Kate Gregory

@gregcons.bsky.social

1328 Followers 662 Following

I advise, develop, mentor, write, and speak. C++ mostly. One of the Carbon leads. Limited availability; you can ask. Want me to speak? http://gregcons.com/SpeakerKit.aspx She/her.

A crumpled freight car, thickly graffitied in bright colours among thick pines. Judging from their width they are younger than the wreck, which happened 70 years ago
Security line for Canada Switzerland world cup game
Kate Gregory: I may not live there, but I was born there and have family there and I felt the shock of it too. [friend]: Heartbroken Kate Gregory Kate Gregory: May today be the worst of it for you, and it be at least a little better tomorrow. [friend]: Prob will head back to the US Kate Gregory: Out of the frying pan my friend. Who knows what November will bring there? Bunch of people saying they never dreamed that voting for him might mean he would win?
An email from a company with the name partly redacted, it ends Financial. The subject of the email is "Our new website is almost here!" and the preview starts "With our upcoming website refresh," as if anybody would care even once the refresh was live, much less in advance like this.
Graph of my heart rate through the day, low until about 8am when i went down to the conference from my room, variable through the next 8 hours as I attended sessions etc, then spiking well above 125 for the hour in which i delivered a keynote.
People waiting on a GO train platform at Union Station Toronto. A train track dominates the foreground.
Truth and Reconciliation: the State of Indigenous Tech
Benchmarking and optimizing the Carbon compiler
Once types are introduced into a programming language, they allow us to distinguish between timescopes, in particular between compile time and run time
Carbon: graduating from the experiment
Slide describing panics of earlier eras about IDE'S, Stack Overflow, AI
Graph of unexplained infant deaths in England and Wales, 1979 to 2024. The early bars are around 1000 or more deaths a year, nearly 1500 some years. Later bars are the low hundreds. There's a dramatic and sudden drop in the early 90s and a caption labels that year as "Back to Sleep campaign launched." Fine print sources the graph as using numbers from the Office for National Statistics, defines an infant as under one year old, and points out 2023 and 2024 numbers are incomplete. There is also a BBC logo.
A recent illustration of the “universal vaccine” approach came in a study led by Drs. Adam Grippin and Steven Lin of MD Anderson Cancer Center. They reviewed records of more than a thousand cancer patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors and found that getting an mRNA-based Covid vaccine was linked to a significantly better response to cancer drugs. Patients with small cell lung cancer who had gotten a Covid shot within 100 days of starting treatment lived nearly twice as long as those who hadn’t. For those with melanoma, researchers couldn’t calculate the difference in survival time because so many of the patients who had gotten a Covid vaccine were still alive.
A small shiny statue of a bird (ptarmigan? it is black on the bottom half, white on the top half, with red feet and beak and a black cap) with statues of whales behind it. They all sit on a shiny surface in which they are reflected. There is a map in the background behind them all.
Lanyards for the NDC Toronto conference. They are blue, with a red maple leaf and white text "NDC {Toronto} 2026 on each half.
A post from a restaurant titled "HOT CHICKEN ROTI" showing a thin bread wrapper around a yellow curry with chickpeas, potatoes, and chicken visible in the filling.
a pain scale from 0 pain free through mild, minor, uncomfortable, moderate, distracting, distressing, severe, intense, excruciating to 10 unspeakable. A sentence adds more details for each.
A browser page that proclaims in large letters "An Error is occurred" and offers only a Back to Home link. (Spoiler: following the link will lead back here to the error page.)
A bike lane completely neglected and full of snow. Paths across it worn by feet. Sidewalk and road are clear.
Email with the subject line "Kate, last week your posts reached 6 people" that continues enthusiastically to let me know my posts made an impact and my audience showed up.
An elephant in the style of a lion, by someone apparently not burdened with having actually met one. (The front legs are bending utterly the wrong way)
A bag of Minde Mork chocolate - mint, mocha, and sea salt flavours.
A package of 16 "skippers pipes" with a lot of old-style nautical imagery (many sailed ship, lighthouse on what appear to be an iceberg, a ships's wheel, seabirds) on the box. The pipes themselves are made of black licorice with little red candy dots clustered to represent glowing embers at the top of the pipe bowl.
Blue swimming spa water in the foreground with snowy trees just outside it. Thick snow covers most surfaces and plenty of large flaked snow is falling still.
View of a mini Cooper from behind with brake lights on. Each is an arrow pointing in towards the centre of the car. Confusing.
Tshirts. All star the Toronto Blue Jays. Left to right 1985 AL Champions, 1992 AL Champions, 1992 World Series Champions (featuring the trophy), 1992 World Series Champions (featuring a lot of Canadian flags.)
The title was created for the eighth time for Prince Andrew, second son of Queen Elizabeth II. As of 2022, the only legitimate offspring are his two daughters from his marriage to Sarah, Duchess of York. Thus, if he has no future (legitimate) sons, the title will again become extinct—reverting to the Crown—upon his death. Aside from the first creation, every time the Dukedom of York has been created it has had only one occupant, that person either inheriting the throne or dying without male heirs.
Opening slide of a presentation. /* The Code is Documentation Enough */. (The punctuation makes it a comment in C++, which many developers use to document code. The talk is by Tina Ulbrich.
A small cardboard container with a few pieces of popcorn in it. On one side is written "make" and on another, "me"
