I lied – this post isn’t going to be about how I built the Twitter bot. There are dozens of half-way decent tutorials scattered across the web and even a couple of decent ones and you’re welcome to exercise your DuckDuckGo-Fu or Google-Fu and figure it out.
Instead, this will be about my experience wading into the collective dumpster fire/garbage pit that is Twitter with some simple automation.
Been working on lots of little personal projects lately, but find myself running into that old problem of, too much shit to do with not enough time to do it. That’s another way to say, color me lazy, but let’s not reinvent the wheel with everything I do.
Born of this labor…
I found a fairly decent online tutorial for creating a Twitter sentiment analyzer. Though helpful, I didn’t find that it was particularly intuitive, put together fairly well or workable in Python 3.
So, I took the concepts and substantial amount of the code and started fixing, modifying and rewriting…
Good take from Jon Sharpe on ethics in tech. Suspect this issue will take center stage in many aspects of our lives the next few years: https://blog.jonrshar.pe/2018/Jul/17/coed-ethics-2018.html
I’ve got a side project I’ve been working on the last 2-3 weeks that’s been taking up most of my non-working waking hours (and some of my sleeping hours too). I also started up a running program again to prep for my next 50-miler in March. So, feeling much more in tune physically, but kinda fuzzy mentally w/ my reduced sleep. Great days ahead!
A good read for software entrepreneurs, few years old, but still good insights: https://basecamp.com/books/Getting%20Real.pdf
“…An amazing QEMU disk image every day!”
This made me laugh…
I’ve been fascinated with artificial life since reading about Conway’s Game of Life in one of my granddad’s copies of Scientific American. Within the last few years we’ve developed the technology to synthesize entirely new species here in the analog world. Craig Venter describes his Institute’s work on the first synthetic organism in a 2010 TED Talk.
Helpful in decision-making when preferred weights of risks vs benefits need some structure: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-attribute_utility
http://archive.pcjs.org/pubs/dec/pdp11/basic/BASIC_Programming_Manual_Dec70.pdf