back to weeklogs

Weeklog for Week 9: February 27 to March 05

Mar 5, 2023

Progress

Nothing unusual.

Some of the book projects are advancing. Some game ideas are advancing.

Finished part 1 of ComputerEnhance, decoding MOVs. Finished part 2 as well and now I'll have to do the challenges.

Articles

Krickelkrackel -- I had nothing in mind while painting this.
Hand tracking experiment with WebGL and three.js: Works surprisingly well, except for at the edges when your hands flop around like mad.
Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors: The Erlang PhD thesis.
New explain -- explain.depesz.com: PostgreSQL's explain analyze made readable (via Jochens weeklog)
Berkson's paradox - Wikipedia: A specific sort of sampling bias, where two (uncorrelated) conditions are observed together. For example, if a restaurant with good ratings has a bad website, the food must be great, because a bad restaurant with a bad website would go under. Although, not exactly that.
Most Data Work Seems Fundamentally Worthless — Ludicity
Undetectable very-low frequency sound increases dancing at a live concert: Current Biology: I haven't looked at the paper but I don't believe the conclusion until I've thoroughly read it through.
A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering
How to Write a Spelling Corrector
A Concerning Trend – Neil Clarke: Open-submission sci-fi story publishers are overwhelmed with AI-generated stories.
Life Imitates AI Art (@life_imitates_ai_art) • Instagram photos and videos: Actual images resembling missteps by AI art generators
Kurt Steiner (stone skipper) - Wikipedia: And his name is Steiner.
Bing chatbot just got smarter – and it’s about to get different AI personalities -- TechRadar: "The ability to switch between a trio of personalities is the big change for the Bing chatbot, and to hear that it’s imminent is exciting stuff for those who have been engaging with the AI thus far. As detailed previously, the trio of personalities available are labeled as Precise, Balanced, and Creative. The latter is set to provide a chattier experience, and Precise will offer a shorter, more typical ‘search result’ delivery, with Balanced being a middle road between the two. So, if you don’t like how the AI is responding to you, at least there will be choices to alter its behavior."
stephen judkins: "The best thing I've seen written on Musk and Twitter is this random YouTube comment (that I can't find a way to link to directly)" - Mastodon: "what strikes me the most is the absolute inability for Musk to experience satisfaction, to be satiated. He’s a hungry ghost. He was up in the middle of the night haunted by the absolute deprivation of only 9 million impressions on his worthless superbowl tweet. He’s so taken in by the Skinner box of twitter that he bought it and is making the box-maintainers specifically give him higher numbers. But the whole point is that no matter what number the machine gives him he will feel dissatisfied with it because that feeling is precisely what makes the machine work.
This is the endgame of whale-baiting, right? You make software that’s hostile to brains in the hopes a few rich people get poisoned by it and become willing to exchange money for higher numbers. In twitter’s case, they got eaten by the whale. They get slack notifications at 2am if the whale isn’t getting enough numbers. In a way, the app created its owner. That’s a little fucked up to me, more so than the standard AI domination tropes, that a system without agency ends up in control."
Stellar Software: "Since 1985 we have been delivering optical ray tracers to the engineering and education communities. Back in 2015 -- after 30 years -- we adopted the policies of open source and free distribution. This is our way for thanking the community for these many years of support."
Optic Explorer: "Optic Explorer is a cloud based optical simulation and design application. It allows you to simulate and design optical systems using just your web browser. You can even run it on your tablet or phone."
Is the Alpha Wolf Idea a Myth? - Scientific American: Spoiler alert: yes, always has been.
Jailbreak Chat
A guide to Plan S: the open-access initiative shaking up science publishing: Finally!
GitHub - awesomedata/awesome-public-datasets: A topic-centric list of HQ open datasets.
This model does not exist -- Meet Ailice: I love how many of these images make absolutely no sense at all.
that time my manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used: internal politics will make people to the stupidest shit
These CGI Renders Are Actually Real Photos -- PetaPixel: Turning AI image generation on its head.
lena -- Morten Rieger Hannemose: finally, a freely licensed Lena image
Shredding Deeply Nested JSON, One Vector at a Time - DuckDB: I'll have to try DuckDB more thoroughly!
I Will Fucking Dropkick You If You Use That Spreadsheet — Ludicity
devdata - Improving developer velocity and experience
So powerful, it's kind of ridiculous: on the history of 3dfx
How much space would we need to store the world’s plastic in landfills?: about 18.3 billion m^3, or 700km² x 25m. Not as much as you'd expect.

Libraries, programming, etc

Books

We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor: Fantastic!

Games

Sea of Thieves
Hot Wheels Unleashed
Return to Monkey Island: I can not free Wally and the game says "it's too late in the game to do that" sooooo... I guess I have to go back in time and do it earlier?
Dishonored 2
Minecraft

Backlog

Rise of Industry (free from EGS)
Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales (Humble Monthly)
Shady Part of Me (Humble Monthly)
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (Humble Monthly)
Doom Eternal (Humble Monthly)
Hokko Life (Humble Monthly)
The Serpent Rogue (Humble Monthly)
Gotham Knights (Türkiye-Syria Earthquake Relief Bundle)
Stick Fight (Türkiye-Syria Earthquake Relief Bundle)
XEL (Türkiye-Syria Earthquake Relief Bundle)
Little Orpheus (Türkiye-Syria Earthquake Relief Bundle)
Detached (Türkiye-Syria Earthquake Relief Bundle)
Lighthouse Keeper (Türkiye-Syria Earthquake Relief Bundle)
The Inner World (Türkiye-Syria Earthquake Relief Bundle)
Orbital Racer (Türkiye-Syria Earthquake Relief Bundle)
Sunlight (Türkiye-Syria Earthquake Relief Bundle)

Recipes

fluffy mozarella breadrolls
monkey bread with chocolate filling: didn't release from the pan as well as I'd hoped, but was seriously delicious. I'll have to try again in a silicone form.

Funny enough, these recipes are actually very similar: good things wrapped in yeast dough.