Episode: 2232
Title: HPR2232: linux.conf.au 2017: Lilly Ryan
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2232/hpr2232.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 16:16:34

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This is HBR episode 2,232 entitled Linux.com.0 2017, LilyRion and in part on the series Interviews.
It is hosted by Clinton Roy and in about 16 minutes long and Karina Cleanflag.
The summer is an interview with Beaker and trainer LilyRion.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at an honesthost.com.
Welcome to our second interview for Thursday at Linux.com for you.
I'm here with LilyRion. Lily is a speaker here at the conference.
I first met Lily over in New Zealand at the Python conference in New Zealand,
where she was leading a teaching course. I think that was for beginners or for students.
That was an entry luxury Python course for total beginners.
Yeah right and I think I put my hand up as a help or something for that.
Yeah you did and thank you that was awesome.
Yeah so like I've gone on to help out with a thing called Code of Dojo and that's like a worldwide
thing. That started in Ireland for memory. Okay and basically it's a set of fairly
fairly loose lessons on teaching kids how to code. Back in Brisbane we're really lucky.
The local Brisbane City Council has picked it up and they've run it at all of Brisbane City
Council libraries and they've run four or five sessions a year. So like I'm sort of you do
sort of like six weekends a year with the students and you run through basic programming
and consumables with them. So I've sort of continued on with that.
That's brilliant. So glad to hear it.
Yeah it's an interesting thing because it's one thing to know how to do something but it's
another thing entirely it's sort of another level of expertise to be able to flip that and
teach those concepts to somebody else.
Yeah I've heard interesting experiences running Python workshops in a lot of different places.
So Kiwi PyCon was one where I ran this particular workshop but I've run a few in Melbourne where I'm
based and one of the more challenging experiences that I've had teaching Python to beginners and
this course has aimed at adults usually not kids so much.
We're getting a couple of people in the course who spoke Spanish is their first language
not English and the course has offered in a few different languages but Spanish isn't one of them.
So I speak Spanish and it was interesting to sit down next to them and talk to them through
programming in a second language for me. It's not an experience I get very often as to teach
by coding language in a second language.
Yeah yeah like I know like English is the sort of language that well like half of
half of English is other words that with air quotes borrowed from other languages and
and we English does seem to be quite well well I don't want to say designed but
the way that English is evolved means that if we need to add a new word to describe some
technique and concept we will we will beg borrow and steal word from some other language and
and make it fit is is finish that that way or no Spanish is a little like French in the sense that
they they don't like loan words they will translate words where they can right okay so it's a
pure language. Sometimes yes well this is Spain based Spanish I know in Latin America it can
be a bit different and they will adopt words from particularly from English which is then most
as cultural influence on that continent. There was a really good talk at the conference here yesterday
which was by three people who came from different cultural backgrounds talking about what it's
like in the open source community to have to use their second language English and the challenges
that they face when the English instructions are written by English native speakers. It was really
great and I'm thinking about going and going back and adapting some of the workshops that I've
run in the past to make sure that they avoid some of those pitfalls because it's important to be
aware that the way you communicate doesn't always make sense to everybody I mean that's important
pretty much anything but if you're teaching particularly. Yeah I mean I know you know I've certainly
struggled at various times to try and convey a concept using English to people you know who's
seeing English is their first language and I've struggled to find the right words I can only imagine
how difficult it is to go across yes another language barrier. Oh yeah it's something that I need
to remind myself to be mindful of more often and the talk yesterday was wonderful at spelling out
some of the ways that we could be better at it as a community. Cool I will add a link to to that
to the tonight's for this episode because most almost all of the the talks are getting recorded
and I've already seen a lot of the talks up on YouTube so I should be able to link to that
that particular presentation in the notes. So you are also giving a talk here at the conference.
Yeah that's right I gave it on Tuesday it was called The Rage Against the Ghost of Machine.
The talk video came up the day after I was really impressed. Cool. It was about privacy and
data and metadata and the afterlife the the idea that what we're doing at the minute in terms
of data retention is something that carries on further than we probably think or further than we
would like to think because contemplating the end of our own existence is quite an uncomfortable
thing and we don't do it that often. So is that is that having a like an Australian specific context
or is that a much wider thing? I do touch on the Australian metadata retention legislation in
that but it's more general because a lot of the companies that I'm talking about are the main
culprits of this are American based. I mean the traditional Google Facebook Amazon trifecta
particularly those who run the ad networks especially have a whole bunch of data about us that
can tell a lot about the way that we think and the talk that I gave was about how that data could
be used about us in future particularly in conjunction with machine learning algorithms and
also the rising personal assistance and automated assistance and all of those kinds of things.
My theory is that it's probably a lot cheaper to get somebody's existing personality
than to write a whole AI from scratch and if you have access to somebody's personality
through the data that they explicitly publish like their Facebook posts and their tweets
as well as things that you know that they're interested in through a cookie metadata and all
of that kind of thing then you have a really well-rounded picture of that person well-rounded
is probably the wrong phrase but you have a very intense picture of that person. As complete as
you could possibly imagine without doing like a 10,000 question with them or something like that.
Yeah yeah I mean there's data that gets captured in this way that we wouldn't share even with
our intimate partners just because it shows processes of our chains of thought so you spend
the late night on Wikipedia and you're clicking from one article to another that you find interesting.
It shows a lot about your own interests over time. So was your talk a warning?
