Progress

I don't know, year-end stress, I guess. Not much to show for.

Articles

• Paktol, the positive spending tracker where money goes up!: cute idea, nice gamification
• First letters found in new scroll - Vesuvius Challenge
• Reverse Engineering iOS 18 Inactivity Reboot
• Frühe versus verzögerte orale Ernährung nach großen gynäkologischen Eingriffen - Charoenkwan, K - 2024 -- Cochrane Library: just give these women to eat; it seems to not make a difference in clinical outcome, but everyone who's a human can tell that allowing people to eat is just better.
• 6 lessons I learned working at an art gallery
• Sentence structure for writers: understanding weight and clarity [extract] -- OUPblog
• django-filter: filtering a foreign key model property
• Egoless Engineering
• Is Wine Fake?—Asterisk: yes, probably.
• 52 things I learned in 2024 -- by Tom Whitwell -- Dec, 2024 -- Medium: I love these end-of-year knowledge lists.
• Can Amazon save luxury US department stores?: Credit cards make up about 30-60% of the income of large retailers
• How Switzerland’s best river swim became a summertime commute
• Tabloid: the clickbait headline programming language: SHOCKING!
• Why an end-of-the alphabet last name could skew your grades: This is the effect that the (debunked) Kahnemann book theorised with judges and their lunch breaks, except with realistic effect sizes.
• Xiaohongshu helps Southeast Asia with tourism recovery post Covid-19 - Rest of World: There's a single tree that rose to stardom after being featured on the Chinese TikTok variant.
• AI fever turns Anguilla’s “.ai” domain into a digital gold mine - Ars Technica
• Europe’s crackdown on air pollution found to cut heart disease deaths: "The World Heart Federation said that between 2010 and 2019, deaths in the region from heart disease attributed to pollution fell by 19.2 per cent, and from strokes by 25.3 per cent. This amounted to 88,880 fewer heart disease deaths and 34,317 fewer stroke deaths."
• A Medieval Gothic Monastery Built Using CAD / CAM -- Hackaday
• 7 Databases in 7 Weeks for 2025
• Accidentally writing a fast SAT solver -- Blog - Daniel Huang: not really fast nor efficient
• Every UUID V4
• Writing down (and searching through) every UUID · eieio.games
• Disclosure of the Metaserver CDN Source Code · organicmaps · Discussion #9837 · GitHub: some open-source drama
• Big data is dead: Why Your Laptop Might Be Faster Than a Cluster
• Next-level frosted glass with backdrop-filter • Josh W. Comeau
• reference request - The letter $wp$; Name & origin? - MathOverflow
• SechsBriefeGaussAnKreil.pdf: you can Actually read Weierstrass's notes on the Internet?
• Lies I was Told About Collaborative Editing, Part 1: Algorithms for offline editing / Moment devlog
• Historically, 4NF explanations are needlessly confusing
• GitHub - Olshansk/postgres_for_everything: How to reduce complexity and move faster? Just Postgres for everything.
• The Biggest Shell Programs in the World · oils-for-unix/oils Wiki · GitHub
• my second year without a job -- shilin typing...
• zizmor would have caught the Ultralytics workflow vulnerability
• How Much Do I Need to Change My Face to Avoid Facial Recognition?

Libraries, programming, etc

• GitHub - facebookresearch/watermark-anything: Official implementation of the paper "Watermark Anything with Localized Messages"
• GitHub - DocumindHQ/documind: Open-source platform for extracting structured data from documents using AI.
• GitHub - jdx/mise: dev tools, env vars, task runner: What is it?
  • Like asdf (or nvm or pyenv but for any language) it manages dev tools like node, python, cmake, terraform, and hundreds more.
  • Like direnv it manages environment variables for different project directories.
  • Like make it manages tasks used to build and test projects.
• Introduction - Just Programmer's Manual: just is a handy way to save and run project-specific commands.

Books

• Jennifer Government: I read this book some years ago and it is still as good as it was then. It starts out a little slow and a little on the nose, but soon enough, things/people spiral out of control so far that you just have to stay with them, just to see how far they'll go before everything comes crashing down.

Games

• Cocoon: so good I played straight through.
• Heaven's Vault: I looked forward to this very much, but it absolutely did not click with me at all.
• The Falconeer: nice action.
• *Astroneer: as usual.
• Walkabout Minigolf: finally, new DLC. Took us only an evening to find everything in it.

Recipes

• Belgische Waffeln

Other media

• Interview With The Team - Buckie Harbour to Rothienorman - YouTube: this is about a large-object transport company. Go watch it, it's fascinating.
• I Spent 12 Months trying to Debunk a 30 Second TikTok - YouTube: the conclusion is brilliant!
• How They Made Hagrid Big - YouTube
• Testing the US Military’s Worst Idea - YouTube