Tqft @tqft@octodon.social

Awful interviewer report -- "Numerator"

This data startup farmed out work to me as a "system design" test & presentation that took two weeks to resolve. Repeatedly tried to pressure me into interviews during my working hours for followups despite me insisting to them that I have a job and that they need to work around it.

Kept giving positive feedback. Then they whiteboarded me in the final step, decided it wasn't good enough despite, y'know, completing all problems, took my SD work (which they admitted in three interviews was a current real world problem they were trying to solve) and ran.

The shit dollop cherry on top? Their recruiter decided to schedule a call during my work hours just to let me know I'd been rejected.

So yeah, stay away from these guys. They are running a scam.

Carl T. Bergstrom on Twitter: "We have a new paper out in PNAS today, in which we address the harm wrought by dramatically restructuring human communication of the span of a decade, with no aim other than selling ads."

Explanatory thread in plain language: https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1407099264363208706

📄 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/27/e2025764118

🐘

A comrade of mine is needing to find a safe place to crash for a bit in Denver. Her housing situation is getting worse as the person offering it is trying to sexually pressure her and she needs to get out of there.

Needs to be trans friendly and leftist.

Please let me know if you can help, she's a gem and in a bad situation.

Boosts are very welcome.

📣 obs-cli v0.2.0 is out, a command-line interface for OBS!

Cleaned up the CLI interface, added new commands (recordings, countdowns!) and support authentication.

Get it while it's hot: https://github.com/muesli/obs-cli

Hi people! Here's a quick survey about your usage of Mastodon. If you have a couple of minutes ahread, that would be great if you answer it to give a little hand to my UX research students: https://forms.gle/k19mPvtEEDYrD6AW8

(YES, it's a Gform, NO I don't give a sh*t about your hot takes on Google, please go scream them in a pillow instead of pooping in my mentions)

When you receive a commission asking: 'Please could you paint a Friday night at pub kicking out time, with all the fights, kebabs, and throwing up in gutters, but in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry?'

A fine example of what I can only describe as avant-Romanesque by Jim'll Paint It.

https://jimll.co.uk/

I wrote a thing about COVID and DV and digital privacy and losing your job and being an unemployed activist and it got turned into a podcast ep.
Audio: https://pca.st/episode/541eabb9-e60c-4d67-ae17-17965cba6010
Text: https://greenagenda.org.au/2021/06/has-covid-19-made-women-more-insecure-at-home/

KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE IS DEAD
​​​​​

https://www.wsj.com/articles/keystone-xl-oil-project-abandoned-by-developer-11623272010

A Mathematical Foundation for Foundation Paper Pieceable Quilts: http://web.stanford.edu/~mleake/projects/paperpiecing/, via https://www.metafilter.com/191666/Quilters-are-the-best-at-graph-theory

They formalize things by hypergraphs, but I prefer antimatroids (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatroid): a pattern is piecable iff you can slice off one piece at a time by guillotine cuts, eventually slicing everything. The possible slicing orders form an antimatroid, because a piece, once sliceable, remains so until it is sliced. The piecing order is the reverse of a slicing order.

This 55min documentary is absolutely delightful:

https://iview.abc.net.au/video/DO1907T001S00

Quoll Farm, about Eastern Quolls in Tasmania.

#Microfiction

Computer science no longer excited me. I looked in the “positions open” list. The job ad for the librarian position read:

“Your two most challenging tasks will be:
• Selecting which books are to be removed from the Collection, and
• Allocating catalogue numbers to books.”

How hard can that be? I thought. It’s just cache invalidation and naming things.

I interviewed Professor Paul Rolan last week about how his research intersects with migraine, and it was a fascinating chat. You can read it here: https://www.migraine.org.au/research_paul_rolan