Was it trying to give some advice on what was it a warning about our possible futures where we'll have
some sort of echo of ourselves surviving after our deaths? Was it trying to give a list of
things to do to try and stop your profile continuing to exist? Yes and no. Warning might be the
wrong word for it. Personally I'm not in favor of this happening but I also think that if people
want to donate their personalities to the world for posterity the way that people can donate
their bodies after they die they should be able to and they should be able to make sure that the
data that they that they contribute is an accurate representation of them or you know leave the
legacy that they want to leave instead of the one that's being collected about them right now which
is generally something that flies under the radar for most people. Right right so there's that that
element of choice there. What I'm really interested in is informed consent. Making sure that people
can understand what companies like this are doing with their data and the information that gets
recorded about them every time they interact with the internet in any way because that's something
that isn't always obvious even to techies and I think that by drawing it out into a future
scenario regardless of the fact that it's hypothetical helps to tell a story which people like
stories can paint a picture of what this could look like in 50 years. Right and I found that this has
been one of the most powerful ways I've been able to convey this information so far. Okay cool.
And plus it's fun to talk about ghosts. Yeah yeah I'm trying to think that you gave a story. I'm
trying to think was it a dinner? A dinner talk that you did. I'm struggling to remember the details
now. This kiwi pike one last year? Yeah was it was it the was it radio signals? Yes, scientific
rule again as well. Right. Yeah I've given that one a couple of times. Yeah that one that one was
very interesting. I hopefully I'll be able to find the video of that and link that to the story
notes as well. Yeah they've got one up. Cool. Well yeah that was that was about the first hack in
history which when you're talking about technology hacks um happened in 1903 and it was all about
radio tech. You'll notice a theme here I'm sort of exploring the past and the future and all
of that kind of thing and the ethics and extrapolating from all of that based on our current situation.
Yep yep. Part of that's because I was a historian before I became a software engineer and I've
got a really deep seated interest in looking outside the spectrum of what we think we know in terms
of the tech industry. Yep. And seeing what we can borrow from others. I'm not unique in that
regard I know but I find it very interesting personally and it's what drives me often in the talks
that I give. Well I think um I think the the current sort of development modes that we've got are
very much focused on the next feature or the next bug fits and you know everyone's doing agile
these days which means you've got like a two three four weeks sprint so the amount of looking
ahead we do is that long. Yeah. And you know we're starting to see issues with this now in terms of
security where the security people have been screaming at us developers to um look fundamentally
deeper at our code and then try to learn the lessons of the past where instead of just patching
each bug we we try to patch each pass of luck as a user and we still haven't figured out how to do
that. It's interesting also when I say that I'm a historian or a tech historian most people think
that goes back to about 1970 and I'm really looking more at 1870 or or further back in the talk
that I gave at this conference um a lot of what I was drawing on was 17th century philosophical
concepts not that that was necessarily something that you would know if you listen to the talk
but that's what it was and that's the sort of scale that I'm trying to think at because I think
that this sort of perspective is useful. A lot of the way that we deal with technological problems
is just a facet of the way that we've always communicated with each other's human beings and
if you look at it in that sense people have been discussing these issues and what we do about them
for a very long time. It sort of strikes me that you're I guess most of us who are sort of creating
the technology at some respects um we sort of separate ourselves from the things that we're building
where it sounds like we're all trying to say that these artifacts that we're producing they are
they are part of humanity they are expressions of humanity. Yeah they are. Whereas the engineer will
sort of go you know this bridge it's made for driving trucks over. It's not it's not the expression
of myself as a human or anything like that. Well you go to a museum and you look at the very early
artifacts and they'll say oh this is a very ex you know a very good example of an early stone hammer
which is a tool and a lot of what we look at in terms of software is also a tool for facilitating
one thing or another but the amount that archaeologists and historians have been able to glean
from a stone hammer about the way that people lived and worked in those sorts of situations is
enormous. I mean a lot of the information we have about things that happened 10,000 years ago
because of artifacts like that that's what gets left. Our software tells us an equal amount
about the way that we are as human beings I think. Yep okay yep yeah and I guess you know there's
a lot of there's a lot of people stuff like but you know in the open source movement where you've
got like the the rights of the user where we put the the rights of the user at the top of the
pedestal in a way where you know at least at least we're at least giving lip service to putting
the user at the top of the top of the pile we don't always put the the user at the top
we know we don't even always put other developers at the top you know we we quite often
are quite cruel to other other people who are doing the same thing as we are just on different
projects and yeah there does at times seem to be a fundamental lack of humanity when we
develop as a deal of how the developments yeah it's it's interesting to think that
computer people aren't people people because in a lot of ways we're providing the tools that
people are going to use in the future yeah everybody is a technologist now everybody who
touches the internet in any way has to be in some way and these are just you know the tools
that we use to talk to each other yep it's a new expression of something very old
yeah right yeah yeah are there any other talks that you're looking forward to at LCA that you'd
like to mention um actually saw the the program for the lightning talks that are going to happen
on Friday evening um there are a few that look really interesting um but are not tech-related
I know Jacinta Richardson's got one about going to Antarctica which oh something I've always wanted
to do has has she actually gone or she's just oh she's been uh twice I think oh wow okay cool
excellent um that makes my little south coast track talk seem a little bit tiny in
Harrison oh geographically nearly there and there's uh there's another one called lightning
karaoke and I'm keen to see how that can oh I think I might put the e-plugs in for that one
see how we go yeah all right everything looks great though and it's been a really wonderful
conference excellent okay cheers thank you very much for for talking to me thanks for having me
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