If you own a Kobo e-reader, check out the Plato reader [0], an unofficial document reader of Kobo devices. I find it interesting that it's written by the same person that wrote the bspwm window manager.
It is one of my favorite pieces of software. The UI is beautiful and, to be honest, inspirational. It frequently reminds me that the best UI should not be noticed. Humbling.
The blog post gives an example response to being paired with a coworker you dislike working with:
> "I'd prefer not to work with Alice again. There's a bit of a personality clash and I had trouble getting proper credit."
Don't just say this. Instead, say:
> "Alice is an incredibly bright person and a great developer. However, I'd prefer not to work with Alice again. There's a bit of a personality clash and I had trouble getting proper credit. I'm certain Alice will be a highly productive member of team in my absence."
If you don't actually think those things about Alice, take some time, meditate on it, and find some things you do really respect about them.
The book Crucial Conversations says to be "100% honest, and 100% respectful". It made me reconsider what I can directly communicate. In the past I would consider 1 or 2 ways to say something and then give up, but the truth is there are hundreds of ways to communicate something and unless you've spent a lot of time actively considering them, you haven't considered them all. (Spending a lot of time passively stressing and worrying about what you want to say doesn't count, because those are probably poor thinking patterns.)
It still paints alice in a bad way. People only care that you said bad things about them. Words are cheap until they hurt you lol. Before I had one problem, after telling that to the manager I will have at least 3 problems (+alice+manager).
Totally agree. I’d also say it paints yourself in a bad way since you’re showing you aren’t willing to work through your differences with Alice. No free lunch, but if you’re already committed to this approach the least you could do is be supportive of your colleagues even when you’re unwilling to work with them.
Yes, Stack Graphs power code navigation for supported languages (currently, Python). We also use tree-sitter parsers for CTags-style symbol navigation.
Thanks for sharing this! I recently went through the process of generating vector tiles for the world at all zoom levels using OpenMapTiles. Seemed like a fun way to make my computer sweat for a while. The process was pretty straightforward, but thought I might as well share the resulting mbtiles file here if anyone wants it.
The poor auto exposure and white balance touched on by this article really affected my webcam’s quality. A lamp in the background of my office caused my webcam to choose some setting that caused my face to be very red and blotchy.
I’m not being vain. People noticed it and it strained conversations. It’s harder to effectively communicate when your audience is uncomfortable by your appearance. Something to think about elsewhere in life.
But I digress. The Logitech software is horrible. I found CameraController [0] to adequately solve the problem. It allows me to adjust exposure and white balance. Now conversations feel more natural at work.
The intersection of graphs, FSMs, and linear algebra is really wild. I touched a very tiny bit on this topic a few weeks ago [0]. I highly recommend the book "Mathematics of Big Data" [1] if you're interested in this subject.
Congrats on making a decision sooner rather than later. I also dropped out of graduate school and remembered having some similar thoughts as you.
I remembered feeling a bit lonely, too. There's no one to talk to about your work since no one understands it. It's a bit obvious in hindsight. Research topics are at the fuzzy fringe of human knowledge. They exist just outside of others' research topics. Your job is to find something that makes the field even more complex. Or, even better, connect the dots that show it may not be so complex after all. In either case, no one knows what the hell you're doing. If they're in your little tiny field, they may have some vague idea about how it may relate to their own little universe of research. But most likely, when you come home and a loved one asks what you did today, you won't be able to have an answer and that can be frustrating. To compound the issue, everyone is familiar with what a PhD is, but few know how academia works. And there's some not-great aspects of it.
I've continued my research on my own time because it interests me. I no longer have looming deadlines and I don't have to check my bank account in the Wendy's drive-through line to see if my stipend will cover a chicken sandwich. I still value academia, though, and I know that my hobby-research will come nowhere close to matching the quality of research done with the resources provided by academic institutions.
> But most likely, when you come home and a loved one asks what you did today, you won't be able to have an answer
My PhD - and subsequent research - is in security. I will happily explain my research to anyone who will listen. In case I'm not sure, I just start explaining just in case.
How privacy in voting is important. How most scraping studies have a fundamental flaw. How to catch scientific fraud.
Current WiP is on reconstructing possible histories of NTFS files. Sounds boring? We're working to catch criminals that claim "never had that file".
Maybe it's the subject, maybe it's just me, but this research stuff is friggin awesome and I'll happily shout that to the world!
I've been in academia since 2004; just not US academia. Maybe that's the main difference?
There's plenty of wrongs in academia on this side of the pond as well, but some of the stories here just couldn't occur.
Case in point: a regular PhD position is an actual full-time job (with regular salary, healthcare, other benefits) here. You have to apply for such a position - which comes with a supervisor & a project description. No "can't find a supervisor" problems; no deciding on a subject all on your own.
It is one of my favorite pieces of software. The UI is beautiful and, to be honest, inspirational. It frequently reminds me that the best UI should not be noticed. Humbling.
[0] https://github.com/baskerville/plato