Progress

This week, the new assignment starts. This also means the old assignment stops, which is sad.

PlantEd

I really, really wanted to do something this week. Meh. Next week!

NTS

We started work on The New Algorithm, but all of us were too tired to make it work completely. It's a great start, however, so we'll continue down that avenue.

Articles

• Career Advice Nobody Gave Me: Never Ignore a Recruiter -- by Alex Chesser -- Feb, 2022: I'm not sure I agree with this oneas do most commenters on HN. Getting mail from recruiters might be nice for the ones that are actually interested, or for those rare times when you're actually desperately looking for something. The only responses I have earned from recruiters so far is: "I've never recruited anyone at those rates."
• How I reversed a NodeJS malware and found the author -- The Devops Guy
• Apple’s new ad invites you to imagine dying alone without a Watch on your wrist - The Verge: The underlying message is brutally clear: if they didn’t have this miraculous life-saving product on their wrists, they could have died alone.
• How I hacked SONOS and YouTube the same day -- Didelot Maurice-Michel: Weeeelll, replaying commands isn't really the same thing as "hacking", is it? The hard part isn't even finding the commands, since there's a library for that, but getting it signed with the correct key.

Libraries, programming, etc

• Luxon, successor to the not-any-more recommended moment.js
• Minion (perl library) source code: This is an example of a real and well-written SQL integration.
• Unicode arrows: all of them
• WebVM: server-less x86 virtual machines in the browser: TL;DR — We made a server-less virtual Linux environment that runs unmodified Debian binaries in the browser. This is powered by CheerpX, a WebAssembly virtualization platform.
• canonical/dqlite: Embeddable, replicated and fault tolerant SQL engine.: dqlite is a C library that implements an embeddable and replicated SQL database engine with high-availability and automatic failover. The acronym "dqlite" stands for "distributed SQLite", meaning that dqlite extends SQLite with a network protocol that can connect together various instances of your application and have them act as a highly-available cluster, with no dependency on external databases.
• Contrast with: rqlite/rqlite: The lightweight, distributed relational database built on SQLite: rqlite is an easy-to-use, lightweight, distributed relational database, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. rqlite is simple to deploy, operating it is very straightforward, and its clustering capabilities provide you with fault-tolerance and high-availability. rqlite is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

Books

• The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde: After reading the nursery crime series last week, I simply devoured this one. It's pure Fforde: whimsical, fantastical, outrageous, smart.
• Free Radical by Shamus Young: Since a few years ago, there are books that are structured like video games. There was Ready Player One, obviously. I don't really know exactly what makes these books so, but they are like video games. This one is System Shock, obviously.

Games

• Loop Hero, a roguelike where you don't do anything yourself, you just plan and equip. It's nice, but it has that same "you'll see the start 100 times" problem as all the roguelikes have. 6/10
• Golf Club Wasteland: Our chosen medium must be one of the weirdest. This is a game that tells a story about the Apocalypse and how a large corporation dealt with it through golf. It's weird, and the story is weird, and the soundtrack is weird, and the golf game isn't actually that good, so I like it. 7.5/10.
• Mages of Mystralia, a cute little action/adventure game in the of the Zelda-like sort. Not sure I want to play this for longer, but I'll have to try some more before I can decide. 6/10
• Planetary Annihilation: Titans, I've played some more of this. I like the building aspects more than the fighting aspects, so in the end, it's not that interesting. 7/10
• The Forgotten City: A fantastic time-looping mystery game. It's beautiful, and it's tangled and it's fantastic. And the best part: for follow-quests, you simply press E and it auto-follows. 10/10
• Snowrunner: Played with Simon. It's like its two predecessors, only more so. Not something I'd play alone, but with another player or two, it's relaxing and fun -- and beautiful, naturally. 8/10

Other media

• This video has $x views: Tom Scott asked his newsletter readers to watch an old video of his, so I did.
• Is Meat Really that Bad? -- kurzgesagt: I like the videos of kurzgesagt, even though they give me existential dread. This one is no different. One intersting titbitYes, that is the correct way to write that word, you bowdlerizing Americans. though: Shipping is insanely efficient. Shipping 1 kg of goods from South America to Europe generates only about 300g of CO2-equivalent emissions. That's about as much as driving your own car for 1.5km. If you drove your car to the grocer's, you've created more emissions than the avocados you picked up at the store.
• How ski lifts are installed: Vail's new Chair 5: Spoiler alert: helicopters. That helicopter, by the way, is a Kaman K-MAX, which can lift 2.7 tons of cargo and costs about $8 million. There's much more to read here, including on the helicopters wooden blades.
• How to make a wooden crate the easy way
• Cutting your cake with a water-cutter
• How to make hard candy: There seem to be a lot of videos on hard candy in the last few months. They're mesmerizing to watch, even though I don't actually like hard candy.