Weeklog for Week 34: August 21 to August 27
Progress
Back to work. Everything as normal.
Played around with Llama2 with two co-conspirators. Great fun, and also: works. And many ideas streamed from that, so I'm super-happy.
Had some very interesting discussions with friends and colleagues. Very nice.
Articles
- cosmology - shouldn't very very distant objects appear magnified? - Astronomy Stack Exchange: Yes, and they do!
- The Stick of Jan Sloot
- Jazz² Resurrection
- Thagomizer - Wikipedia
- When I have a slower publishing cadence my blog grows faster
- SolarPi experiment 2: Finally something that works
- Seamless Communication Translation Demo: That's quite fantastic!
- What You Don't Know About the World’s Oldest Photograph -- Art & Object
- Replication Database: The replication database is a crowdsourced effort to include unpublished and published replication results to estimate and track the replicability along various fields and provide researchers with a way to assess replicability of crucial studies in a quick and transparent way.
- An Old Conjecture Falls, Making Spheres a Lot More Complicated -- Quanta Magazine
- LANDrop - Drop any files to any devices on your LAN
- We Might Have Accidentally Killed the Only Life We Ever Found on Mars Nearly 50 Years Ago - JSTOR Daily
- Corrupted Blood incident - Wikipedia
- Introducing Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding
- The complete sequence of a human Y chromosome -- Nature
- The place where no humans will tread for 100,000 years - BBC Future: It's about the Finnish nuclear storage site, and written like a journalist: lots and lots of feelings, light on the facts.
- Was niemand gesagt hat. - Schule, Schulleitung, Familie, DIY: I hate these kinds of experiments because there is an implicit expectation of game-ness in that setting. It's like saying "here's a dice and a game board, whoever's first to the goal wins" and then berating the players for using the dice instead of just placing the figures there. And you could also make the opposite article where you tell a group very specific rules and someone will still try to bend them just because.
- Ugly Numbers from Microsoft and ChatGPT Reveal that AI Demand is Already Shrinking: I disagree with the conclusion of the article, but it is indicative of a sea change.
- Shamir Secret Sharing: A story on how one of the early employees almost brought down Paypal in the name of security.
- The rival to the Panama Canal that was never built - BBC Future
- Power consumption of JPEG, WebP, and AVIF - Fershad Irani
- How Tycho Brahe Really Died - Article by Aase R. Jacobsen and Lars Petersen - 2001 - International Planetarium Society, Inc.
- Phind: AI Search Engine and Pair Programmer: CodeLlama can program better than GPT4, and be selfhosted.
- The Cosmic Ladder
- How ruff changed my Python programming habits - Matthias Kestenholz: I might have to try that out, too. (via Jochens weeklog)
- Pluralistic: Autoenshittification (24 July 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow (via Jochens weeklog)
- Initial Impressions of Microsoft Olive
- E-ink is so Retropunk
- Block YouTube Ads on AppleTV by Decrypting and Stripping Ads from Profobuf
- Cody -- AI coding assistant
Libraries, programming, etc
- GitHub - pysnippet/fastapi-oauth2: Easy to integrate OAuth2 authentication with support for several identity providers.
- GitHub - marceloprates/prettymaps: A small set of Python functions to draw pretty maps from OpenStreetMap data. Based on osmnx, matplotlib and shapely libraries.: Very nice, but needs a lot of interface work, more consistent layouts and way more options!
- Rye: "Rye is Armin's personal one-stop-shop for all his Python needs. It installs and manages Python installations, helps working with pyproject.toml files, installs and uninstalls dependencies, creates and updates virtualenvs behind the scenes. It supports monorepos and global tool installations." And of course it is Armin Ronacher's invention...
- OS.js Web Desktop: "OS.js is an open-source JavaScript web desktop platform with a window manager, application APIs, GUI toolkit, filesystem abstractions and much more." and who has not yearned many nights for such a thing!
- astral-sh/ruff: An extremely fast Python linter, written in Rust.
Books
- The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly: After I've seen this recommended more than once on my timeline, I picked it up and tried it out. I can't connect with it at all. I mean, sure, the mystery aspect and the treasure hunt, I love that. But the main protagonist is an almost middle-aged woman artist with an adopted teenager and a very unstable living situation. I don't know, I guess the distance is just too far.
- Providence by Max Barry: something completely different this time: Space Soldiers in Space, against Space Aliens That Want To Kill Us. It's well-written, and unnerving. I don't know how it concludes yet, but I can see potential for a handful of twists coming up.
Games
Backlog
- Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak (free from EGS)
- Saints Row (from waitlist)
Recipes
- Sektsorbet