Progress

Not a lot, just some regular work.
Still didn't do my yearly retrospective.

Did some gardening, too.

TWIL

CSS outline, if you need a border around your border.

Articles

• The math exams of my life -- andreinc
• Input Prompts · Kenney
• Using and editing input prompts · Kenney
• GPT-3.5 crashes when it thinks about useRalativeImagePath too much
• How Far Could the Sun Possibly Be?
• Reading QR codes without a computer!
• Why Zig When There is Already C++, D, and Rust? ⚡ Zig Programming Language
• A Visit to the Sponza Palace’s Atrium
• There is way too much serendipity — LessWrong: There are many sweet compounds, and they've all been found by accident. But why are there so many?
• CIA Chief Pushes For More Spies Abroad; Surveillance Makes That Harder -- Colorado Public Radio: Americans lean in a specific way.
• Scientists Discovered an 'Ultra-Large Structure' in Space That Shouldn't Exist
• Ludum mortuus est: This piece posits that the global gaming market, which made $187B in 2023, is dead and finished.
• The Price Is Not Right - Right to Repair Europe
• [2401.12070] Spotting LLMs With Binoculars: Zero-Shot Detection of Machine-Generated Text: I might want to implement that some day.
• Unbloating the buffers -- Dan Groshev
• Pluralistic: The Cult of Mac (12 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow: I'm not a Mac customer, but I used to be. The absolute hostility that Apple shows towards its customers is what drove me away. So I read articles like this, or the Epic lawsuits, with great entertainment. (via Jochens weeklog)
• Wave of the hand defeats new $700k subway gates meant to deter fare evaders - Boing Boing: SECURITY!!!
• GoCardless and Salt Edge - Firefly III documentation: I was about to write that I'm not interested in personal finance management if it doesn't work with PSD2, and then I found that it does work with third-party PSD2-compatible APIs. Nice, got to try it! (via Jochens weeklog)
• Lumiere - A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Realistic Video Generation: "We introduce Lumiere -- a text-to-video diffusion model designed for synthesizing videos that portray realistic, diverse and coherent motion -- a pivotal challenge in video synthesis. To this end, we introduce a Space-Time U-Net architecture that generates the entire temporal duration of the video at once, through a single pass in the model. This is in contrast to existing video models which synthesize distant keyframes followed by temporal super-resolution -- an approach that inherently makes global temporal consistency difficult to achieve. By deploying both spatial and (importantly) temporal down- and up-sampling and leveraging a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model, our model learns to directly generate a full-frame-rate, low-resolution video by processing it in multiple space-time scales. We demonstrate state-of-the-art text-to-video generation results, and show that our design easily facilitates a wide range of content creation tasks and video editing applications, including image-to-video, video inpainting, and stylized generation."
• The Hacker News Top 40 books of 2023 -
• Height -- Clio Infra -- Reconstructing Global Inequality: Seems like it plateau'ed in about 1960.
• ChromaDepth
• Fair cake-cutting - Wikipedia
• How to Choose Cookware – With Cookware Product Menu
• Which Shows Got Their Finale Right, and Which Didn't? A Statistical Analysis
• Impacts of lid closure during toilet flushing and of toilet bowl cleaning on viral contamination of surfaces in United States restrooms - American Journal of Infection Control
• Healthy childhood development through outdoor risky play: Navigating the balance with injury prevention -- Canadian Paediatric Society
• Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend -- Tauri Apps: It's like... a smaller Electron?
• Portable EPUBs
• CNC Lasers (cutters, engravers) · Jacques Mattheij
• Driving Faster Takes Longer – Algorithm Soup: Well, at lot of things get unintuitive really fast if you add death-time averages into it. Wouldn't want to be hurt by that falling asteroid"The average number of deaths from an asteroid impact is estimated at about 1,000 per year but that figure relates to a billion people killed by one massive asteroid impact every few million years, rather than 1,000 people dying from smaller impacts each year. We have no experience with asteroid fatalities (although the section on historical impacts may surprise you) but the bottom line is that "death by asteroid" is an extremely low risk, perhaps 10 times greater than dying from a shark attack, but lower than dying in an earthquake.", from The Danger from Asteroid Impact!
• Pong wars -- Koen van Gilst
• The 100 MHz 6502 · e-basteln: What a beautiful implementation of a pin-compatible chip.
• I hacked a train toilet
• In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox @ tonsky.me: I've not paid any attention to this, because this feels like an invariant: single-select options are round, multi-select options are square. But after reading the article, I noticed some examples myself. Who the heck let these idiot designers change such a fundamental piece of UX?
• absorptions: Smoother sailing: Studying audio imperfections in Steamboat Willie
• Performance Analysis of Python's dict() and {} - MadeByMe: Use {} if you want, but it really does not matter!

Libraries, programming, etc

• Python & JavaScript Libraries · Ollama Blog
• GitHub - placemark/placemark: A flexible web-based editor, converter, visualization tool, for geospatial data

Books

• Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds: I'm only a quarter of the way through it, but it's already full of fantastic ideas and well-crafted backgrounds. I love it!

Games

• Walkabout Minigolf with a friend, and even though we enjoyed it, most of the time was spent bickering about the game's shortcomings. Hrmpf, gotta make my own, I guess.
• Raft
• Flight Simulator
• (the) Gnorp Apologue: I don't know what I was thinking! An idle game! Me! This could cost me days. But, well, I already beat it. And I'm so glad I did. It's good, don't play it! 9/10

Recipes

• Tempura Chicken Nuggets
• Tigerkaka

Other media

• The Real Star Locations and Scale of Sci-fi - YouTube
• How an oscillating sprinkler works - YouTube
• How a torque wrench works - YouTube
• Debunking the worst haircare misinformation on TikTok - YouTube: with science!
• VFR Map functionality and VR World Scale Settings Explained -- MSFS -- New SU10 features - YouTube
• Make a Motorised Drift Trike with Basic Tools - YouTube: I often watch maker videos where they have lots of tools, esp. regarding metalworking. This old one is a reminder that you can do a lot with just basic tools.
• I Choose You! Greg! -- Palworld -- Nerd³ Challenges - YouTube: Everyone's talking about Palworld, and here I am, not interested in any of it. However, the interesting thing about it is how successful an actual, good Pokemon game would be. Think about that, Nintendo, when you start your lawsuits! This money could've been yours...
• Pokémon Apokélypse: Live Action Trailer HD - YouTube
• How This Guy Became The Best Rock Skipper On The Planet -- Obsessed -- WIRED - YouTube
• I hacked a train toilet (see description) - YouTube: and what a beautiful Sunday afternoon it is to watch videos of British train toilets!
• The genius tool LEGO wants to forget - YouTube: Gotta buy one now!
• CD / Shutter Speed (again) - YouTube