Week Notes: 23

Jul 5, 2022 00:00 · 569 words · 3 minutes read weekly-reviews

Here’s a new month. And with it, here’s a quote about “productive stupidity” that I came across from some paper I had read within the week.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.

— From the paper: “The Importance of stupidity in scientific research” by Martin A. Schwartz

Also, this month marks Muthemba’s (Symo) 4TH year death anniversary. With this in mind, I updated my e-mail signature to:

(Life is like a pencil that will surely run out,
    but will leave the beautiful writing of life.)

Free And Open Source (FOSS) Work

  • Finally merged this #93 which calls [rust] correlation code in GN3. Later this week, I’ll have a regular 1 hour pairing session with the contributor to wrap some things up before they break for their exams.
  • Made some notes on storing data in GN2. Work is still on-going on writing a declarative way [in GNU Guile] of extracting data from some shared CSV file, and dumping that into an SQL file. The idea is that someone can eyeball it for errors (in addition to running it through a linter). I’m really enjoying my GNU Emacs + GNU Guile + GNU Guix experience.
  • I shared some [hopefully useful] feedback on this paper to Christine this past weekend. I highly recommend reading it.

Grad School

  • Group work for one of my course units.
  • Registered for some special exams that I missed out on last year (because of SU’s—still present—discriminatory policy against men with natural dreadlocks.)
  • Last module’s results aren’t out though.
  • Course work is becoming more intense. Nevertheless, I’m managing just fine.
  • Here’s a paper that I should read: “Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems.” I’m already half-way through it. I’m including it since I’d highly recommend it to any one in the tech space.

Long Form Reading

Personal & Miscellaneous

  • Went to my baby sister’s PTA meeting. Weird event this one; some of my teachers during my primary school days now own a chain of institutions. Meeting them triggered old memories—far from nostalgic. Nevertheless, it wasn’t a bad experience.
  • I’ve been watching [more like bingeing] on One Piece’s Oden Sama’s arch.
  • I started heavily using GNU hyperbole after someone shared this with me.
  • Found a work-around for using GNU Guile with different GNU Guile run-times in an error-free way. Read this for more context.