Category: charity
niche tech in film
I just want to post about this sexy beast that is currently situated at the Mono No Aware film lab in Brooklyn, New York. Let me try colorfully recount what Steve Cossman, Mono’s director, tells me:
This is 1 of 18 machines in the world. The hardware is handbuilt by one guy and the software is handbuilt by another. Its full cost is $250,000 but they made one at $30,000 for Mono. It’s got 32TB of hard drive temporarily as the guy will come next week to upgrade that. It’s hooked up to a Windows PC that host the processing software, export to the data tower and we’ve got a Mac hooked up to that for ease of data transport. Scans 8 frame a second at 4K resolution. We drove it to the lab in the middle of a snow squall, and I have to thank a cinematography.com guru for helping set it up for us.
That’s it, just niche tech that most will not get to see. Unless they come to Mono No Aware.
copenhagen interpretation of ethics
Current situation:
So let me get this straight… Up until now, Amazon/AWS hasn’t donated anything to cURL. And noone hated them for it.
Suddenly when someone - probably some manager with a limit of $5000 on donations - pushes through a donation of $5000, everyone hates them? Are you serious? If I was a cURL developer this would absolutely make my day.
When you develop OSS (Open Source Software), you aren’t doing it for the money, you don’t even know whether anyone is going to be using your software. And sure, you could limit the license so that big corps have to pay, but because that’d become a legal nightmare for them quickly, they (and probably by extension everyone else as well) will just skip your software and use or make something else.
So you make it copyleft or fully open, and then thank for donations no matter their size. A shitton of OSS devs don’t get any donations.
Philosophical followup:
UN me
Probably won’t happen based on this answer
22:20 edit: Further proof that I will never get to work at the UN as a SWE.
EWB Failure Reports
“What happens when engineers run a charity? They write detailed postmortems, of course, so they can fix their mistakes.” - apenwarr
Engineers Without Borders: Failure Reports
I find this one particularly funny.
“The election planning committee indicated that we could collect votes ahead of time, and then submit ballots during the election period. My team created a Google form clearly indicating that in completing the form, they were giving our campaign team consent to submit a vote for me on their behalf. As such, we could not only account for every supporter’s vote, but also control when it would be cast in the race. Since preliminary results were to be released each evening in the election period, our plan was to submit votes slowly at the beginning of the week so not to give away our strong position in the race. We would then work around the clock in the last 48 hours to submit the majority of my votes.
We failed to see that to someone that wasn’t in our chapter, this looked like a failing campaign that led to a desperate attempt to stuff the ballot box. Consequently and unsurprisingly, the candidate that lost by a mere 15 votes called for a recount. After a long, three-week ordeal, the election was awarded to the latter candidate due to inconsistencies discovered with the votes I had received.
Looking back, we realized we had developed tunnel vision; we failed to be cognizant of the fact that we had to be accountable to the LYAC’s election procedures and what was expected of us. By not consulting the election planning committee about our campaign strategy, we took the committee and the runner-up by surprise. We had lost sight of our original goal of forging meaningful connections with youth in our community behind a shortsighted, singleminded desire to win a race”
don’t know if real, but here’s the comment:
“The footnote to this interesting learning experience is that the candidate that Joyce lost to actually ended up backing out of her role due to the required time commitment. Thus, Joyce un-un-won an election, an accomplishment that may truly be first-of-its-kind.”