Weeklog for Week 5: January 30 to February 05

Feb 5, 2023

Progress

Thought I'd finished a topic, but it came back and I worked all week on it.

The house is nearing completion, now dates are being talked about. The communication with the builders is still about the worst thing you could imagine.

I started following "Computer, Enhance!" by Casey Muratori. Let's see whether I can keep up.

Articles

The Window Trick of Las Vegas Hotels
Toshiba–Kongsberg scandal - Wikipedia
MusicLM: Generating Music From Text: Abstract: "We introduce MusicLM, a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as "a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff". MusicLM casts the process of conditional music generation as a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modeling task, and it generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes. Our experiments show that MusicLM outperforms previous systems both in audio quality and adherence to the text description. Moreover, we demonstrate that MusicLM can be conditioned on both text and a melody in that it can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption. To support future research, we publicly release MusicCaps, a dataset composed of 5.5k music-text pairs, with rich text descriptions provided by human experts."
The Origins of the Phrase “Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps” – Useless Etymology: I just love that "bootstrapping" was originally meant to describe something physically impossible, but now it's what you're supposed to do.
The pandemic’s true death toll: millions more than official counts
Foone Turing — FUN FACT: I own porn I can't watch.
⚙️ Math Breakdown: Anime Homing Missiles - Little Polygon Game Dev Blog
The Cube Root Trick
Rewrite, refactor, or reinvent? -- Herb Caudill
ESP32 Buyer’s Guide: Different Chips, Firmware, Sensors -- eitherway
I'm Going To Scale My Foot Up Your Ass
Bernardo Subercaseaux -- The story behind the Packing Chromatic paper.
Showering at the South Pole
The Market for Lemons - Infrequently Noted: Observations on JS frontend technology.

Libraries, programming, etc

Yaml, JSON, Toml - Chris Coyier (via Jochens weeklog)
Trigger.dev - Effortless automation built for developers
GitHub - nikku/works-on-my-machine: Continuous integration done right.
GitHub - auchenberg/volkswagen: Volkswagen detects when your tests are being run in a CI server, and makes them pass.
How I added C-style for-loops to Python: I wonder that this monstrosity could be used for.
GitHub - arc53/docsgpt: Use documentation and asks questions directly with DocsGPT
Pyodide 0.22.0 release -- Pyodide blog (via Jochens weeklog)

Books

Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys

Games

Sea of Thieves: with the crew. Very enjoyable, super-polished, nice progression. Will do that again! 8/10 Ah, on the second run (crew of two, this time around), we found the PvP element of the game, which was not as enjoyable. But on the other hand, we're not going to grind this game, so the others will have much more to lose than we do.
Outer Wilds: I know what to do, but I can't get past those damned fish. Very frustrating.
Minecraft
Hot Wheels Unleashed

Backlog

City Of Gangsters (free from EGS)

Recipes

Sopetti

Movies

Lightyear: I'd wanted to watch this for a while because I like Toy Story and Pixar and generally silly movies. It was... ok, I guess. Not great, a little all-over-the-place, and I wondered when the movie would start until it was almost done. The rendering is absolutely fantastic, the action is greatAnd the little gay couple thing is perfect, simply because it's not remarked upon at all. Apparently, groups were disappointed because they wanted more prominence out of it, but that'd be silly. She says "I'm engaged" and he says "what's her name", as if that's perfectly normal because it is., but the movie is just... ok. The characters don't really shine and their arcs are, well, ok. 6.5/10