14 min read

A mostly automated roundup of what the Yak Collective was up to this week. Yaks can jump on the server to join in. If you’re not yet a member, consider joining.

channel activity

Astonishing Stories. Fiction study group that occasionally publishes speculative fiction

General Discussion. I’m looking to assemble a computing reading starter pack that contains, at most, 10 books. Assume, say, an undergrad level of familiarity with computer science and programming. What ten texts are up for inclusion? / Anyone interested in a decentralized finance study group? thinking about starting one up / Anyone interested in regular weekly coworking sessions?

Infrastructure. how hard would it be to write the readingadd url list to a spreadsheet? reflecting on the governance chat exercise we just did, starting to summarize/tag a year’s worth of readings to make a summary whitepaper, it strikes me that piping link shares into a spreadsheet creates a very useful starting point in general, for many accumulating value conversations

New Old Home and Country. Making a call for interesting case studies in the emergent roles & projects spun up or faltered during the course of the pandemic. This would begin as a slide presentation just like last year’s The New Old Home and could go for there to multimedia formats.

Online Governance Studies. Today‘s coworking session on the 6-pager. Agenda: 10 minutes reading, 10 minutes comments, 40 minutes working on the spreadsheet together (should be obvious what we‘re trying to do from the spreadsheet, but I‘ll provide some direction). But just for fun, we’ll also do a very quick reading/discussion too of a very relevant article, as we attempt to do this… Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia — Cory Doctorow

Philosophy. we are currently on hiatus; I’ll have a time confirmed this week for the beginning of the next which will be early July

Quantum Computing. Would anyone be interested in a project or study group on quantum computing? I don’t have a specific direction in mind, but with tools like Qiskit https://qiskit.org/ it looks not so hard to play around and do something interesting.

Yakfit. Exploring wearables and fitness goals for yaks.

yak rover updates

This week‘s meeting notes.

Nature is Murder. Got started on CAD model of the actual final design, ordered a bunch more goodies. Boot up the BBBlue and get to led blink on it. CAD is an REPL even though it doesn’t look like it

Wonderful Wandering Growth. debugged video source duplication (for streaming, dual access to images) and googledrive and twitter integrations. wrote some underlying code for twitter usability. finish tweepy based twitter integration. using tools/libraries with version 0.X is “fun”

Abio Flex Wanderer. Tentative coding on BOS to cover goal modeling and planning in the bot. The context is for the bot to “discover” what to do when it cannot progress (e.g. never walked up stairs, how to). Continue on BOS tentatives, and complete what I could not this week on the OAK-1 camera. Remote access to the bot is down, and I lost my opportunities this week to deal with the OAK-1 configuration. A discussion with Maier on my work compared my approach to SLAM (the now famous problem definition). In fact this work could be seen as some form of SLAM for concepts/knowledge. Tentatively calling it CLAM.

Hehe triple-hybrid test assembly: CAD printout, pen lines on paper, some actual components. This could be an art form.

— Venkatesh Rao • @vgr • 8:50 PM • Jun 20, 2021

take-gig-leave-gig

Current gigs. Details on the server.

Was asked to spread word about this position at the Exeter Ed Incubator — part of the prestigious University of Exeter. It’s a remote job, but you’ll need to based in the UK.

I am looking for a product engineer to work on a new headphone project I am looking to get off the ground. essentially the idea is modular over ear headphones where if anyone any one part breaks then as part of a subscription you can get a replacement part without having to replace the whole thing.

looking for a graphic designer who can take technical process and architecture diagrams and make them look attractive.

Client is looking for a react-native front-end dev for a 2 week UI sprint towards launch.

cool job alert: Linktree is hiring a Head of Creators and a friend is leading the recruiting for the role. who’s the right person for the job?

came across this 6 week research project for a food business thought someone here might be interested.

Urban tech startup is looking for a contract mobile developer, for a small project, to get an app on the app stores (it’s a single-task app for sensor installers, with no commercial activity on the app)

Justice tech startup is hiring a Product Designer!

yaks at work

A bucranium coin minted in Lamponeia, Troad (Troas) in 6th century BC…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamponeia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucranium

— oldeuropeanculture • @serbiaireland • 9:16 AM • Jun 20, 2021

My patience for project management level of procedural meta thinking is at a lifetime low… just wanna fingerspiutzengefuhl my way through shit in a well-appointed environment that magically translates vague intentions into quality output with nothing in between

— Venkatesh Rao • @vgr • 6:08 PM • Jun 17, 2021

Reports of Organized Fraud in ACM/IEEE Conferences.

https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-acm-ieee-computer-architecture-conferences-ccd61169370d

— Chase Saunders • @MaineFrameworks • 2:02 PM • Jun 9, 2020

“Those lucky enough to have become full professors — supposedly the light at the end of the tunnel for struggling junior scholars — spend just 17 per cent of their time on their own research.”

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/if-you-love-research-academia-may-not-be-you

— Paul Graham • @paulg • 5:03 PM • Jun 13, 2021

@paulg Academia is a “good spot for research” (as per the parable below)

A popular fishing spot, but not because of the fish.


