Progress

Work is going not as fast as I had hoped, but it goes ahead.

The hackathon I had planned to attend was converted to virtual-only because of COVID. But it worked out quite well. We made a lot of progress and found some really exciting solutions. I'm looking forward to what the teams make of it afterwards.

PlantEd

I unpacked my stuff. That's as far as I got.

NTS

I read up on CSG geometry. Quite complicated, all that, but at their core, the algorithms are simple. CSG could well be the differentiator this project needs.

• Hyperfun
• CGAL - # Computational Geometry Algorithms Library
• Survey of CSG algorithms
• StackOverflow: Constructive solid geometry mesh
• libCSG - A constructive "solid" geometry library

What if we "pre-solve" the most common cases and then just disallow all others? Like, a handful of cuts with certain parameter areas and everything else is just not possible?

Articles

• Sutton Hoo helmet
• Goiânia accident: One of the largest radiation accidents, when one radiation source was stolen from a derelict hospital and everyone involved didn't know the least thing about radiation.
• How I found a bug in Intel Skylake processors: One of the OCaml team found a bug in an OCaml program and traced it back to a processor issue.
• Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes: I'd really like to try out an anechoic chamber.
• Japanese Company Purposely Designs Dull, Boring Toys
• A Prototype Original iPod: If you're so paranoid that you don't trust the engineers working on your product...
• 2,050-year-old Roman tomb offers insights on ancient concrete resilience
• Heavens Above: such a great space resource
• It’s That Time of Year Again: A parable on daylight savings time The name alone is madness, no one is saving any kind of time.
• "This project will only take 2 hours": no, it will take a lot longer.
• Love seems like a high priority: That's a bit of a weird one, but the core idea is interesting: there is very little research nor services that help people fall in love.
• Lesser Known PostgreSQL Features: Another fantastic Haki Benita article on PostgreSQL
• Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies: Every few years I come back to the idea of better file systems. Still no solution, though.
• The number one rule of risk, and why it matters to your games business: This discusses operational vs. financial risks, and how game development trades these off for each other. I think I disagree, simply because this tradeoff exists in everything.
• Organ transplant patients (maybe) don’t get dementia. Here’s why.: The proof seems quite thin. Let's wait a bit, maybe.
• How To Make A CPU - A Simple Picture Based Explanation: Showing all the steps necessary for making a CPU in simple pictures. Funny!
• It’s Time for Some Game Theory: Experiencing history in Assassin’s Creed.: Key takeaway: Might not be accurate, but: "What the boys did nearly unanimously report to Gilbert is that Assassin’s Creed had made them feel more emotionally connected to the past. “It’s not like you’re learning about history” from playing the games, one explained. “You’re experiencing it.” As another put it, “Assassin’s Creed reminds us that history is more than just words on a page. History is human experience.” An interviewee named Henry told Gilbert about the powerful emotional reaction he experienced after playing through ACIII’s portrayal of the Boston Massacre and realizing, for the first time, how frightened participants in the actual event would have been: “That was a terror not like anything I had ever read. But I felt that.”" -- powerful stuff!
• 3D-printable hexagonal mirror array capable of reflecting sunlight into arbitrary patterns: What a fantastic idea: taking many small mirrors at specific angles to project a sunlight pattern on the ground.
• Securing your digital life, part one: The basics and Securing your digital life, part two: The bigger picture—and special circumstances
• Apply for an ACX grant: a rich-enough person funding world-bettering projects. Nice!
• Visualizing Networks in Python: Well, now that I've started looking at visualizations, I can't stop!
• Matplotlib vs. Plotly Express: Which One is the Best Library for Data Visualization?: Spoiler: Plotly.
• Which Python Library Is the Best for Data Visualization?: All are good.
• Pyodide: Bringing the scientific Python stack to the browser: This looks really, really nice!
• Scattered Thoughts on Why I Waste My Own Time: Everyone is struggling with the same things...
• Ruby vs Python comes down to the for loop: Another one I disagree with. Or maybe I don't understand it?
• How To Sort By Average Rating: Lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter
• Long-range e-bike: The things you can build when you're wealthy enough to not care about time nor money. For example, this battery-enhanced pedelec with a 2.1kWh battery and 45km/h top speed.
• New mineral davemaoite discovered inside a diamond from Earth's mantle

