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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.