Progress

New Year!

We went to visit some friends and had a great time, without thinking about anything of importance. Very relaxing.

Articles

• actually, BSD kqueue is a mountain of technical debt -- Ariadne's Space
• The Zombocom Problem - by Gordon Brander - Squishy Computer: “This is the Zombocom Problem: sure, it can be anything, but first it has to be something specific. Many attempts at no-code, low-code, nodes-and-wires, end-user programming, wikis, malleable software, moldable development, super apps, protocols, and platforms have failed because of the Zombocom Problem. People don’t want “anything at all”. They want something specific. To succeed, you need to solve a specific problem for a specific user and find specific product-market fit.”
• Mixbox - Natural Color Mixing Based on Real Pigments
• GitHub - cooljjj33/PolyDye: Full Color Printer Mod for Marlin 3D Printers
• Debugging memory corruption: Who wrote ‘2’ into my stack?!
• Penrose mazes: I'll have to integrate those into my maze generator, I guess.
• Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
• Collection of insane and fun facts about SQLite - blag
• Meet Grasso the Yard Robot – chrisfenton.com
• Simon Murphy - Film History MA Work, 2005: How turntables were invented to replace movie orchestras.
• The RotoZipper – chrisfenton.com
• Frontiers -- Effect of swearing on physical performance: a mini-review: Swearing improves grip strength by 9%, wall sit time by 22%, and plank time by 12%.
• The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans -- Scientific Reports: Here's a perspective on AI emissions: Humans emit 27g of CO2 in the time it takes to write three hundred words. ChatGPT, however, performs the same task in 4.4 seconds and produces only 2.2g of CO2.
• Oxford Comma Dispute Is Settled as Maine Drivers Get $5 Million - The New York Times
• Extreme metal guitar skills linked to intrasexual competition, but not mating success: Heavy metal guitarists who play fast tend to have higher rates of intrasexual competitiveness. The main motivating factor behind becoming a heavy metal guitarist is not to impress women, but to impress other men.
• Ranking Programming Languages by Energy Efficiency
• Honesty of Groups: Effects of Size and Gender Composition - dp16954.pdf: This paper studies unethical behavior by groups and provides systematic evidence on how lying decisions are affected by group size and group gender composition. We conduct an online experiment with 1,677 participants (477 groups) where group members can communicate with each other via a novel video chat tool. Our key findings are that (i) larger groups lie more, (ii) all-male groups stand out in their proclivity to lie, (iii) already the first female in a group causes an honesty shift, and (iv) group behavior cannot be fully explained by members’ individual honesty preferences.
• Brains vs Brawn: Relative brain size is sexually dimorphic amongst weapon bearing ruminants - PMC: In species where males invest in weaponry (antlers, horns, tusks, etc.), female brains are bigger.
• Fun Facts about Reindeer and Caribou -- FDA: Santa’s reindeer are all female. Male reindeer don’t start growing antlers until February, so any reindeer with antlers hauling goods on Christmas Eve wouldn’t be male.
• How many joints does the 5th toe have? A review of 606 patients of 655 foot radiographs - PubMed: 44.4% of people have one joint on their pinkie toe and 55.3% have two.
• Lazy Sun is less energetic than compost › Dr Karl's Great Moments In Science (ABC Science): The energy output of the sun is 276.5 watts per cubic meter, roughly the same as a compost pile. But, well, it's a large compost pile.
• Feeling small: Fingers can detect nano-scale wrinkles even on a seemingly smooth surface -- ScienceDaily: "This means that, if your finger was the size of the Earth, you could feel the difference between houses from cars," Rutland says. "That is one of the most enjoyable aspects of this research. We discovered that a human being can feel a bump corresponding to the size of a very large molecule."
• 2024 remake of the 2004 game Darklaga Cannonball Symphony
• 5 ways to draw an outline
• Polyline triangulation - Julien Vernay
• Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass -- Nature: Humanity has become a dominant force in shaping the face of Earth1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. An emerging question is how the overall material output of human activities compares to the overall natural biomass. Here we quantify the human-made mass, referred to as ‘anthropogenic mass’, and compare it to the overall living biomass on Earth, which currently equals approximately 1.1 teratonnes10,11. We find that Earth is exactly at the crossover point; in the year 2020 (± 6), the anthropogenic mass, which has recently doubled roughly every 20 years, will surpass all global living biomass. On average, for each person on the globe, anthropogenic mass equal to more than his or her bodyweight is produced every week. This quantification of the human enterprise gives a mass-based quantitative and symbolic characterization of the human-induced epoch of the Anthropocene.
• biocubes: an inventory of biomass and technomass
• What Smartphones are doing to kids' mental health is NOT terrifying (no matter what a child psychiatrist says)
• Cees Bassa: "For the 4th year in a row, my all-sky camera has been taking an image of the sky above the Netherlands every 15 seconds. Combining these images reveal the length of the night changing throughout the year, the passage of clouds and the motion of the Moon and the Sun through the sky. #astrophotography" - Astrodon - The Astro Community
• Making a PDF that’s larger than Germany – alexwlchan: quite simple, actually. Also, not specific to Germany.
• [2501.00536] Phase behavior of Cacio and Pepe sauce: Finally, we present a scientifically optimized recipe based on our findings, enabling a consistently flawless execution of this classic dish.
• Cuneiform Mug - Hand Carved -- Cognitive Surplus
• This is how much human blood you need to make a longsword: It's 2,352 for an iron longsword, and 16,188 for a steel longsword.
• Selbstgebaute Blitzer-Attrappe – „Strafbar, aber nachvollziehbar“
• How to send progress updates - Slava Akhmechet: I'll have to add (15) to every single thing I write from now on: "These tips don’t work if you’re incompetent."
• An Unreasonable Amount of Time - Allen Pike
• The Engagement Is Better on Bluesky - Bluesky

Libraries, programming, etc

• llama.cpp guide - Running LLMs locally, on any hardware, from scratch ::
• OpenSPH: “Versatile particle code for astrophysical simulations
  SpaceSim -- A new graphical application that uses the OpenSPH solver, but with a user interface that is more interactive, intuitive, and easy to use.”

Board games

• Red 7: I did not win the championship this time, again.
• Love Letter
• Terra Mystica: Quite the heavy game, and it took us about four hours to finish the game (contrasted with 90 minutes of "regular" playtime from the side of the box). The finish was super-closeWell, I was far off in last place, so, uh, not for me. My mistake is that I always play with people who are much smarter than me, so I end up unwinning. so the balancing is quite good. I guess this is one of those games that you'd need to play a hundred times to get comfortably familiar with.
• Spiel des Lebens: This is just some silly nostalgia. The game presents the american model of life as the only viable alternative, and everything just revolves around money. Even winning just means making it to the “stately mansion” (which I read as “dead”, since you're not doing anything afterwards) with the most money. It really is quite silly, which is part of the fun.

Other media

• How to Ship 800 Billion Pounds of Rock (The Marquette Ore Docks) - YouTube
• Hulett Ore Unloaders - YouTube
• We Built a Car Ejection Seat! - YouTube: Answers the age-old question: can you eject from a car moving at 40 km/h by counter-accelerating yourself to that same speed and end up standing?