Libraries, programming, etc

• Excalideck: Excalideck is an app for authoring slide decks that look hand-drawn. Excalideck is based on Excalidraw.
• Hamilton: The micro-framework to create dataframes from functions. Specifically, Hamilton is a framework that allows for delayed executions of functions in a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). This is meant to solve the problem of creating complex data pipelines. Core to the design of Hamilton is a clear mapping of function name to implementation. That is, Hamilton forces a certain paradigm with writing functions, and aims for DAG clarity, easy modifications, unit testing, and documentation.
• Paperless-ng: a document store that looks simple and useful enough that I might be tempted to install it somewhere.
• Shiny by RStudio: "Shiny is an R package that makes it easy to build interactive web apps straight from R. You can host standalone apps on a webpage or embed them in R Markdown documents or build dashboards. You can also extend your Shiny apps with CSS themes, htmlwidgets, and JavaScript actions." A customer showed me their interactive page powered by Shiny. It was really amazing and interactive and cool. Now I'm envious and want to have something like that for Python...
• plotly Dash: is somewhat similar to Shiny, except not really. I should do more with Dash, it is awesome.
• Dash Core Components for Visualization.: Network and Datatable views for Dash
• High-level tools to simplify visualization in Python: HoloViz provides a set of Python packages that make viz easier, more accurate, and more powerful: Panel for making apps and dashboards for your plots from any supported plotting library, hvPlot to quickly generate interactive plots from your data, HoloViews to help you make all of your data instantly visualizable, GeoViews to extend HoloViews for geographic data, Datashader for rendering even the largest datasets, Param to create declarative user-configurable objects, and Colorcet for perceptually uniform colormaps.
• Pyodide: Python with the scientific stack, compiled to WebAssembly. Pyodide may be used in any context where you want to run Python inside a web browser. Pyodide brings the Python 3.9 runtime to the browser via WebAssembly, along with the Python scientific stack including NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, SciPy, and scikit-learn. Over 75 packages are currently available. In addition it’s possible to install pure Python wheels from PyPi. Pyodide provides transparent conversion of objects between Javascript and Python. When used inside a browser, Python has full access to the Web APIs.
• Apache Zeppelin: Another notebook server. I am unclear on why this should be used instead of Jupyter.
• Fast Random Integer Generation in an Interval: "Pseudo-random values are usually generated in words of a fixed number of bits (e.g., 32 bits, 64 bits) using algorithms such as a linear congruential generator. We need functions to convert such random words to random integers in an interval ([0,s)) without introducing statistical biases. The standard functions in programming languages such as Java involve integer divisions. Unfortunately, division instructions are relatively expensive. We review an unbiased function to generate ranged integers from a source of random words that avoids integer divisions with high probability."
• Rotation by Shearing: "What follows are my own notes on Alan Paeth's "A Fast Algorithm for General Raster Rotation," as published in the proceedings of Graphics Interface '86. This is a very popular algorithm for image rotation, used by many libraries such as ImageMagick, pnmrotate, etc. Initially I hoped that this scheme would be suitable for use in scientific data processing where arrays must be rotated, but now I believe that this scheme is unsuitable due to the poor interpolation. I also question whether this is any faster than bilinear interpolation when run on general purpose hardware (due to the large amount of data movement); however I do not yet have any quantitative measurements. These concerns aside, the decomposition of a rotation into three shears is interesting in its own right."

Books

• Dark Matter by Black Crouch: I like the premise. The book, so far, does not satisfy me. I liked recursion very much, but this one... meh. I'm still hoping it'll pick up, though.

Games

• Journey to the Savage Planet with Anton: beautiful and whimsical exploration, and then all of a sudden, loads of stuff to do. Great two-player game. The only downside is that there's no map. 9/10
• Alba, Wildlife Adventure: cute little exploration game about snapping photos of animals. 7/10

Other media

• DiResta Fancy Leather Wallet
• Building a quality USB-C microphone
• The Witness Epiphany Compilation: those moments when streamers find a secret of the game
• golden balls. the weirdest split or steal ever!: using game theory to win at the prisoner's dilemma
• Introducing the Icelandverse: "Welcome to this very natural setting!"
• The Dutch Angle: Why movies tilt their cameras (Vox)
• Der Wunsch: What a fantastic ad for... a discounter?!