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Weeklog for Week 1: January 01 to January 07

Jan 7, 2024

Progress

What a satisfying way to start the year -- with a Monday. Imagine if every year would be like that.

Still on vacation. This impressive list of played games is what I achieve when I have a vacation!

Articles

Pushing it back - Charlie's Diary
j3s.sh
[2312.01479] OpenVoice: Versatile Instant Voice Cloning
[2310.20360] Mathematical Introduction to Deep Learning: Methods, Implementations, and Theory
Paul Fairie: "A List of Predictions Made in …" - Mastodon
The funny rules of spamassassin
How Salim Kara Stole $2m Of Coins With A Magnet & Car Antenna
To Celebrate New Years in Greenland, the Mitaartut Scare People - Atlas Obscura
Self-hosting a high-availability Postgres cluster on Kubernetes
On the privacy of push notifications
PrivateGPT -- Docs
Solar cell efficiency tables (Version 63) - Green - 2024 - Progress in Photovoltaics: Research and Applications - Wiley Online Library
You Can Literally Sniff Out Other People's Inner Feelings -- Scientific American
The Curious Case of MD5 -- Kate Sills
Jennifer Pan - Wikipedia
Jean-Claude Romand – Wikipedia
Chandler Halderson Killed Parents After Dad Found Out About School Lie: Prosecutor
Sef Gonzales – Wikipedia: Once you start reading on con people and whom they killed to keep the secret, you can't stop!
How to Survive in Ancient Greece -- Colgate Magazine: A very romantic picture of a grim past. Actually, I take a lot of issue with this article. Firstly, the descriptions aren't all super-accurate, and then they continue romantizing it. Life in ancient times was hard, if you even made it through childhood. Most people were slaves, women had very few rights, and even if you were lucky enough to be born into any of the well-known polis, there was hard work, war, famine, sickness, accidents, repression, ... but "there won’t be any chemicals in your food." As if having access to clean and plentiful food is a bad thing, the new-wave rose-painting goes on with frankly stupid points such as "Racism is largely unknown."Except, of course, if you're not from the actual polis you live in, in which case you wouldn't even be regarded a full person. or "you might see certain advantages in being looked after, even at the cost of your personal liberty" -- what white-male bullshitNote that rape of female slaves was common and not even recognized as a crime. In fact, "consent was not a concern and thus not a focus of lawsuits".. But hey, at least "the stars will be more plentiful and brighter than they are almost anywhere in the developed world today"Except of course, it's very easy for me to take a car, drive for four hours and be in places that have clean air and very little light pollution. Neither "taking a day off", nor "driving" nor actually "going somewhere" were concepts that existed in ancient Greece.. The author concludes that "I would love to return to ancient Greece". I wish the author would, as a woman and/or slave, and I would like to add: "Don’t take your 21st-century sensibility with you.", and also not your medicine, safety, entertainment, technology, transportation, heating, freedom, knowledge, food availability and variety and safety, ... Compared to all of human history, we live in absolute paradise, but idiot pieces like this try to gild the past into a wonderful place.
Freistetters Formelwelt: Die nahrhafte Null - Spektrum der Wissenschaft
Upload 3 files · microsoft/phi-2 at 7e10f3e: Microsofts phi-2 model changes license to MIT
Comics I Loved In 2023 – Ritesh Babu: soo many recommendations

Libraries, programming, etc

Writing a TrueType font renderer -- Phillip Tennen
GitHub - KoboldAI/KoboldAI-Client: This is a browser-based front-end for AI-assisted writing with multiple local & remote AI models. It offers the standard array of tools, including Memory, Author's Note, World Info, Save & Load, adjustable AI settings, formatting options, and the ability to import existing AI Dungeon adventures. You can also turn on Adventure mode and play the game like AI Dungeon Unleashed.
GitHub - marella/chatdocs: Chat with your documents offline using AI.
GitHub - DLYuanGod/TinyGPT-V: TinyGPT-V: Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model via Small Backbones

Games

Cursed to Golf: a little golfing game, made with lots of love. This would've been nice on the SNES. Problem is: I don't actually like golf games. 4/10
Snakebird: A puzzle game, again. I get tired of the same puzzle type very quickly, so... The polish is amazing, though, and as a game developer myself I'm surprised that it's so very well-made. 5/10
Dorfromantik
Flight Simulator 2020: why is this downloading its 130 GB package at 2 Mb/s?! Well, once it has downloaded itself, it is exactly as you'd expect it: slightly wonky in the menus and controls (eg. you can open the menu with a controller, but you can then not interact with the mouse), but very stable and beautiful in the game.
Inscryption: I don't know what to say about this game. If you like deck builders, you have to play it. Not only because it is a great deck-builder with an interesting environment/metagame, but also because once you've unlocked that "New Game" in the main menu, the metagame really starts and it becomes a whole new deck builder. I don't usually like card-driven games, but this one I'll make an exception for. 7.6/10
Pony Island: If meta were a game, this would be it. The game sections aren't very interesting, though. 7/10
Hardspace: Shipbreaker: a relaxing spaceship salvaging game. The worldbuilding is great! However, I can already see that they're going to add a stressing time-based component to it and that slightly turns me off. 8.5/10
Tchia: Recommended by some people, I've had this in my backlog. It really is as cute and nice as expected, even though there is a lot of handholding in the beginning. Once it opens up, it is really, really nice. Cute, and warm and just great. 9.5/10

Board games

Red7: I won the championship again.
Alhambra
Sechs nimmt

Recipes

Boboti
Käsespätzle
Bratapfel-Eis
Mandarinen-Eis
Zimtlikör