TITLE: Strange Loop 2: Day Two
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 02, 2021 5:37 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
I am usually tired on the second day of a conference, and today was
no exception. But the day started and ended with talks that kept
my brain alive.
• "Poems in an Accidental Language" by Kate Compton -- Okay,
so that was a Strange Loop keynote. When the video goes
live on YouTube, watch it. I may blog more about the talk later,
but for now know only that it included:
- "Evenings of Recreational Ontology" (I also learned about Google
Sheet parties)
- "fitting an octopus into an ontology"
- "Contemplate the universe, and write an API for it."
Like I said, go watch this talk!
• Quantum computing is one of those technical areas I know
very little about, maybe the equivalent of a 30-minute pitch talk.
I've never been super-interested, but some of my students are. So
I attended "Practical Quantum Computing Today" to see what's up
these days. I'm still not interested in putting much of my time
into quantum computing, but now I'm better informed.
• Before my lunch walk, I attended a non-technical talk on
"tech-enabled crisis response". Emma Ferguson and Colin Schimmelfing
reported on their experience doing something I'd like to be able to
do: spin up a short-lived project to meet a critical need, using
mostly free or open-source tools. For three months early in the
COVID pandemic, their project helped deliver ~950,000 protective
masks from 7,000 donors to 6,000 healthcare workers. They didn't
invent new tech; they used existing tools and occasionally wrote
some code to connect such tools.
My favorite quote from the talk came when Ferguson related the team's
realization that they had grown too big for the default limits on
Google Sheets and Gmail. "We thought, 'Let's just pay Google.' We
tried. We tried. But we couldn't figure it out." So they
built their own tool. It is good to be a programmer.
• After lunch, Will Crichton live-coded a simple API in Rust,
using traits (Rust's version of interfaces) and aggressive types.
He delivered almost his entire talk within emacs, including an
ASCII art opening slide. It almost felt like I was back in grad
school!
• In "Remote Workstations for Discerning Artists", Michelle
Brenner from Netflix described the company's cloud-based
infrastructure for the workstations used by the company's artists
and project managers. This is one of those areas that is simply
outside my experience, so I learned a bit. At the top level,
though, the story is familiar: the scale of Netflix's goals
requires enabling artists to work wherever they are, whenever they
are; the pandemic accelerated a process that was already underway.
• Eric Gade gave another talk in the long tradition of Alan
Kay and a bigger vision for computing. "Authorship Environments:
In Search of the 'Personal' in Personal Computing" started by
deconstructing Steve Jobs's "bicycle for the mind" metaphor (he's
not a fan of what most people take as the meaning) and then moved
onto the idea of personal computing as literacy: a new level at
which to interrogate ideas, including one's own.
This talk included several inspirational quotes. My favorite was
was from Adele Goldberg:
There's all these layers in everything we do...
We have to learn how to peel.
(I have long admired Goldberg and her work. See
this post from Ada Lovelace Day 2009
for a few of my thoughts.)
As with most talks in this genre, I left feeling like there is so
much more to be done, but frustrated at not knowing how to do it.
We still haven't found a way to reach a wide audience with the
empowering idea that there is more to computing than typing into
a Google doc or clicking in a web browser.
• The closing keynote was delivered by Will Byrd. "Strange
Dreams of Stranger Loops" took Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel,
Escher, Bach as its inspiration, fitting both for the conference
and for Byrd's longstanding explorations of relational programming.
His focus today: generating quines in
mini-Kanren,
and discussing how quines enable us to think about programs,
interpreters, and the strange loops at the heart of GEB.
As with the opening keynote I may blog more about this talk later.
For now I give you two fun items:
- Byrd expressed his thanks to D((a(d|n))oug), a regular
expression that matches on Byrd (his father), Friedman (his
academic mentor), and Hofstadter (his intellectual inspiration).
- While preparing his keynote, Byrd clains to have suffered from
UDIS: Unintended Doug Intimidation Syndrome. Hofstader is so
cultured, so well-read, and so deep a thinker, how can the rest
of us hope to contribute?
Rest assured: Byrd delivered. A great talk, as always.
Strange Loop 2021 has ended. I "hit the road" by walking upstairs
to make dinner with my wife.
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