a hundred that would do the default ubuntu install, then only patch when something breaks. And that is why I like compliance. I work with our compliance team on lots of things, and everybody ends up winning.

[1] Consider password rules. Some compliance rule says must have a couple funny characters and a mixture of upper and lower case, minimum ten characters. Basically, forces a password that users hit the minimum on, then have no choice but to write down. Compare with an entropy-based measure that would lets users have an essay question, but one that's memorable and has higher entropy. Far more secure, yet rarely how compliance express their password concerns.

Recently enough to have been unacceptable, the director of our internal apps team decided to only support IE when they redid the intranet site. This, in a place that installs Firefox on all endpoints and proxy logs showing less than 50pct IE usage.

He was unamused when I started posting "screenshots" with "best viewed in ie" logos added.

That's what kexi was supposed to be. https://kexi-project.org/

I tracked it for a long time, just was never able to make it fit my needs

Early in covid, I played with a famous 65-year-venerated dataset from where I work. Found some interesting minutiae and ended up on the front page of the wsj over it.

https://github.com/RANDCorporation/milliondigits

It's probably not what you're looking for, but it's my own favorite dataset.

And a better way to handle certs for it, and all the IDEs, behind a corporate MITM SSL proxy would really improve my day.

Thank you! I try!

Every time I see someone's off-piste raytracer project, I feel compelled to link my own silly contribution to that diaspora: https://github.com/chunky/sqlraytracer

Seems easily solved by twitter recalculating their number of users by subtracting the bots, leaving the total users around 49 million and change.

The security boundary thing breaks smart cards. Had to jump through unpleasant hoops to keep my Firefox profile after upgrade. Plus, patching now is two separate things instead of one. Different version of packages are in two different repos that I now need to search.

Literally just broke a bunch of stuff and gave me nothing in return.

"but for 999.99 you can buy a dongle that converts one to the other."

The fancy security boundary thing totally broke smart cards. The blast radius on this Firefox snap thing overall just infuriates me.

I was doing an experiment with my raspberry pi, and I needed a joystick of some sort for input. Only thing I had lying around was a ps4 controller. Plugged it in, used pygame for input, all was good but I couldn't figure out the touch pad.

Eventually I noticed that the mouse cursor was moving. Turns out that Linux automatically recognises the touch pad on that controller as hid mouse like device, with pushing for clicks and all. Immediately my life got easier, it's much better than a touchscreen.

I don't know why I hadn't heard of this, because it's awesome.

I'm pretty confident that that horrorshow was a case study in A/B testing: People can't decide what to watch and agitate over flicking through titles, so some bright spark had the idea of just starting stuff in the background to see if that helped.

It did! People started watching stuff sooner!

Mostly because it was so incredibly irritating that I'd start a show just to make the random autoplay cease. Of course, what it really meant was that I'd go to amazon and agonize over what to watch, but at least I was doing it at my own speed and not being harassed by noise autoplay.

"If a study came out that said deafening high-pitched noises increased conversion rates, we would all be bleeding from our ears by end of business tomorrow, right?"

Netflix auto play? Is that you? You were a hateful idea, no one liked you, yet you stubbornly hung on for far too long

The code they created, to implement that component, is an original creative work. Thus protected under copyright.

The whole globe? No. But the berne convention does have 179 signatory countries. It's not just "western".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

There was a looong period of time where a lot of developers felt entirely free to drop whatever they wanted into c:\Windows, System, System32, whatever. It's a big part of what led to windows getting a reputation for being poorly behaved/crashy/slow over time [leading to a lot of "have you tried reinstalling windows?" recommendations]

I tell people that I'm not precious about my stuff, and if something sucks I want them to tell me so that I can make it better.

The other thing that I find works really well is "what is your least favorite thing about this tool?"

Fond memories. I met my now-wife on Orkut.

I remember when I quit using it, too; the platform just became dominated by a language I didn't understand.

Thank you!

"Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit

This feels like an opportunity to link my own, much sillier, raytracer: https://github.com/chunky/sqlraytracer

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RAND is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous.

As a Research Software Engineer, in the 13 years I've been here, I've worked on a broader variety of projects than any Software Engineer has a right to expect in their lifetime. I also enjoy reading about my work in the news, actually affecting the world in positive ways.

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I've been using Kagi for a while. I'm totally on board with springing $10/mo for good search.

The biggest thing that worries me about Kagi is that, in order to be using it and paying for it, I have to log in, across all my devices. I'm literally collaborating on the process of someone doing much, much finer-grained and definitive tracking than other search engines currently do.

While Kagi assure me they aren't putting all this information together... I am giving it to them, and that gives me pause.

That's the point, though. What makes someone senior is being good at everything that isn't writing code. Such as being in tune with the business and how it's demands behave over time.

I haven't seen anyone else point out: One of the ways you can often identify really experienced programmers is by them being able to pretty accurately separate thing-that-probably-will-change from things-that-probably-won't.

Finding a good way to balance YAGNI with this-will-definitely-change-in-a-few-months-because-it-always-does is incredibly hard, and I've really appreciated working with engineers who make that prediction correctly.