Progress

I held a Python seminar. That fills the week automatically.

I tried to get another ticket merged, but review told me a few defects that I'll have to fix.

PlantEd

I finally bought one key component, and now I can start. And then I actually, really did start writig some code, putting together some components. It looks like I'm going to start doing things now.

NTS

We had an important-but-hard discussion about the future of this project. I'm not entirely sure it'll work, but we'll continue for the time being.

Articles

• Julia Evans on Things that used to be hard and are now easy: What a wonderful idea, looking at progress from the standpoint of "what can I do now that I couldn't do before". Of course, the orange page immediately backfires with Thing that used to be easy, but are now hard, and the answers are predictably silly: "web development is hard", "building a word processor is hard", "setting up a Windows machine is hard" and of course "visiting websites is hard".
• “The Wall” Housing Structure In Fermont, Quebec
• Striking Gold: When does the brain reach maturity? : slatestarcodex: Conclusion: Probably around 13-16, after puberty finishes.
• Against the survival of the prettiest - Works in Progress: I strongly disagree with the conclusions in the article and can think of several reasons for the survival of the prettiest.
• An Injection of Chaos Solves Decades-Old Fluid Mystery -- Quanta Magazine
• Arrow's impossibility theorem - Wikipedia
• LEGO has designed a set that can't be taken apart -- Brickset: LEGO set guide and database: I cannot see why it couldn't be disassembled, but apparently this is a big deal.
• Why the West’s Diplomacy With Russia Keeps Failing - The Atlantic: I can hardly believe that anyone thinks that this is about contracts or dignity or image. This is about power, specifically, inner-political power. I am glad it's backfiring badly.
• Money creation in the modern economy -- Bank of England: Let's say you're a modern bank, and you think to yourself: "Where does the money actually come from? It can't be the people, or productivity, or something from the world outside of this building, because that would be silly. I bet, actual, you know, real money, that comes from us banks, we're the ones creating the actual money when we lend it to someone, and all money is debt to us, and if someone pays back that debt, the money is then destroyed."
  Should you then believe them? Should you think about all the edges of that hypothesis, like what happens if no one is borrowing money or if there were only one bank? Should you ask: but what about the interest that needs to be paid on lending? Who creates that?! Should you ask whether this is pompous as hell and whether someone needs a reality check?
  I don't know whether you should do that, since I'm just a guy on the internet...
• Entanglement between superconducting qubits and a tardigrade
• Brandon Sanderson’s Advice for Doing Hard Things - Study Hacks - Cal Newport

Libraries, programming, etc

• ~~drillan/jupyter-black: Black formatter for Jupyter Notebook~~: On recommendation by Jochen, but I never got it to work with Lab, so I used the next one instead:
• Jupyterlab Code Formatter
• Learn Python ASTs, by building your own lintervia Jochen
• Why you shouldn't invoke setup.py directly
• Computer latency: 1977-2017
• digitalocean/nginxconfig.io: ⚙️ NGINX config generator on steroids 💉

Books

• Das Mañana-Problem by C. Northcote Parkinson: I really, really, really like the essays in Parkinson's Law and I highly recommend you read that book. After reading two of the essays in this one, it seems like a rather lukewarm copy; I'm still waiting for the hidden gem here.

Games

• Eastshade: still the same good and the same bad. The world is very nice, but the one game that is about painting pictures will not let me paint pictures, and if the game compels me to paint something, it's for a quest. But it's even worse than that, because there are two mechanisms that hinder your painting: canvs and inspiration. For every painting you create, you need a canvas to paint onto, realistically enough, and you can overpaint your canvases. So far, so good, if a quest requires you to do a painting, you'll just re-use your canvases. Which is... not great, because if you do a painting outside of a quest, you'll usually assign some significance to it. Which is then gone.
  However, the worse thing is inspiration. For every painting you create, you use up one unit of inspiration, and that's gone. You get inspiration by finding new places and experiences, but as far as I can see, there is only a limited amount of inspiration on the entire island. So once you're out, you're out. No way to complete quests any more.
  These two points combine to make this a game about creating paintings, where you'll only create paintings if you're absolutely sure there's a payoff in terms of quest completion. It's a walking game with complicated resource management. Very frustrating.

Backlog

• Tower Tag (from Humble VR bundle)
• Synth Riders (from Humble VR bundle)
• Blaston (from Humble VR bundle)
• Cook-Out (from Humble VR bundle)
• Panoptic (from Humble VR bundle)
• Red Matter (from Humble VR bundle)
• Touring Karts (from Fanatical VR bundle)
• The Assembly (from Fanatical VR bundle)
• Republique VR (from Fanatical VR bundle)
• Hello Puppets! (from Fanatical VR bundle)
• Fujii (from Fanatical VR bundle)
• Dreadhalls (from Fanatical VR bundle)
• Doctor Who: The Edge of Time (from Fanatical VR bundle)
• Dance Collider (from Fanatical VR bundle)
• Beat Blaster (from Fanatical VR bundle)
• 1976 Back to Midway (from Fanatical VR bundle)

Recipes

• Marmorkuchen, free-hand, at least this much I know how to do

Other media

• I read the top 100 scientific papers of all time