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Weeklog for Week 8: February 17 to February 23

Feb 23, 2025

Progress

Starting with a free day, this was a great working week. I got a lot of stuff done, some of it even useful!

We recorded a podcast episode on Thursday, also cool!

I baked and fried a good deal of things, so that was nice, too!

Articles

What do I mean by some software devs are "ngmi"?: very enthusiastic about AI (and specifically something called “Cursor”)
searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours -- Ben E. C. Boyter: the largest SQLite DB I've created was 50GB, and already at that size, the file alone was quite a pain to work with
Fluoxetine promotes IL-10–dependent metabolic defenses to protect from sepsis-induced lethality -- Science Advances
Does or did COBOL default to 1875-05-20 for corrupt or missing dates? - Retrocomputing Stack Exchange: no, not by default, by probably by this department's convention
ESPARGOS - ESP32-based phase-coherent WiFi sensing device
When Not to Obey Orders (military context, but applies)
IPv6 is hard :: Techlog: “No it’s not. It’s different.”
Making the Web More Readable With Stylus - Wesley Moore
Inscribed: a slide-based tool for fast sketching and animating ideas.
Debugging An Undebuggable App - Bryce Bostwick
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?
Bombed Fresco: Using Math To Piece Together a Lost Treasure - DER SPIEGEL
Can I ethically use LLMs? -- nicole@web
Product Development Processes You Might Not have Heard of - Department of Product
::: A Short History of English Waymarks :::
Getting a charge out of wasted automobile heat – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet
Setting up a trusted, self-signed SSL/TLS certificate authority in Linux
Adam Golaski On David Lynch's "Revenge of the Jedi" — Bennington Review
My Washing Machine Refreshed My Thinking on Software Effort Estimation — Cosive: The thing I read here is that it's important to have a large enough toolset to deal with blockers. I think this is true for both washing machine installations as well as software development.
The Ideal Candidate Will Be Punched In the Stomach § Scott Smitelli bleak
Catalytic Computing Taps the Full Power of a Full Hard Drive -- Quanta Magazine
It's Not a Damned Calculator: Taggart Tech
Why the Number Line Freaks Me Out – Math with Bad Drawings: if the number line freaks you out, wait until you hear of any of the freaky stuff in mathematics
A year of uv: pros, cons, and should you migrate: “You should try it, and only if it doesn't work, try something else.” -- agreed
We switched from Java to Go and don't regret it -- Glasskube: surprise!
Reviewing the Cryptography Used by Signal - Dhole Moments
Reviewing Signal’s Cryptography, Part 2 - Dhole Moments
Reviewing Signal’s Cryptography, Part 3 - Dhole Moments
How X-Plane Works -- X-Plane: Simple!
Reviewing Signal’s Cryptography, Part 4 - Dhole Moments
Reviewing Signal’s Cryptography, Part 5 - Dhole Moments
Reviewing Signal’s Cryptography, Part 6 - Dhole Moments
Reviewing Signal’s Cryptography, Part 7 - Dhole Moments
Reviewing Signal’s Cryptography, Finale - Dhole Moments
Crypto Fails — Reasoning by Lego: The wrong way to think about...: I don't get it, the ways sound exactly the same to me?! One is “you build software out of composable parts” and the other is “you decompose a block of software into smaller parts”, soo... uh?
[2502.09734] Gravitational Effects of a Small Primordial Black Hole Passing Through the Human Body: useful information!
The secret Poker Game You Can Play on the Subway! -- falken
An early social un-network -- Paperstack
Xbox Pushes Ahead With Muse, a New Generative AI Model. Devs Say ‘Nobody Will Want This’ -- WIRED: Actually, I'm not so sure about that. Many developers/managers don't care about their product, and cost is the only thing. Heck, I am very cost sensitive when it comes to game development.
A Tail Calling Interpreter For Python (And Other Updates)
Nicht‐invasive Überdruckbeatmung zur Behandlung von akutem Asthma bei Kindern - Korang, SK - 2024 -- Cochrane Library
The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world
After 20 Years, Math Couple Solves Major Group Theory Problem -- Quanta Magazine
Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » FAQ on Microsoft’s topological qubit thing
Obscura VPN -- Privacy that’s more than a promise
Can ISPs NetFlow data be used to track traffic going through VPNs?
AI vs. an extra minute in the shower - kmaasrud: as with so many things, individual responsibility is way overblown. Do you really think that Google does only a handful of queries each day? Or perhaps they run their LLMs multiple times against every page on the internet multiple times, in the hope of finding out new things?
An asteroid might hit earth in 2032. Here's what to know: it's not gonna hit us specifically, so that's relief!
The Buenos Aires constant
Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud
Removing Jeff Bezos From My Bed ◆ Truffle Security Co.
20 years working on the same software product -- Successful Software
Sparse Voxels Rasterization: Real-time High-fidelity Radiance Field Rendering: very impressive
AI is Stifling Tech Adoption -- Vale.Rocks: An interesting argument: because training data lags current events, AI developers will also lag new features and technologies.
Introduction - augurs - a time series toolkit
A Vending Machine, on the Internet -- Three Kind Words
PAROL6 DOCS: "PAROL6 is a high-performance 3D-printed desktop robotic arm. The design approach of PAROL6 was to be similar to industrial robots in terms of mechanical design, control software, and usability. Control software, GUI, and robots STL files are open-source. You can build your own PAROL6 robot by following the instructions located in Github respository."
Create a Gaming HVM - Community Guides - Qubes OS Forum
Comments on NASA's 10 rules: The real takeaway here is "don't use C in critical environments".
The Big TDD Misunderstanding. 💡Rumors have it that the term “unit”… -- by Oliver Wolf -- Medium: agreed, but does not address TDD very much except to say "it would be weird to let your architecture be driven by your tests", which I agree with
Money lessons without money: The financial literacy fallacy » Anand Sanwal: that idea is IMHO super-misleading. It replaces “unhealthy un-knowledge” with “unhealthy all-about-money”, so I'm not a supporter!
Who Gets To Sonic Meme? -- Talking Videogames, With Robots
The Shape of a Mars Mission - Idle Words
SLUM: The Shadow Library Uptime Monitor
How I Built an Open Source AI Tool to Find My Autoimmune Disease (After $100k and 30+ Hospital Visits) - Now Available for Anyone to Use : selfhosted: Not sure whether to be amazed or horrified. I mean, it's nice to do document handling, but doing healthcare research, that's a bit bold, isn't it?
The End of Programming as We Know It – O’Reilly
How to Favicon in 2025: Three files that fit most needs—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog (via Jochens weeklog)
Wiki - GDScriptNotes
1665 celestial phenomenon over Stralsund - Wikipedia
1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg - Wikipedia
1566 celestial phenomenon over Basel - Wikipedia
Ask for no, don’t ask for yes – Dan Moore!
Electronics Teardown: Stelo CGM -- Andy Kong
John Carlos Baez: "Hey! A step toward topologica…" - Mathstodon
How we built a VR Headset that sees people through walls. (Treehacks ‘25) -- by redJ -- (Jared M.) -- Feb, 2025 -- Medium
Rust, C++, and Python trends in jobs on Hacker News (February 2025) -- Martin Wojtczyk
On productivity, and lack thereof – Micro SF/F

Weeklog for Week 8: February 17 to February 23

Progress

Articles

Libraries, programming, etc

Books

Games

Board games

Recipes

Other media