Progress

Work goes well.

We have a weekend off in the snow. Very nice. But ate too much.

Articles

• The mountain that weighed the Earth – Signore Galilei
• Video Games as Art · Gwern.net: this is one of the stupidest and most aggravatingBonus annoyance: the last article I read by Gwern was First, Make Me Care, by Gwern · Gwern.net, which this one completely disregards. articles I've read in a long time. Not because of the fact that video games are artand if you can't see that there's really no point in discussing this with you, except maybe to ask you: What is art, then?, but because it reduces art down to one single aspect that is just the stupidest: “you can't talk about it”. Let's discuss this by looking at the sub-head, one by one:
  • “Video games are art”: agreed
  • “but a strange art”: what, why would it be strange, or even different from other art?
  • “their essence is transformation of the player, not description to the player”: that's... what all art is! There is no point in describing a movie to someone, or a book. You can only experience movies or books or the moon by experiencing them yourself. And their essence is transformation; you become a new person by experiencing the art. That is what art is.
  • “This makes meaningful criticism nearly impossible”: why would that follow?, and why would this be different from literally any other form of art and art criticism?
  • “you can point at the moon, but it’s not the moon, and once someone sees it, they no longer need the pointing”: now this is just plain silly and also the same for all art forms. It is expanded further a bit further down as „Criticism is often limited to serving as advertising, a finger pointing to the moon in hinting at the transformation, exegesis, parasocial gossip, or technical critique of the craft.“. Which, again, is the same for all other art forms, too. It's also entirely disregarding the entire field of, you know, video game critique.
  • In summary, this is just bad! I may be slightly biased because my definition of art is pretty wide. But even if you take the Wikipedia approach and say “Art is a diverse range of cultural activity centered around works utilizing creative or imaginative talents, which are expected to evoke a worthwhile experience, generally through an expression of emotional power, conceptual ideas, technical proficiency, or beauty” then all of that still applies to video games and it still does not contain any of what this article goes on about.
• Your App Subscription Is Now My Weekend Project · Roberto Selbach
• That’s Not How Email Works, HSBC – Dan Q
• 3D-printed mathematical lampshades
• Sacred Geometry:Golden Ratio:Equil.Triangle in circle:GeometryCode.com
• AI found 12 of 12 OpenSSL zero-days (while curl cancelled its bug bounty) — LessWrong
• Three-Dimensional Mapping of the Moai (Statue) Quarry at Rano Raraku, Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile)
• Maik Klein - Announcing Unreal Rust
• ESA - Europe’s next-generation weather satellite sends back first images
• Detecting Dementia Using Lexical Analysis: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Tells a More Personal Story -- MDPI
• ScienceShot: An Illustrated Guide to Hippo Castration -- Science -- AAAS
• In a genre where information is sacred and spoilers are devastating, how do we talk about puzzle games? · Thinky Games
• Two days of oatmeal reduce cholesterol level — University of Bonn
• Wallace and Gromit Font
• Godot 4.6 Release: It's all about your flow
• AntiRender - See Through The Architectural BS
• 5,500-Year-Old Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of a Massive Asteroid - Archaeology Worlds
• Audiophiles Can't Differentiate Audio Signals Sent Through Copper, Banana, and Mud in Blind Test -- Headphonesty
• Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native • The Register
• The Universe of Discourse : An anecdote about backward compatibility
• Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon – Wilsons Blog
• How I Taught My Neighbor to Keep the Volume Down

Libraries, programming, etc

• pandas - Python Data Analysis Library
• Overview
• GitHub - jmuncor/sherlock: Intercept LLM API traffic and visualize token usage in a real-time terminal dashboard. Track costs, debug prompts, and monitor context window usage across your AI development sessions.

Games

• Astro Colony

Board games

• Dune: Empire Uprising
• Sky Team: finally played this after having it on the shelf for a year. It's really good and very tense. Will play more in the future.

Other media

• The Adventures of Reemo Green - YouTube: lots of AI generation in here, and surprisingly good.
• I Remade Endgame in 1 Week - YouTube
• Adam Savage on When It's Time to Change Your Worldview ... - YouTube: great as always.
• I Recreated Disney's Most Convincing Illusion - YouTube
• The Most Horribly Mistranslated Word in Old English - YouTube: see also the discussion on here: Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection on Hacker News, most saliently in this comment as: “Beowulf translation is a whole academic field, the translation has been debated ad nauseum for 100s of years, Tolkien had his own translation and opinion, which differed from others. One additional scholar adding his own interpretation doesn't necessarily overturn anything. There is not enough detail in this article to know how compelling the case is or what the counter arguments would be.”
• The Misconception behind Beowulf's Name - YouTube
• The Mind-blowing Scale Of Moai Building - YouTube
• I Reversed Newton's Experiment - YouTube
• The Liquid Hammer Toy You Can't Buy - YouTube