From 3b0142cedcde39e4c2097ecd916a870a3ced5ec6 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Vito Graffagnino
For those who want to know, my committee is Mike Hammond, Tom Bever, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, Simin Karimi and Robert Henderson. The only one who non-linguists may be familiar with is Massimo, notorious for his book "What Darwin Got Wrong" with Jerry Fodor, but a couple of the others might have a Wikipedia article or talks on YouTUbe if anyone is interested.
+ +Anyway, after passing this, I'll be officially allowed to start on my dissertation (and after finishing that, I'll be doing another defense of that). I was sort of thinking of recording this defense for public consumption, although I don't think I'm strictly speaking allowed to, as the event is supposed to be private. (I think this has traditionally been just for the privacy of the defender, which I obviously don't care about).
+ +After this is over, I'll the ABD (all but dissertation, as they say) and will have more time on my hands.
]]>If you don't trust Patreon or Paypal (which you shouldn't really), throw your support in via LiberaPay. It'd honestly be better generally to get channel funding there anyway!
]]>Tom introduced me in too glowing terms, a nice, yet not so meaningful gesture considering Noam is more than half deaf nowadays, especially in the bustle of the party. People had actually be lining up to see him; it looked sort of like people paying respect to a mafia don, but Tom unceremoniously pushed aside everyone else and invited me to talk to Noam directly.
+ +We spoke a bit about my projects on prosodically driven syntax and the quantifier scope project, and he entreated me to talk to him later to get more in depth. He didn't divulge if he knew about me, granted, he's definitely heard of me from Tom and others in the department and we've spoken on email chains, but I'm not sure what or if he could've been expected to remember considering that he's less involved than the other faculty.
+ +I still don't plan on going into the field, but there was an aura of momentousness to the event. A couple people were taking pictures of us and I got a couple comments afterward that remarked on the potential significance of our first meeting.
+ +Either way it is sort of funny. Someone mentioned to me a bit ago that a lot of the grad students in the field know Arizona as "the place where Luke Smith is", which is hilarious for many reasons, and would probably be upsetting for a lot of the syntacticians here, but most strange now that Noam is here (a lot of people assume he's still at MIT since it's only been a year or so). I've never been plugged into academic politics, I don't actually plan on publishing before I leave the field and I've never even been to the LSA, but between the YouTube channel and targeted pressure from several people, I have a level of notoriety unexpected by me.
+ +So the disaster scenario for "some people out there" is that something comes of this: that I become in the popular eye "the Linguist" that at least some normal people know about, or even worse, some kind of next logical step from Chomsky, catapulted to prominence in a way similar to how Noam's political rabble-rousing popularized him. And of course the elephant in the room is the political differences: there's a huge irony in some kind of mantle being passed from a Jewish anarcho-communist who grew up on a kibbutz to a goyish low-church Borderer who voted for Trump and has only barely managed to slip into the cracks of academia given his political disposition. If I were to obtain a well-known position in academia, I would be doing a lot of good for the re-enfranchisement of the White Right in the opinion-molding class.
+ +That's not to say that my ascendancy in the field is even probable if I do stay, but the mere fact there's greater than a 2% chance of it would certainly have surprised me 15, 10, 5 or even 2 years ago. The only question is what aspects of my life am I willing to give up to continue to stoke the fires of this potentiality, or if I can continue to tolerate this lifestyle. On one hand, I've put up with every lie, manipulation, character assassination and "technicality" that could be thrown at me from this department, mostly without flinching, and my detractors are starting to sound like boys-who-cried-wolfs. On the other hand, a cabin for my family in the woods generally sounds like a better lifestyle.
+]]>There's also now a (mostly) ncurses based interface during installation and, if it means anything, I've considerably reduced the size of the script seeing that the deployment method is now less ad hoc.
+ +I'm hoping to "officially" re-release the scripts very soon, in fact, after this they may not actually change much at all until I do, all is needed is a little testing. You're welcome to try it yourself now and see the results.
]]>Don't expect me to end up becoming a game streamer, especially with (>proprietary software), but it was fairly refreshing to play a game with genuinely good storyline and development again. Obviously it lacks the features of a modern game, but back then video games were far enough away from real life so that you could rely on your imagination to fill in the gaps, which arguably makes for a better experience.
]]>I've always looked for a more effective way to make meme videos, by which I mean the videos like my distro-hopping or Mac videos, where I more or less narrate a stream of memes and some text. Traditionally I did this in Blender, but that could be very time consuming, taking several days of constant work to put out a 10 minute video.
+ +It actually hit me that sent would be a very good replacement for Blender (strangely enough), in that I can just write a presentation, put in images, etc., load it in sent, and record my screen while narrating. I.e., no video editing/tweaking/compiling or work time other than assembling my "script" for the video, in the different memes and text I'll be talking about.
+ +I think I'll try this out pretty soon. Hopefully I can get in a place where I can put videos like that out relatively commonly.
]]>It also checks to see if new mail has been downloaded, and if it has, will provide a brief little notification ding! Enjoy!
]]>Don't be afraid, everything will still be here, but you can fee free to clean out your RSS cache and reload to clean everything up!
]]>I also put out a brief video on how to generate a public/private key pair in GnuPG here, which is needed for the auto-confige script.
