Weeklog for Week 10: March 03 to March 09

Mar 9, 2025

Progress

Carnival! What great fun!

Work was meh.

This week was a good for board games. We had a game night. Then I tried to join the local board game club but couldn't find it.
Then an old friend stayed over the weekend and we played some more games.

Articles

olmOCR – Open-Source OCR for Accurate Document Conversion
Rackmounting that which should not be rackmounted - Cal Bryant
Man's brain turned to glass by Vesuvius volcano ash cloud
Highlights: Blue Ghost moon landing finds success within ‘Sea of Crises’ -- CNN
Octopuses are now punching fish in the face. This video shows exactly why -- Discover Wildlife
Identity Alignment Simulation · Streamlit: This application simulates how identity alignment could have evolved in society. Agents hold beliefs on multiple issues and develop affinities with other agents based on belief similarity. "Someone should demonstrate this more mathematically, but it seems to me that if you start with a random assortment of identities, small fluctuations plus reactions should force polarization. That is, if a chance fluctuation makes environmentalists slightly more likely to support gun control, and this new bloc goes around insulting polluters and gun owners, then the gun owners affected will reactively start hating the environmentalists and insult them, the environmentalists will notice they're being attacked by gun owners and polarize even more against them, and so on until (environmentalists + gun haters) and (polluters + gun lovers) have become two relatively consistent groups. [...]”
VectorChord-BM25: Revolutionize PostgreSQL Search with BM25 Ranking
Downtown Doug Brown » The gooey rubber that’s slowly ruining old hard drives
Begrudgingly choosing CBOR over MessagePack
> (CBOR introduced) a neat [type--length] encoding instead of just [type], which ... -- Hacker News
Chrome Returns 206 when the Server Returns 403 – Ao Li
Crónicas Estilográficas: One Logo, Three Companies (I)
Engineers create first flat telescope lens that can capture color while detecting light from faraway stars
Color astrophotography with a 100 mm-diameter f/2 polymer flat lens -- Applied Physics Letters -- AIP Publishing
Mapping the French Culinary Network -- Théophile Cantelobre
SQLite-on-the-Server Is Misunderstood: Better At Hyper-Scale Than Micro-Scale
The power of interning: making a time series database 2000x smaller in Rust -- Blog -- Guillaume Endignoux
The very weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option – Interesting things
How the U.K. Broke Its Own Economy - The Atlantic
Repairable Flatpack toaster - Kasey Hou
Familienbasierte Interventionen im Vergleich zur Standardbehandlung für Menschen mit Schizophrenie - Chien, WT - 2024 -- Cochrane Library: This review suggests that family interventions might improve patients’ outcomes (e.g. relapse) and families’ outcomes (e.g. caregiver burden and expressed emotion), with little to no difference in patients’ hospital admission and adverse effects in terms of death. However, evidence on patients’ compliance with medication and quality of life was very uncertain.
The Museum of All Things
Introducing django-remake-migrations -- browniebroke.com
What Vegetable Are You?
Global sales of combustion engine cars have peaked - Our World in Data
Salty game dev comments, easier mods are inside Command & Conquer’s source code - Ars Technica
Sutro Tower in 3D
fi-le.net
Code Galaxies Visualization
Book+covers -- Stanisław Lem: Solaris - Hype&Hyper
Why fastDOOM is fast
Tmux - the essentials – david winter
DuckDB goes distributed? DeepSeek’s smallpond takes on Big Data
Arc Blanc: a real time ocean simulation framework (JCGT)
Avoid the nightmare bicycle
HYTRADBOI 2025 postmortem
Why "alias" is my last resort for aliases
GitHub - adamghill/awesome-django-admin-themes: A compendium of themes for the Django admin (with screenshots!)
Yoke is really cool - Xe Iaso
Building Real-Time Global Illumination: Part 1
Radiance Cascades: Building Real-Time Global Illumination
Mistral OCR -- Mistral AI
Things have reasons · Alex Gaynor
What is OpenTelemetry and how to add it to your Django application -- We Love Open Source - All Things Open
Drones and Cowboys -- EMEA Entrepreneurs
Naturally occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects
Call It What You Want: Threat Actor Delivers Highly Targeted Multistage Polyglot Malware -- Proofpoint US
Secret Weblog • Succinct data structures
Athena spacecraft declared dead after toppling over on moon -- Space -- The Guardian
Explore the Largest Online Collection of Plants -- Compare Across Stores: filterable plant catalog
Polars — Polars Cloud; the distributed Cloud Architecture to run Polars anywhere
Portable MRI Scans Patients for Signs of Stroke - IEEE Spectrum: Axana does not require any AI to process the data, just straightforward physics and mathematics. This makes the interpretation of the data much simpler and more reliable.
Clickbench says Postgres is a great analytics database
Discworld Rules - by Venkatesh Rao - Contraptions
Undocumented "backdoor" found in Bluetooth chip used by a billion devices
You might not need Redis - viblo.se
Discovering Errors in Donald Knuth’s TAOCP
Kill your Feeds - Stop letting algorithms dictate how you think - usher.dev
An exploratory fly-by of Pi-Hole 6 • The Register
It is as if you were on your phone -- 📱
2025-03-05 How do you process the news?

Libraries, programming, etc

Scroll Buddy, js-powered little man that follows your scroll bar
Mox: modern, secure, all-in-one mail server
GitHub - pipecat-ai/smart-turn
GitHub - Fimeg/NetworkChronicles: Network Chronicles: The Vanishing Admin A gamified self-discovering documentation system that transforms traditional network documentation into an immersive mystery adventure.
GitHub - bypirob/airo: Deploy your projects from local to production (self-hosted).

Books

Influx by Daniel Suarez: still quite grim; also, I'm not currently in the mood for over-the-top-risk-it-all action sequences.

Games

Mars First Logistics
Walkabout Minigolf: it's been too long!

Board games

Agricola
Dorfromantik
Import/Export
Red7
Machi Koro
Love Letter: with two players, this game is really not that good.