Weeklog for Week 18: April 29 to May 05

May 5, 2024

Progress

Got some more parts, did not build everything. But what I have looks nice.

TWIL

Rust, the programming language, isn't named after rust, the iron oxide, but after rust, the fungal plant pathogen. Apparently the reasoning is that this fungus is "overengineered for survival" and very hardy. However, naming a programming language after both a destructive chemical process and a destructive biological process seems, well, destructive.

Articles

What's Going On With 'Nonplussed'? -- Merriam-Webster
Raspberry Pi 5 vs Intel N100 mini PC comparison - Features, Benchmarks, and Price - CNX Software
Aircraft seat shortages hamper airlines’ efforts to upgrade planes: oh the poor airline industry!
After 48 years, Zilog is killing the classic standalone Z80 microprocessor chip -- Ars Technica
Deconstruct: "I wrote a function called deconstruct for How JavaScript Works. It breaks a binary floating point number down to its fundamental parts. You can use those parts to precisely compute the actual numeric value. If the number includes a decimal point or is very large, it is likely that its actual value is different than its literal value. This difference is called an error."
DEC64: Decimal Floating Point
Short Story on AI: A Cognitive Discontinuity.
Keep Out! - A WebGL game by Little Workshop
Why SQLite Uses Bytecode
Engineer 'builds a GPU from scratch' in two weeks — process much harder than he expected -- Tom's Hardware: well, parts of. And only the chip. And only the VHDL, not the actual part.
The World's Highest-Grossing Media Franchises, Ranked -- Digg
How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland? -- by Anna Andersen -- Apr, 2024 -- UX Collective: There must be a wonderful short story in there where some person actually becomes president of Iceland by accident.
GitHub - ddvk/remarkable-hacks: additional functionality via binary patching: will have to try this.
Milchindustrie sauer: veganer Blauschimmelkäse gewinnt Food Award – Das Kraftfuttermischwerk: I'd like to try that cheese, but it's one of those vaporware products with an email waitlist.
[2404.19737] Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction
A-Frame 3D Tiles Component - Basic example
The PostgreSQL community debates ALTER SYSTEM [LWN.net]
Exploring Indra’s Pearls with WebGPU -- by Nicolas Belmonte -- Apr, 2024 -- Medium
GitHub - s-macke/AdventureAI: Interactive Fiction in the Age of AI
mRNA Cancer Vaccine Reprograms Immune System to Tackle Glioblastoma -- Inside Precision Medicine
A smooth and sharp image interpolation you probably haven't heard of
GeoSpy.ai: Results were not astonishing. I posted a picture of a landscape with a river and some minor details that could have been sleuthed.
Jane Street is big. Like, really, really big: wow!
Pet parrots prefer live video-calls over watching pre-recorded videos of other birds: funnily enough, so do I!
The World's Loudest Lisp Program to the Rescue
Building a Rocket Engine from Scratch - by Ryan Kuhn - abl
Debugging Tech Journalism—Asterisk
Making a 3D Modeler, in C, in a Week ・ Daniel Hooper
Every map of China is wrong. And this is intentional… -- by Anastasia Bizyayeva -- Medium: China uses their own coordinates with some obfuscation. That's it, saved you a click.
‘I will never go back’: Ontario family doctor says new AI notetaking saved her job -- Globalnews.ca
Goodyear Inflatoplane - Wikipedia
Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software
How hard can generating 1024-bit primes really be? -- glitchcomet
Are Japanese anime robots isometric or allometric? – Journal of Geek Studies
Chris's Wiki :: blog/tech/UEFIAndBIOSAndOtherPCTerms
The Mirror Fusion Test Facility: what a typical bureaucratical nightmare!
Development slowness in big and legacy applications [and how to hurry it up] -- Michael's Coding Spot (slightly light on content)
Introduction to Loro's Rich Text CRDT – Loro
Sweden and the euro - Wikipedia: I did not know that they'd have to join the Euro!
Bollards: Why & What · Josh Thompson: They place guide rails on the outside of footpaths. WHY?

Libraries, programming, etc

Books

Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge

Games

Walkabout Minigolf: I like this game, but I'm also very frustrated with it. There are so many small things it could do to make itself better, and they annoy me to no end.
Factorio