]]>If you're a mutt user, you can help me by sending me your email server settings if they're not already in the autoconf/domains.csv file.
]]>Registration should be free and open and you should be able to post on the boards I've made so far, so feel free to, if fact, please do and go ahead and find any bugs, start dialogue etc. If everything works out, I'll probably announce it on the channel next week.
]]>There have been a lot of little improvements, and I'm hoping to have a lot of the small kinks worked out before then.
+ +There is one thing I'd really like and don't know if it exists, and that is a kind of mutt config generator or wizard, that will automatically detect your email provider's servers and set the more annoying settings by itself. I've put some documentation up about how to configure mutt so far, but I really wish there were a way to make it easier for users.
+]]>Here I talk about the basics: the arithmetic, variables and the logic of vectors in R, and how R differs from typical programming languages.
]]>This might sound like a strange thing to do, but the repo files were getting huge (around 20MB for a repo for less than 2MB of files). I tried all the typical options, garbage collecting, even tree filtering, but couldn't reduce the size, and a small size is what I need for LARBS.
+The main reason it got so big was when I naïvely included an enormous font system with the repo a while back to make it more accessible to Parabola users. I didn't realize how much of a pain it would be to deal with for its ease.
+I'm planning a bigger, fuller release of LARBS, so I want to have everything clean and accessible. I may upload the old bloated repository as well on Github, maybe a "voidrice classic" and keep it as it is now, but there's a lot I've learned about system management so I like the clean feeling.
]]>It has transparency and scrollback, and a lot of helpful bindings, but also all the typical perks of st: excellent unicode compatibility and general non-bugginess.
]]>I'll be putting up another video on it soon!
]]>One of the reasons I got this assignment is my history on YouTube, and given that, I'm going to actually end up making the linguistics videos I've been promising here and there.
+The initial content will probably be very introductory, but if I get momentum in making the videos, I'll probably expand the range past what my assignment is.
]]>You can avoid the main of LibreOffice and the encumbering syntax of LaTeX/Beamer all in one.
]]>It's one of the few computers with actual innovation behind it, and really propose a decntralized alternative.
]]>I'm the kind of person who when in a pinch goes the extra mile, which is good now just because I've been putting out a whole lot less content than I had wanted this semester. Good news is (a) I now have the will to do more hardcore video editing and (b) I found a way to cheat!
+ +That said, I do have a lot of personal work to finish, two qualifying papers, a paper on the evolution of rationality, a corpus of Latin and probably some other stuff I've forgotten. For me that just means more limitations, and thus more motivation for output I'll probably also put out videos on my academic projects, but only as a little bonus.
+ +First things first, I have a series on de-Googling coming soon, with a couple videos coming out next week.
]]>Host Michael Perilloux and I talk about software freedom, decentralization and privacy in the context of the Restoration and Neoreactionary politics.
+Check the podcast out here, and then SocialMatter.net for even more.
]]>I've come a long way. My two most popular videos (distrohopping and Apple/Mac) were both made before I had 100 subscribers, now I have a hundred times that, and both those videos are individually at over 130,000 views.
+Looking back at my system of a year ago I can't help shaking my head either; I've improved so much and have brought a lot of people with me on this year-long (but ongoing) journey!
]]>The feedback we got though was overwhelming and encouraging, especially given how little most of my subscribers probably cared about the issues before hand. I also had a lot of grad students in the field email glowingly. Even better was the "negative" attention we got, mostly from the Old Guard and the typical pearl-clutchers in our department. The very gall of us to serve as faces to the universal discontentment.
+Ryan was witness to a particularly embarrassing encounter with a certaie professor absolutely apoplectic about the podcast, and recounted it to me with much gusto, variegated with uncontrollable laughter.
+Needless to say, the more episodes are in the tubes. We're enjoying where this is going already.
]]>To christen our first episode, we discuss Noam Chosmky joining us at the University of Arizona and our general disenchantment with the generative program.
]]>Expect them sometime this week. It actually saves me a lot of time doing this, and is a lot of fun making the documentation [autism intensifies].]]>
Otherwise, this week I'll probably put up a Battlestation video, and possibly the first of a linguistics-themed podcast.
]]>As always, dotfiles are on Github.
]]>This might take the form of me starting a formal blog... I haven't yet, but I already have a WP server configured and might be employing it soon.
]]>I hate the internet. I like not being connected. But I pretty often have ideas for what to add to my website when I'm outside of the WWW.
+ +Traditionally, I just had to remember what I wanted to change and do it when I came back into the realm of wifi, but now I'm just keeping an entire "repository" of my website on my computer here.
+ +I can edit it offline, and when I get back to a reliable connection, I "push" the changes with rsync via ssh.
+ +There are other huge advantages to this as well. I don't have to worry about maintaining another vimrc on the serverside, and I don't have to worry about the lag common over ssh. Plus, I have an extra little backup in case of disaster with Host Gator.
+ +All in all, a good development.
]]>Thankfully, Vid.Me always for pretty easy migration of YouTube videos, without me having to reentrer metadata, so it should be pretty easy to upkeep everything.]]>
Expect a video on my i3 configs soon. There will be overlap with previous vids, but I feel like this one is much more refined now.]]>