A person holding a long thin stick over their head to poke a button on a ceiling-mounted projector. It worked!
A podium and a speaker (Klaus Iglberger) on stage. Behind Klaus is the NDC logo. To one side is a small table and on that a little cloth doll. She represents Rainer Grimm who can no longer travel to conferences.
View from a restaurant table through arched windows. There's an umbrella'd terrace and beyond that a lake. The room is wood-panelled and old fashioned.
A vending machine that sells coffee. Sorry the picture is rotated 90 degrees. Taken on a moving train.
Two rolls of candy. The love hearts, labelled Bestevenn, have been opened. The liquorice mentos have not.
A delicately arching bridge over a fjord with hulking mountains below it.
Sewer access cover (with reindeer) in Tromso, Norway
An image headed CURSIVE ALPHABET shows the letters Aa Bb and so on through Zz. They are written on triplet horizontal lines to help show the proportions. Both the i and the j have dots above them.
Moraine Lake is an exquisite shade of blue. It's surrounded by pine trees and rocky mountains. Also by hundreds of people who (with a good deal of effort from me) are not in this picture.
Road sign saying "const ahead" with some impressive mountains in the background.
A glacial stream near Nairn Falls in British Columbia. The water is pale green and moving fast. There are trees in the foreground and on the other side of the stream. It is definitely a forest stream and probably memory safe
The base of a red lamp pole in Victoria BC's Chinatown. It has yellow (gold) scrolling. In the background across the street you can see the top of a similar pole
A painting on silk hangs in a woodlined staircase. It's 7 feet long and 2 feet wide. In the foreground, white pines extend up out of the frame and a pair of loons are in the water. In the distance is a spectacular sunrise over the water with a green hill on the horizon. The branches of the pine are rimmed with copper.
Screen showing Carbon C++ interop in action with Scott Hanselman posing in front of it
Two sandwiches (and accessories) on a sunny park bench
At the right, me getting ready to deliver a talk. In the middle, my laptop showing the title slide for my talk, and behind that attendees getting into place for the talk itself.
Web page excerpt: Sorry to see you go! If Substack isn’t the right platform for you, consider following me on others: Instagram, Facebook or X! You can also watch committees or City Council live on YouTube.
Screenshot of an email from Olivia Chow (well, her office or staff) saying "I've moved my newsletter to substack!" which is a very bad thing to do and not something to announce cheerfully to a progressive audience.
The floor of a Singapore MRT station, showing where to stand and wait (red arrows) and where to leave empty for train riders to leave (green arrow.) Made possible by platform edge doors.
Two birch trees that normally are parallel and vertical, bent down until the tips touch the ground. Behind them are pine trees thickly coated in ice. A little ragged snow is in the foreground. The light is blue because the picture was taken just as day broke.
An unpruned tree in a rural conservation area in Ontario in lovely spring sunlight. It has a natural hemisphere shape and reaches out in all directions. The green is that new-growth green of spring and the blue sky behind it is cloudless. Taken May 2015.
the foreground is a white stony path, probably chalk since this is in the village of Avebury. The path curves across grass towards a road that has cars on it. Large standing stones form a circle on the other side of the road. One stone is on this side of the road, and the path curves past it. It's a cloudy day but the stones and the sheep grazing inside them are in sunlight.
But a good way to resolve the debate might be to establish an informal rule: responding to Trump's provocations is always acceptable if the effect is to belittle him; to make him look like a boob or a chump or a phony. Not "ahhh! this is dangerous!" but "whatever, clown!" Not "what about our norms!" but "try me." Etc, etc.
Dialog box from Microsoft Outlook that claims "Copying meetings is not supported." with only the option to say "OK" -- which it very much is not.
Two search results from amazon for "swedish fish". On the left, a yellow-and-blue package of red fruity candy. On the right, a yellow-and-red tin of Surströmming - fermented actual fish from Sweden.
Screenshot of a web browser at 511on.ca/map, the official government of Ontario road conditions information. Under a black banner identifying the site and offering a hamburger menu, there is a blue banner that says ALERTS and describes the current bad weather. At the rightmost end of the banner is an X I assumed was to close the alert, but it's actually a link to a page about their Twitter presence. The actual map isn't relevant to this post, but shows most roads are now bare, but closures remain (Highway 11 has been closed for over two nights and is still not open yet.)
Screen shot of a bluesky post in progress with a picture in place. Superimposed over the picture are a button reading +ALT, a pen icon, and an x icon. Below the picture (an autumn scene of a cottage by a lake, with fallen leaves EVERYWHERE) is text that says "Alt text describes images for blind and low-vision users, and helps give context to everyone" Below that are more Bluesky UI buttons. At the top is a grey warning banner "One or more images is missing alt text" because I have set that option in my settings to remind me to always provide alt text.
A slide that says "It is more important to be a good person than to be a good programmer" from the opening keynote at Meeting C++ 2024 by Titus Winters. The picture is taken from the back of the room and shows the backs of many attendees of various ages and genders. I enjoyed both the keynote and the lovely way everyone reacted to it.
a map showing 7 power outages near the hamlet of Pontypool, Ontario
A very pink sunrise above silhouetted pines
What is Abstraction? Give a name for stuff. Recall / use via Name. Hide details behind Name Encapsulation enables change