Progress

A rather normal week, to be honest. I played some great games with friends, had some great discussions and phone calls and everything went surprisingly smoothly.

There is, again, a lot of AI going on, and I need to talk about that some more at some point.

TWIL

I found out that you can see all your IKEA purchases in your profile, even in-store purchases where you showed your family card. I also learnt that I spent 6464,93 € since 2016, at an average of 146,93€ per visit. This also means that I pay IKEA about 2,86 € per day.
I'll write some tooling to check out the purchases in more detail.

I've looked more into the time loop concept, cf. last week. I like time loop stories like Outer Wilds, Groundhog Day, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August or that one episode of Star Trek TNG. And what usually happens is that someone gets trapped in a loop, finds out, does something and "solves" the loop. But this week I found out that the first story with a time loop, Strange Life of Ivan OsokinHilariously, Wikipedia cites a story from 1915, while some others refer to much later "first" ones., arguably the invention of the time loop, is about a guy who gets stuck in a time loop, finds out, does something and then realizes that, no matter what he does, he can't change the outcome at all. So, exactly the opposite. Weird!

Articles

• [2302.04761] Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools
• Bing AI Can't Be Trusted - by Dmitri Brereton - DKB Blog
• AI-powered Bing Chat spills its secrets via prompt injection attack -- Ars Technica
• ongoing by Tim Bray · Modern Mono
• Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did. -- I'm Too Stupid to Travel
• core-js/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md at master · zloirock/core-js · GitHub: "This was the last attempt to keep core-js as a free open-source project with a proper quality and functionality level. It was the last attempt to convey that there are real people on the other side of open-source with families to feed and problems to solve." Very sad!
• Maybe people do care about performance and reliability • Buttondown
• Shrinkflation, SanDisk style :: ./techtipsy — Herman's blog
• Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing is getting ‘unhinged’ and argumentative, some users say: It ‘feels sad and scared’
• Generate Your Website with AI in 30 Seconds -- Durable: Works quite well!
• Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
• Last Flight Out: What you feel when the last flight out of the Antarctic research station for the next nine months leaves.
• How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions - Kevin Schaul
• How does Planet Work – BorisTheBrave.Com: An analysis of "Planet", Oskar Stalbergs game before Townscaper.
• Missing data mean we’ll probably never know how many people died of COVID: Many, many people are still dying of COVID. More than of anything else, actually.
• Stick a Fork in Them -- Digits to Dollars: Intel's in a much worse place than it seems.
• Resetting the score — Benedict Evans
• Is an increase in penile length cause for concern? - Scope

Libraries, programming, etc

• userscripts/chatgpt/duckduckgpt at master · adamlui/userscripts · GitHub
• GitHub - deepmind/mctx: Monte Carlo tree search in JAX: This is one of the core functions of AlphaGo and AlphaZero: a fast stochastic monte-carlo tree search. Much more traditional than I had expected from the successes it had.
• GitHub - swarmlet/swarmlet: A self-hosted, open-source Platform as a Service that enables easy swarm deployments, load balancing, automatic SSL, metrics, analytics and more.

Games

• The American Dream: it's a good idea, giving the player guns and then doing everything with those guns. Except that the game is... well... not great. The graphics are quite minimal, the games are the same thing over and over again and so are the jokes. And it didn't center me correctly. 5/10
• Return to Monkey Island

Backlog

• The American Dream (from waitlist)

Other media

• How is the restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral going? -- Focus on Europe - YouTube: It is hilarious, how much money and effort is spent on these silly symbolics.
• The Future of Cinema: Epic Games Gave Us an In-Depth Tour of The Volume (Their Virtual Set Tech) - YouTube
• [1500] Picking My Most Expensive Lock - YouTube
• Summiting the Matterhorn with an FPV Drone 5K -- Chimera 7 Cinematic Long Range - YouTube: Beautiful, and soo sharp.
• The Secret To Mastering Burgers, Sausage, and Meatballs -- Techniquely with Lan Lam - YouTube
• How these buildings made Turkey-Syria’s earthquake so deadly - YouTube
• Red Beads - YouTube: The Red Beads experiment, as performed by its inventor, Ian Deming. The experiment is a demonstration through role-play that a process can be entirely random, but people will still try to "optimize" it or assign meaning to special things in it.
• Mad Men: One Perfect Scene - YouTube: I like it when mad fans overexplain interesting movie scenes.
• Frituren op accu (Milwaukee M18 battery powered frying pan) - YouTube
• Life As A Developer: My Code Does Not Work Because I Am A Victim Of Complex Societal Factors... - YouTube: Bit of a long wind, and doesn't actually address the hypothesis it poses: Does my efficiency suffer because I am lazy or are there complex societal factors?
• MK area calculator Review / HowTo - YouTube
• Inca counting boards and the table yupana - YouTube
• Calculator Sticks from the 1600s - YouTube
• Well, Someone Had to Explain the Liar's Dice Scene In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest - YouTube I like it when mad fans overexplain interesting movie scenes.
• Someone Had to Explain the Chess Scene In Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows - YouTube I like it when mad fans overexplain interesting movie scenes.
• Someone Had to Explain the Go Scene In Knives Out - YouTube I like it when mad fans overexplain interesting movie scenes.
• Building the World's Fastest Roomba - YouTube