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-# linux.conf.au 2017
-
-## General comments
-
-Re-stating the audience's questions before replying is helpful.
-
-## Choose Your Own Adventure, Please!
-
-Keynote by Pia Waugh.
-
-Warns against short-sighted itch-scratching; wants to encourage more
-long-lasting systemic change.  To contrast with Maciej Cegłowski, who
-warns against [ivory-tower wank] in Sillicon Valley, where no-one
-seems interested in working on the severe poverty problems nearby.
-
-(To be fair, Pia does say we need both "symptomatic relief" and
-systemic change.)
-
-41:30
-
-> My favourite story from my studies with martial arts was actually
-> about two monks walking around.  They're walking along, elder one,
-> younger one, and when they get to the river, a person comes and says
-> "I'm being chased by robbers, can you help me across the river
-> please?".  The older monk says "Yep, not a problem", picks them up
-> and carries them across (because they're hurt).  The person gets
-> away.  And they're walking along, still in silence, and the younger
-> monk says: "… You know, back at the river back there"; the older
-> monk says "Yeah?"; the younger monk says "I thought we had taken a
-> vow of silence".  The other goes, "Yeah?".  "… Should you have
-> spoken to that person?", and the older monk says: "I put that person
-> down back at the river.  Why haven't you?"
-
-That story appeals to me: it's got some sort of
-Jesus-ish-unconditional-forgiveness-Zen vibe that feels reassuring,
-"it's OK to make mistakes, as long as you aimed for the Greater Good,
-focus on the Spirit of the Law instead of upholding the Letter".  But
-slippery slope turns that into "move fast and break things",
-consequences and accountability be damned.
-
-You can even link that to ["fussy" compilers] and false alarms: why
-should Buddhist GCC warn on Vow-of-Silence violation if it's not
-actually a problem?  The warning should be refined, the diagnosis
-should be smarter, the standard amended, otherwise how do you
-distinguish between the shades of red?
-
-["fussy" compilers]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-04/msg00190.html
-[ivory-tower wank]: http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm
-
-## Stephen King's practical advice for tech writers
-
-By Rikki Endsley.
-
-Lots of pointers, e.g. [The Care and Feeding of the
-Press](http://netpress.org/care-feeding-press/).
-
-Suggested outline:
-
-- intro (invite the reader in)
-- state the problem (background)
-- solution
-- (for tech article, tutorial, whitepaper: technical stuff (howto, FAQ))
-- conclude (important dates, action items)
-
-Parasite words: "very", "some".  Be mindful of slang.
-
-## Sharing the love: making games with PICO-8
-
-By John Dalton.
-
-> Sad old people, longing for the glory days
-
-PICO-8 restores the "Democracy of Creating".
-
-Kids get the point of sharing without having to be "encouraged" by
-licences.
-
-## Writing less, saying more: UX lessons from the small screen
-
-By Claire Mahoney.
-
-- "mobile" is not necessarily "on the move"
-- a "mobile" app does not have to be a "diet" version of the original
-
-Users do not expect the functionality to be diminished.
-
-> Context can be better than words
-
-(I feel like there is a connection to be made here with namespaces in
-programming languages.)
-
-Patterns are good, repetition is not.
-
-Defining purpose with "when X, I want Y so I can Z" helps "keeping it
-real" and reminding you of the user out there.
-
-## Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Rock Star Developers
-
-By Rikki Endsley.
-
-When writing job descriptions, stop asking for rock stars.  Focus on:
-
-- job requirements
-- job environment
-
-Makes it easier for people to figure whether they will fit in.
-
-Look for developers interested in making *others* succeed, learning
-*new* skills; make sure they are accessible, they use the best tool
-for the job, and they are able to innovate, lead, and collaborate with
-a diverse mix of people.
-
-If you have a rockstar on your hands, make sure the janitors still get
-some credits.
-
-## Why haven't you licensed your project?
-
-By Richard Fontana.
-
-"Post open-source" has actually been a thing for a while: the term
-describes the widespread trend of not attributing a license to one's
-project.
-
-Berne convention says that copyright is automatic, so this POSS
-software might be implicitly "proprietary".  Why worry?  There is a
-lot of proprietary software already.
-
-Not putting on a license constitutes a statement for some developers.
-
-Some attempts at public-domain dedication:
-
-- [WTFPL](http://www.wtfpl.net/)
-- [Unlicense](http://unlicense.org/)
-- [0-clause BSD](http://landley.net/toybox/license.html)
-- [BOLA](https://blitiri.com.ar/p/bola/)
-- [CC0](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/)
-
-## Handle Conflict, Like a Boss!
-
-By Deb Nicholson.
-
-Conflict mostly comes from missing information, mismatched goals.
-
-Avoidance, accomodation and assertion each have their own issues as
-conflict-handling strategies.
-
-Using historical motivations can help give credit to new ideas.
-
-Hypotheticals such as "What's the worst that could happen?" help
-identify the root issues people will not directly talk about.
-
-No ad hominem. No name-calling. Period.  Beware of [Contempt Culture].
-
-Setting expectations can help enforce a civil tone and constructive
-criticism.
-
-[Contempt Culture]: (https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture).
-
-## The journey of a word: how text ends up on a page
-
-By Simon Cozens.
-
-Very interesting explanations on the lengths Unicode must go to in
-order to turn humanity's sprawling mess of written communication
-methods into rigorous rules that a computer can understand.
