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Weeklog for Week 19: May 09 to May 15

Progress

A work week.

Some guy on twitter asked whether anyone knows good time tracking software. Well, I've long thought that one should record the windows that one interacts with and just deduce what one worked on and during which minutes of the day. So I wrote some code to try it out. Works surprisingly well. Now it's only missing the simple part of figuring out how to group these things properly.

PlantEd

The plants are still growing. No flowers nor seeds nor anything else of interest.

NTS

Some progress was made even though I helped.

Articles

Libraries, programming, etc

Books

  • Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett: Good hard fantasy. Some things are a bit too obvious, but that's just that. 10/10. I often wonder about the economies of these societies, and why they're not at least modern, if not post-scarcity. The main obstruction for the development of modern production techniques was access to energy, and through that also access to raw materials. Having access to a technology that can just produce heat would allow refinement and purification of massive quantities of all kinds of modern metal materials. Even without access to modern chemistry and production methods.
    Another thing I wonder about is the actual monetary economyCoincidentally, such thinking gave me one of the worst marks in any lit class in school. We'd read some book about nuclear survivors in a submarine looking for other survivors. On the exam, we were asked to describe how the book made us feel. I wrote that it made me feel nothing because everyone was stupid and the situations were highly unrealistic. Surprisingly, the teacher didn't like my answer.
    I'm still a bit annoyed by this, because I believe my answer was well-written and well-argued, but because it wasn't what the teacher had expected, I didn't get good marks. Fortunately, this is the only such situation I can recall, all my other teachers seemed to be decent.
    . In the book, Sancia has saved a stash of 3000 duvots over three years of "work". A single grenade is supposed to cost 70 duvots, a poison arrow 50. And yet, the economy of the houses is put in danger over "tens of thousands" of duvots, which seems laughably little in the face of the above numbers. I believe that the author tried to emulate old-timesy deflationary money values, where a single Taler was out of the reach of normal folks, yet still wanted to give things "normal" values.
  • Significant Digits by Alexander D: HPMOR fanfiction. Harry Potter fanfiction fanfiction. Meta-Fanfiction. One nice thing about sequels is that you can start right into the action, without having to explain the characters or the world. This is true here as well, even though this Harry Potter is not the Harry Potter you knew as a child.

Backlog

  • The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang
  • All The Birds In The Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (reminds me a bit of Worm by wildbow)
  • The God Proof by Jeffrey Kegler
  • Ubik by Philip K. Dick
  • The Memory Librarian by Janella Monáe
  • Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji

Games

  • Horizon Zero Dawn: I finished. It was great.

Backlog

  • Redout (from free EGS)
  • nothing from Humble Monthly this time

Other media

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