Weeklog for Week 15: April 08 to April 14
Progress
Did a lot of home improvement and garden work. Now my back aches, in a good way.
I bungled a window frame so hard that I'm wondering about my sanity.
First outdoor barbecue of the year. I have learnt a lot.
Articles
- Google Online Security Blog: Google Public DNS’s approach to fight against cache poisoning attacks
- CWS Market Review – April 2, 2024 Crossing Wall Street
- Cow Magnets -- Stanford Magnets
- Anthropic Claude API Magic: The Gathering Card Generator via Images and Instructions - Colaboratory
- Hello OLMo: A truly open LLM. As the world races to deploy AI models… -- by AI2 -- AI2 Blog
- Dimity Jones in Puzzle Castle: An Electronic Escape Novel in Eighty-Nine Ciphertexts: find the password to decrypt the next chapter.
- How To Sideload Content On Meta Quest Using SideQuest
- Ortsname – Wikipedia
- -ach, -ingen, -zell A visual exploration of the spatial patterns in the endings of German town and village names.
- Little Science, Big Science - Wikipedia
- Brane Dump: How I Tripped Over the Debian Weak Keys Vulnerability
- Stacking Triangles for Fun and Profit - OranLooney.com
- R&D Case Study: Developing the OptiGap Sensor System -- Paul Bupe, Jr
- McCarthy's Ambiguous Operator -- Random Hacks
- How I discovered a 9.8 critical security vulnerability in ZeroMQ with mostly pure luck and my two cents about xz backdoor – Fang-Pen's coding note
- Rob Ricci: "OK, so what can we do about all these SSH brute force attacks? We have a plan…" - discuss.systems
- lori's blog - Why I Lost Faith in Kagi
- The Mathematical Tourist: Pondering an Artist's Perplexing Tribute to the Pythagorean Theorem: He made a mistake and now it's clever and perplexing. What an artist!
- The darker side of being a doctor - DrEricLevi’s Substack
- tree-shaking, the horticulturally misguided algorithm — wingolog
- Slay the Spire devs followed through on abandoning Unity
- Personal VPN services are snake-oil -- Jump ESP, jump!What a nice URL, easy to spell and tell other people!
Libraries, programming, etc
Games
- Factorio with the boyz
- Noita: I'd wanted to play this for a long time. It is weird, in that it is a simple platformer, but at the same time it's also a super-complicated automaton simulator. I started it and it plays nicely, like a novelty platformer (which it is), with a cool little gimmick in its simulation-ness. Then I noticed the many different wands one can have. Then I noticed the many different spells that exist. Then I noticed the many different enemies and block types and found some weird fluids and was kind of surprised at the breadth of the game. Then I read up on the wiki and found that there are so many different levels and secrets and lore and, oh, by the way, if you manage to drill through the thick wall at the outer end of the world, there is an entire parallel world there. I'm not going to exhaustively look at, nor understand this world, but this game is a little gem of a thing, hiding so much inside such a perfect little shell. 9/10
Recipes
- Pfefferminz-Eis
- Haselnuss-Eis mit Krokant, sehr lecker
Other media
- Megamind: Such a great movie. It's from 2010, so quite old, but the animation still holds up very well. 9.5/10
- Free Guy: I'm of two minds about this movie. On the one hand, it is a very nice popcorn movie that caters to this audience very well and has lots of meta to satisfy everyone's needs (but not so much that it sticks out, the setting here helps a lot). On the other hand, the plot is... well... contrived, let's put it like that. I have no idea whether I should recommend this movie or not. 6.5/10
- Making a Dog-Sized Furby Robot (and taking it on a walk) - YouTube: this seemed to be the thing this week. It's nice, but, well, they glue a furby on top of a robot and cover it in fur. And pose a lot for the camera, so all the nerds out there can be envious of the duded with the cool wife. I guess that's a winning combination for a video to go viral‽
- Chinese Invisibility Cloak Hoax DESTROYED!!! - YouTube
- A map for my inner child - YouTube
- Olafur Eliasson's 'Room for one colour' -- Monochrome: Painting in Black and White - YouTube
- f0.3 – The Impossible Lens – Building a Large Format DoF movie camera – Epic Episode #18 - YouTube
- Stop for Big Moments! [Design Specifics] - YouTube: I'm watching through Masahiro Sakurai's series on game design. It's very interesting, even though most it applies more to action games.
- MEGAMIND and Nice Guy™ Syndrome - YouTube: Lots of self reflection here...