— GuruAnaerobic • @GuruAnaerobic • 3:56 PM • Jun 17, 2021

— Luca Dellanna • @DellAnnaLuca • 8:19 AM • Jun 18, 2021

An ancient giant ‘rhino’ was truly giant. “The 26-foot-long (8 meters) beast had a shoulder height of 16.4 feet (5 m), and it weighed as much as 24 tons (21.7 metric tons).” via @LiveScience

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/06/18/ancient_giant_rhino_was_one_of_the_largest_mammals_to_walk_the_earth_781988.html

— RealClearScience • @RCScience • 1:30 PM • Jun 18, 2021

🧵: One like = one piece of advice from Wine Mom Sarah to the youths (Specific questions also welcome)

— Sarah Constantin • @s_r_constantin • 9:20 PM • Jun 16, 2021

Idle moments while elevating infected foot and using icepack; playing with a matrix to position various consultants, exorcists and shallow thinkers

— ᗪᗩᐯᕮ SᑎOᗯᗪᕮᑎ 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 🇪🇺 • @snowded • 4:08 PM • Jun 19, 2021

Pls share: Calling Researchers! We’re looking for a ⌗researcher to design the ⌗evaluation approach, data collection & analysis plan for our ⌗foodventure. 6 week project starting immediately. For more info & how to respond take a look over here 👇

https://shiftdesign.org/careers/

— Shift • @shift_org • 4:46 PM • Apr 14, 2021

We were blown away by the creativity and enthusiasms of ⌗IBMQuantumChallenge participants! Who knows what might happen if we devised a challenge to tackle an unsolved problem in the research field?

https://research.ibm.com/blog/quantum-challenge-2021-results

— Junye Huang • @HuangJunye • 4:28 PM • Jun 18, 2021

Dan Harmon on writer’s block

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23092657

— Rob Henderson • @robkhenderson • 10:21 PM • Jun 17, 2021

Really happy to launch my first podcast series, “Overmorrow’s Library”! Each episode in the library for “the day after tomorrow” presents a book that engages with the challenge of world-making, with the end-time of a world, or with the eternal unworldly.

https://e-flux.com/announcements/306323/overmorrow-s-library/

— Federico Campagna • @FedCampagna • 3:53 PM • Nov 19, 2020

wonder if there are no new genres of fiction because there is no longer a need for sublimation of beliefs through fiction. Whatever crazy/taboo thing you believe you would have better luck finding other people by starting a subreddit or a conspiracy theory

— Sachin • @SachinB91 • 7:11 PM • Jun 24, 2021

1/ Just for fun, here’s a thread comparing retrofuturist art from the mid 20th century with the reality today!

https://gizmodo.com/42-visions-for-tomorrow-from-the-golden-age-of-futurism-1683553063
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/475270566909183551/

— Noah Smith 🐇 • @Noahpinion • 4:12 PM • Jun 20, 2021

@meekaale @visakanv @michaelcurzi Alexander has a number of pieces in APL which allude to intergenerationality like Teenager’s Cottage. There is an emergent typology of dualfrontdoor homes serving the grannyflat + boomerangkids + airbnbsublet. I’d like to see this APL’d.

— Phil Pawlett Jackson • @ppawlettjackson • 11:17 AM • Jun 25, 2021

Little thread on what’s one of the harder hands-on engineering things I’ve done in my life. A real test of dexterity and eyesight: crimping a wire to put in a connector. A JST PH connector to be precise. What’s crimping? Here is an expert tutorial

https://iotexpert.com/jst-connector-crimping-insanity/

— Venkatesh Rao • @vgr • 11:56 PM • Jun 18, 2021

Tencent officially launched the first complete self-developed multi-modal quadruped robot ⌗deeplearning ⌗machinelearning ⌗datascience ⌗artificialintelligence ⌗100DaysOfCode ⌗BlackTechTwitter ⌗Microsoft ⌗30Daysofcode ⌗Unity初心者 ⌗arkit ⌗unity3d ⌗innovation ⌗robot ⌗robotics ⌗ux

— i_king_of_ml • @ikingofml1 • 2:59 AM • Mar 15, 2021

When did cheap C-flavored microcontroller boards first appear? Was Arduino the first one? How much did an Arduino equivalent boards cost in the 90s and aughts? I remember an Atmel board that was around ＄300 in 2006.

— Venkatesh Rao • @vgr • 1:55 AM • Jun 10, 2021

Intel to Create RISC-V Development Platform with SiFive P550 Cores on 7nm in 2022

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16780/intel-to-create-riscv-development-platform-with-sifive-p550-cores-on-7nm-in-2022

— AnandTech • @anandtech • 1:20 PM • Jun 22, 2021

The Modular Robotic Vehicle developed by NASA is well-suited for busy urban environments. The driver relies on control inputs being converted to electrical signals and transmitted by wire to the motors within the vehicle

https://technology.nasa.gov/patent/MSC-TOPS-74

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE0KwnDYYh8

— Massimo • @Rainmaker1973 • 6:00 AM • Jun 25, 2021

@vgr @inaturalist Long story! Short story is knockoffs flooded the market:

https://amazon.com/s?k=underwater+drones

They got better very fast, and much cheaper. But underwater drones are now more accessible than ever, which was the goal!

— David Lang • @davidtlang • 4:18 AM • Jun 26, 2021

⌗roamans, what’s the currently preferred way of reading .epub ebooks, making notes and getting things into Roam on iOS (yes, very specific question 😁)? I’ve been using Marvin but the last update was three years ago and I’m looking for something better.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/marvin-3/id1086482858

— C𐃏rtex Futura 🚢 9/30 Atomic Essays • @cortexfutura • 8:03 AM • Jun 25, 2021

@cortexfutura Few years ago I used MarginNote for ePub with great success. I also know some ⌗roamans using it today. I haven’t used it for a while, but it advertises multiple format outputs.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/marginnote-3/id1348317163

— RoamHacker — exploring PKM and its future • @roamhacker • 8:09 AM • Jun 25, 2021

@cortexfutura Currently using Apple’s Books and @readwiseio to transfer highlights and notes into Roam

https://help.readwise.io/article/35-how-do-i-import-apple-books-highlights-from-my-iphoneipad

— Federico Gaggio • @federicogg • 8:31 AM • Jun 25, 2021

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