veddox

Georg Nagel gave the first few biology lectures I had at uni. People were already saying that he was due for the Nobel Prize - I'm happy for him the committee now came to the same conclusion!

The lectures themselves were, unfortunately, quite boring. This was the introductory course for freshmen, covering a lot of material that students ought to have learnt in school already. Much of the time, the professor appeared to be as bored by it as many of the students were, but I guess it had to be done and someone had to do it...

I spent many fun hours there! It blew my mind to discover a game world that was so deeply player-driven and offered so many possibilities - my main character became a professional author...

I earned my first money in-world by writing poetry. At first I hand-wrote it and sold it on the street to other players (probably because they had compassion on a poor first-level wizard who didn't know anything about the game). Later on I had a book of my poems printed and sold in the local bookshops, and went on to write for one of the player-run newspapers. Good fun :-)

Very cool! I expected this would be quite a rudimentary map, but it actually uses OpenStreetMap, so you can zoom right in to the street level.

That depends on what threat scenario you're looking at. If your government wants to track you, they'll find a way, regardless of what phone you're using (or not).

But the privacy gains of not installing a load of third-party apps from a dozen different data-selling businesses (or using an operating system built by the mother of all data-selling businesses) are very substantial.

Replacing stable, working "low-tech" solutions with less user-friendly, unstable "high-tech" approaches is not "progress"!

Just because something is newer doesn't mean it's better. Obviously, the reverse is also true, but there is so much tech naiveté going around that this needs saying repeatedly. We'd have saved our society a lot of trouble if we'd first thought about draw-backs of new technology, before hooking everything in our lives up to it.

I've been thinking about moving to a dumb phone again for the past few months, but so far I've decided against it, for three reasons:

1. Signal/Whatsapp/Threema: biggest reason by far - while I message much less than many others, these platforms are just the way a lot of (group) communication works nowadays. It is possible to go without, but it causes so much hassle when organising things or trying to stay up to date with what's happening in a group, and would disrupt my international friendships.

2. Maps & public transport apps: are just super useful to have available, especially if you regularly travel in places you don't know (well).

3. Camera: This one I'm still a bit undecided on, but I think I would miss not having it at hand.

However, I do try to actively give my phone as little space in my life as possible. I have no social networks on it (I don't have any left by now, anyway), and no other apps that involve scrolling. And I continue to think about how I can avoid distractions from it.

All through university and for several years afterwards I had an Online Vision Classic, which served me very well. Unfortunately I lost the first one at some point, and its replacement had various issues. So a couple of months ago I decided to go for a really good pen, and got an Otto Huth design 04. It looks great, lies comfortably in the hand and has an excellent nib.

Ditto for the fountain pen. For the past few months I've been trying to switch off the computer as much as possible and do as much writing as I can by hand. I can concentrate a lot better and I enjoy the physicality of handling a good pen and actual paper.

I've begun thinking in that direction too, after seeing how my peers have been moving all over the country in the last few years - first for uni, then for a job, then another job... I'm one of the movers myself, and I know why I moved, but I feel the cost of lost relationships quite heavily.

While I agree with your scepticism of our smart phone use, this comment doesn't do the article justice. (The author addresses that point and explains why he thinks that smart phone use, while a problem, is not the root cause.)

I still wish I could work in Lisp, but have also become very happy with Julia.

Julia is not as elegant as Lisp and doesn't offer as many powerful language constructs. But it is a very cleanly designed and well thought-out language that is fun to work in. I especially love its metaprogramming abilities (heavily drawn from Lisp), which include "real" macros.

In the end, the reason I use Julia over Lisp is the community and the ecosystem. As an ecological modeller, Julia is something my colleagues have at least heard of and that I can convince a few to use (instead of R and Netlogo). I fear that I could never convince anybody to use or contribute to a software written CL. Also, the Julia standard library is just very well put together and there are more packages available for the things that I need to do, compared to CL.

I still love CL as a language and sometimes toy with the idea of going back to it, but for the moment, practicality beats purity.

Can you elaborate? I'm using Julia macros to help make my research software easier to extend for others, so would be interested in your experiences.