@oneiro hadn't seen you on my feed for a while. Glad to see you're still around 😄

@cooler_ranch around & about & sick at home finding new outlets :) how are you?

@oneiro i moved cross country in June with my partner for their job. Enjoying funemployment but using the time to program more. It's weird being a domestic partner.

@cooler_ranch ooh! get to know the neighbourhood, start a small cult, start a small open source project, summon a demon to deal with the out-of-control project ...

@oneiro solid advice. I am learning the neighborhood, am in a cult (organizing), and am working on a FLOSS library.

Haven't needed to summon a demon yet, but I'll add it to the list if things get out of hand.

@cooler_ranch nice! what's the library?

@oneiro I'm making an implementation of a neural network framework in Elixir based on this 2011 thesis where somebody does it in Erlang.

It combines a generic algorithm to "evolve" at appropriate topologies of neurons and weights.

@cooler_ranch ooh. genetic algorithms though...wonder how that compares to the tradeoff of additional epochs on a pretty-good hand-designed network

@oneiro it will be interesting to see. My first goal is just to give the work a good refactoring. If it's actually applicable, then that's a huge bonus.

The original stuff is written by an academic used to C++ programming who learned enough Erlang to demonstrate the idea. Nothing is idiomatic, there are no tests, the documentation is the book and huge comments that look like:
%%%%%%%%%%:%COMMENT%%%%%%%%%%%

The language/ runtime itself has changed a bit since the publication of the work, too. But biggest of all: the code doesn't really make much use of the fault-tolerant behaviors that are easily used in Erlang and Elixir.

@cooler_ranch yuppp sounds like research-code smell. (my main FLOSS project and I are mostly in academia, so I've had to wander through altoghether too much non-idiomatic python doing very clever maths without explaining it)

@oneiro it's important work but holy cow. I don't know how anyone in academia expects others to use or understand their work.

@cooler_ranch it's more about the meme / buzzword / citation shtick. academics who care about open source / code reuse generally learn and nurture that care outside of the university

@cooler_ranch good news is, once FLOSS practices and ethics get embedded in academic practice they'll last through decades of continued capitalist assault

@oneiro i hope it really sticks. Kinda tough to justify a better practices/ hygienic development course on its face.

However, your work is wasted if it never gets read/explored/used by being incomprehensible or simply painful.