Progress

This week I'm holding a Python training course, which means it's a full week. But the contract for my large customer is finally here and I can rest easily. I have to tell this to my small customer, however, who is very sad now, so I am very sad now too.

Articles

• Continuous games
• The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet
• A high-dimensional sphere spilling out of a high-dimensional cube despite exponentially many constraints -- Stanislav Fort: Yes, maths in dimensions ≥ 4 are surprising and very unintuitive. Spheres become those weird things that don't take up much space, or "spill out" on the sides if you stretch them.
• A forgotten product: The glass that was almost indestructable -- by Florian Vick -- Medium: Well, that's a convenient narrative, isn't it? The product was so good that no one needed to replace it, which is why it's not around any more.
• BMW’s Virtual Factory Uses AI to Hone the Assembly Line -- WIRED: While the model of that line looks really cool, I don't think graphics animations are necessary to simulate such a thing.
• TOoᴼᵒº˙⁰0₀ₒ.·ph auf Twitter: "since this good call by @quartzthings in April 2020 i’ve kept some notes on “charts that look like data errors” spending on food and drink https://t.co/gg6qTMLCfy" / Twitter
• The Internet Changed My Life -- Pointers Gone Wild: finally, a nice story about the internet, even though I feel for the guy.
• Russian-Made Elbrus CPUs Fail Trials, 'A Completely Unacceptable Platform' -- Tom's Hardware: The headline gives this a very different feeling from the actual article: From a standing start, Russian CPU engineering has created a stable product that is only a factor of ~1-30 behind current Intel Xeon CPUs. That's a massive achievement, and we Europeans should look with immeasurable envy at those processors.
• Why skyscrapers are so short - Works in Progress: If you ever thought: "wait, why is this skyscraper so short?", here's your answer.

Books

• Season of Storms by Andrzej Sapkowski: it has that... taste of running around pointlessly already. I mean the world is great as always, but all of this seems... well...
  I've finished this now, and while most of it is, indeed, pointless running around, there's also a bit of adventure and philosophy in there. 7/10

Games

• Freelancer with oryon, an old space sim MMORPG that has a half-serious online community still around. It's ok, I guess. The interface is very dated and clunky, and combat is, as usual, not my kind of thing, and it's kind-of random which is annoying. But the trade and the trade optimization is an interesting enough puzzle. 6/10.
• Starbound with Anton and Simon. Sideways minecraft with monsters and multiple planets. I like it! The most hilarious thing is that every player chooses their own difficulty, so one of us has a harder life than the other two. 8/10

Recipes

• Lemon Mousse: I didn't do the gelatine correctly, so it was a wonderful mousse at the top with a lake of lemon juice at the bottom. Tasty, but not as expected. More research is needed.

Other media

• Building a self-driving electric cart
• My 500-LED xmas tree got into Harvard., hach, Matt Parker. He's such a jewel.
• Container terminal Rotterdam - YouTube: All the machines in this video are automatic.