Friday, April 27, 2012

Lecture round-up

  • [Link.] [Via.] There are some important insights in this talk about creation and feedback loops. The lecturer says some things about user interface that I don't agree with, but I think that it's been obvious for a while that we're not moving towards One-True-U.I. so I think there's room for everyone's opinion. I myself have what I think are some important insights into art making, feedback, and the proper use of computers, but when I've tried to articulate them they've come out somewhat hippy-dippy. So I'll save them for now.
  • [Link.] [Via.] I enjoyed these Alan Watts lectures on my commute this week.
  • [Link.] This is a good talk by KRS-One about the origin and spirit of hip-hop. I was at Temple in 2004, but didn't hear about this.
  • [Link.] Who knew that bagging on Damien Hirst could be such comedy gold. Thank you, Google filter bubble.
P.S. Ubuntu 12.04 is out. With some trepidation, I typed "sudo do-release-upgrade" into a terminal last night. I haven't noticed any ill effects thus far.

5 comments:

Mr. Alex said...

I really loved the Bret Victor talk. Reminded me very much of this project.

I'm now using Ubuntu 12.04 on my Craptop(TM) and I *love* it! Unity doesn't suck anymore =D

Pete said...

Yeah, I like these new-style code editors. I'm not an IDE guy, I'm a REPL guy. These are definitely a marriage of the two approaches; an IDE that treats the computer like the state-machine that it is. I've never used graphical debuggers, my pain tolerance for that kind of thing is very low.

The tool that I use for this kind of thing is IPython. (Link.)

One weeknight next week I'll pull Unity down from the repo's and try it out. Yesterday, after reading this favorable review in The Register., I was trying to think of the reasons I stopped using it My reasons last time around were workspace management and multi-monitor support.

Pete said...

As an aside:
The REPL/IDE distinction I made is maybe a false one, as one can certainly embed a REPL in an IDE. But static analysis and dropping into a REPL are definitely two very different ways of doing the same thing: introspecting one's code. The "Intellisense" in Visual Studio feels like chaining together magical incantations to me.

Pete said...

Another aside:
I had a good experience bug reporting this week. (Link.)

Pete said...

Welcome to Sunday! I'll have the Terraria and Mumble servers up at the usual time (11am PST/2pm EST/8pmCEST) at the usual address. Drop a line if you can't make it.

It might be fun to try out King Arthur's Gold. There's a free version that you can use to play on most servers. The alpha build has multiplayer zombie survival mode, which sounds neat. I dunno, just an idea. It might be a bit too hectic for our purposes.