-
-Some diacritics can be encoded either with a single code point or a
-vowel plus a combining code point; this is because Unicode intends to
-have one code point for *every character that other encodings have
-ever contained*.
-
-Cozens is publishing a free online book on the subject: [Fonts and
-Layout for Global Scripts].
-
-[Fonts and Layout for Global Scripts]: https://simoncozens.github.io/fonts-and-layout/
-
-## Surviving the Next 30 Years of Free Software
-
-By Karen Sandler.
-
-Is copyright assignment to big organizations (Canonical, FSF?) the
-solution to problems we cannot anticipate?
-
-Wills are tricky: recipients might be taxed on the "monetary value" of
-the "legacy".
-
-Using a trust as a "legal hack": would build a "registry" of free
-software; the trust can map handles to contact information to preserve
-anonymity.
-
-The idea is vaporware for now, since this trust cannot be built
-without debating a lot of finer points.
-
-> The best gift you can give to the people you love is to make sure
-> they're prepared for when you're gone.
-
-## The relationship between openness and democracy
-
-By Pia Waugh.
-
-Openness creates a natural incentive for "doing the right thing".
-
-Some people think shady deals which allow politicians to make huge
-amounts of money from the industry are fair game, since they have to
-get the investments they made during their campaign back.
-
-On "policy-based evidence" as an alternative to evidence-based policy:
-
-> That's rather funny'n'clever'n'witty… Oh shit, you're serious.
-
-How representative and legitimate are elected individuals?  Never mind
-the participation rate, most people vote for (or against) one or two
-things, not the whole program.
-
-> (13:00) Everyone loves to kick public servants; **everyone**.
-
-> (14:30) I was gonna start a cartoon.  And the first thing was gonna
-> be someone saying "I'm surprised that you're working in government,
-> I would've thought you'd disagree with X, Y, Z."  OK.
->
-> The second panel somone saying to me "I just can't believe you're
-> working in government!  I thought you had *integrity*!  I thought
-> you would disagree with all of these things!"  … *OK*.
->
-> The third person says "YOU MOTHER-"…  Anyway, goes on a complete
-> tirade, I'll probably get hit on the head.
->
-> The fourth panel is me running off in the distance.  Into the
-> sunset.  And the three people saying to each other "Why are there no
-> good people in government?"
-
-"Consulting the public" used to be a point on a checklist, not
-intended to yield useful outputs.
-
-## JavaScript is Awe-ful
-
-By Katie McLaughlin.
-
-In JavaScript, functions have to add `var` explicitly to their local
-variable declarations, otherwise they will assign to global variables.
-
-``` javascript
-> [] + []
-""
-> [] + {}
-[object Object]
-> {} + []
-0
-> {} + {}
-NaN
-```
-
-JavaScript is a registered trademark; ECMAScript is the actual,
-*standardised*, **versioned** language.
-
-Some examples of things which can be accomplished without JavaScript:
-<http://youmightnotneedjs.com/>.
-
-Cross-compilers alleviate some of the pain; one has to be careful with
-their prefered language's warts though.
-
-In Ruby, `&&` and `and` do not have the same precedence with respect
-to `not`.
-
-## Data Structures and Algorithms in the 21st Century
-
-By Jacinta Catherine Richardson.
-
-Voronoi diagrams have a lot of applications:
-
-- modeling the capacity of wireless networks
-- robot navigation
-- mouse hoverstate
-
-Fourier transforms help with data compression.  Naively: O(n²); from
-the sixties onward: O(n log(n)).  Nearly Optimal Sparse Fourier
-Transform (2012): O(k log(n)), helps on-the-fly data compression.
-
-Singular Value Decomposition helps with pattern recognition/comparison
-by allowing to express e.g. rotations.
-
-> New stuff!
-
-Evolutionary algorithms (a form of AI/machine learning) to find
-optima:
-
-- a function to tell "is this good enough?"
-
-Genetic algorithms (a form of evolutionary):
-
-- fitness criteria
-- swap information ("breed")
-- random-ish variations
-
-> Setting up the fitness criteria and the initial conditions for
-> genetic algorithms […] is as much art as it is science.
-
-Artificial Immune Systems (90s) is used in computer security.
-
-Swarm algorithms: agents share the value of their findings and
-converge.  Used e.g. to locate cancer; considered for e.g. traveling
-sales person problem, unmanned cars.
-
-Bacterial Foraging Optimization; Shuffled Frog Leaping;
-Teaching-Learning-Based Optimisations.
-
-[Foldit](http://fold.it) is an experiment consisting in making humans
-solve hard problems (e.g. protein folding) through competitive gaming.
-
-Graph isomorphism is *hard*.  Easy to verify, hard to solve. Until a
-week ago: we can now solve them in quasi-polynomial time.
-
-## My personal fight against the modern laptop
-
-By Hamish Coleman.
-
-Ports, durability, keys are getting worse.
-
-Plugging an older keyboard on newer Thinkpads presents issues:
-
-- the motherboard sends in high-voltage current to enable backlight
-- some keys don't work; the firmware must be changed (and then
-  re-encrypted)
-
-Sharing firmware patches is challenging; most end-users have no idea
-what these even are; some of them run Windows and cannot easily use
-the patching tools.
-
-Newer firmwares seem to be signed; this will probably make them harder
-to tweak.