Posts tagged 'windows'| www.williamjbowman.com
A reviewer, in one of those off-hand little low-level comments they leave, which one is sometimes tempted to ignore as one works on a revision because they're not _strictly_ actionable, has absolutely nerd-sniped me. What does "higher-order" in "higher-o...| www.williamjbowman.com
Recently, there has been an attack on academic freedom and free speech at UBC, by fringe right-wing extremists, under the guise of protecting free speech. They recently escalated this attack from bullshit internal political wrangling (which I’ve been helping fight), to a BC Supreme Court Petition: Petition-VLC-S-S–252602-filed–7Apr2025.pdf| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
An ill-advised blog post in which I speculate that academia is actually for-profit, but not in the usual sense of “profit”.| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
What is a model, particularly of a programming language? I’ve been struggling with this question a bit for some time. The word “model” is used a lot in my research area, and although I have successfully (by some metrics) read papers whose topic is models, used other peoples’ research on models, built models, and trained others to do all of this, I don’t really understand what a model is.| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
I’m in the middle of confronting my lack of knowledge about denotational semantics. One of the things that has confused me for so long about denotational semantics, which I didn’t even realize was confusing me, was the use of the word “syntax” (and, consequently, “semantics”).| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
I’ve been trying to understand the semantics of memory in WebAssembly, and realized the “memory safety” doesn’t mean what I expect in WebAssembly.| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
I have long struggled to understand what a logical relation is. This may come as a surprise, since I have used logical relations a bunch in my research, apparently successfully. I am not afraid to admit that despite that success, I didn’t really know what I was doing—I’m just good at pattern recognition and replication. I’m basically a machine learning algorithm.| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
I recently decided to confront the fact that I didn’t know what “realizability” meant. I see it in programming languages papers from time to time, and could see little rhyme or reason to how it was used. Any time I tried to look it up, I got some nonsense about constructive mathematics and Heyting arithmetic, which I also knew nothing about, and gave up.| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
I have argued about the definition of “ANF” many times. I have looked at the history and origins, and studied the translation, and spoken to the authors. And yet people insist I’m “quacking” because I insist that “ANF” means “A-normal form”, where the “A” only means “A”.| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
I’ve been doing, and experiencing, a lot of peer reviewing lately.| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
I wrote the follow at some semester prior to today, about no one in particular, while updating syllabus.| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
It’s weird, but professors are almost never taught how to teach, how to design a course, how to assess students, how to design an exam or what the point of an exam even is. We’re just expected to pick this up on our own, I guess. It’s not as nonsensical as it sounds, since we are trained how to do research and communicate that research, and there is some overlap. But still.| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
This post is a transcription of a thread that happened live on Twitter on June 30, 2019, in response to some anger at my lack of a cutlery tray. I was in a mood following a previous cutlery incident.| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
This post is a transcription of a thread that happened live on Twitter on June 30, 2019, in response to someone claiming there was a correct way to arrange cutlery in a drawer. The statement caused me to momentarily lose my mind. The thread has since become difficult to find, so I’m reproducing it here.| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
Recently, a UBC SPL grad student offered a bounty to anyone who could Rickroll me. This has resulted in an arms race. I have increased my browser security to prevent Rickrolling entirely on most of my machines. This isn’t fool proof, of course, but hopefully it will help defend against low-tier attempts.| λk.(k blog): λk.(k blog)
After a successful virtual PLDI, some of us expressed support for more virtual conferences in the future, and some expressed dissent and concerns. The result was an interesting discussion on Twitter, which is essentially impossible to follow. I summarize ...| www.williamjbowman.com
I've been unhappy with metrics lately, watching academics (of all people) apply metrics without interpretation. I'm losing my mind over it. This was free written in one sitting don't @ me....| www.williamjbowman.com
Posts tagged 'academia'| www.williamjbowman.com
Posts tagged 'tricks'| www.williamjbowman.com
I'm in the middle of liaising with the UBC library to attempt to negotiate joining ACM Open. It's not going well. While US universities appear to see cost increases of 2x--3x, Canadian universities are seeing costs of 10x--20x. And our budgets run much ti...| www.williamjbowman.com
The past few weeks I've been learning to develop and deploy a Progress Web App (PWA) that can communicate with my WebDAV and CalDAV servers. Unfortunately, while these are on the same domain, they are on different sub-domains, and this causes the requests...| www.williamjbowman.com
I just ran the command rm -rf ~, deleting all my personal files in the process. This was not the first time, and it was no big deal, because I back up my files with automatic rolling backups. My backup system is secure, redundant, and has low resources re...| www.williamjbowman.com
In a fit of nostalgia, I wanted to play some Runescape this weekend. I discovered that Runescape forbids copy and pasting your password into the client, for bogus security reasons. This poses a problem for me, since my password is a very long randomly gen...| www.williamjbowman.com
λk.(k blog)| www.williamjbowman.com
In this post, I describe a proposal to redevelop the Construction Science introduction course to use hammers, a standard and state-of-the-art industry tool that students should have experience with....| www.williamjbowman.com
This week, for ReAsOnS, I wanted to run a server on WSL 2 that was accessible from the internet. This was surprisingly involved and requires lots of hard-to-find tricks to forward ports through 4 different layers of network abstractions and firewalls. I...| www.williamjbowman.com