Weeklog for Week 34: August 17 to August 23
Progress
The tail-end of a vacation is always a bitter-sweet thing. On the one hand, the vacation is over. But on the other hand, home is best!
Articles
- A Third World Embedded Engineer Responds to "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"
- Olo (color) - Wikipedia
- How to put 170 atoms in an atom – Signore Galilei
- How JPEG works (Christopher G. Jennings)
- Buy Your Friends Batteries · Domen Kožar
- I've been doing endurance testing on microSD cards for the last 3 years. Here's what I've learned. : r/homelab
- ‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit
- Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
- AI;DR (AI; Didn’t Read) - Rick Manelius's Newsletter
- Thief designer says that the immersive sim audience is too small for AAA games: 'There's quite a few of us who think the way to do it is be III or AA' -- PC Gamer
- From 13.5 million installs to 499 active devices -- LE Games
- How does IKEA come up with names for its products? - IKEA Sweden
- A long division story – Novak Kaluđerović - Kolja
- How a joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare
- Civic Hygiene – Terence Eden’s Blog
- Revealed: Cyber spies used malware from GitHub to hack EncroChat cryptophone network -- Computer Weekly
- Top -- ManabuKosakaArtWorks
- PostgreSQL for Everything - Dr. Raphael A. Bauer, MBA -- Fractional & Interim CTO -- PE/VC Tech Strategy & Due Diligence -- Berlin -- London -- Austin, Texas
- Eval really is dangerous -- Ned Batchelder
- Training a 125M-parameter Model to Autocomplete Piano - SimEdw's Blog
- I Spent Twenty Years Becoming Good at the Wrong Game – savvy normie
- Hexahexaflexagon1 - hexaflexagon-template-2.pdf
- "Using 30 months of panel data on 26,811 Chinese students in grades 7-12, it has been studied how generative AI affects homework productivity and learning." - Mastodon: Huh, not doing your homework yourself leads to not knowing what's in the homework. Who could have guessed THAT?
- Halloween IX: It Ain't Necessarily SCO
- The Amazon tax -- Seth's Blog
- Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner
- State Library of Massachusetts: Massachusetts Takes a Jog: The Story Behind Southwick’s Curious Border
- Belgian car salesman becomes prince after DNA test proves royal parentage -- CNN
- What if Maintainer Burnout Isn't Burnout
- The Fabled Flatbreads of Uzbekistan -- AramcoWorld
- Amazon kept shutting down my tablet, so I spent $266 on four AI models to own it
- Things I want in a modern relational query language - the sporks space
Libraries, programming, etc
Books
- Remarkably Bright Creatures: this book is about a loser who bails every chance he gets and blames everyone else; and also about a supposedly Swedish woman who gets into all kinds of problems because she doesn't talk to anyone. It is not about an Octopus, as I had expected. The Octopus only has a few pages and plays an absolutely minor role in the story. And then at the end the author reveals that they only picked the Swedish ancestry so they could add a lot of Scandinavian clichés (like the not-talking), when they bring up “lutefisk with hardtack” as a traditional Swedish dish. Which it isn't. Took me out of the (rather mediocre) story completely. 3.5/10
- Artemis by Andi Weir: damn, the moon really is a harsh mistress. 9/10
Games
- Walkabout Minigolf: still great fun with friends!
- Sandustry: this clicked for me and I got stuck on it until I completed it. Awesome game! I hope more is coming out soon!
Backlog
- Sandustry
- Together: Moon Escape
- Unloop (from VR bundle)
- CONVRGENCE (from VR bundle)
- Arizona Sunshine® VR 2 (from VR bundle)
- Bootstrap Island (from VR bundle)
- Into the Radius 2 (from VR bundle)
- EXD - ExtraDimensional (from VR bundle)
- UNDERDOGS (from VR bundle)
Board games
- Bomb Busters: got it recently and it's one of these super-hard collaborative games that are super-hard.
Other media
- Star Wars Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi: really the best of the bunch, condenses and resolves everything and has all the things.
- What Happens When you Give LLMs Guns? - YouTube: the idea is interesting, but the video itself is kind-of silly.
- This DIY Datacenter is NUTS - YouTube: LinusTechTips is touring the Hetzner data center and it's awesome.
- Guy annoys girlfriend with puns at Ikea - YouTube
- 5600hp Tugboat Cat Engine Start -- Marine Diesel Generator Fire Up & Black Out -- Noisy Walk Through! - YouTube
- The LEGEND: The NE2000. - YouTube
- The Bronze Age Collapse (approximately 1200 B.C.E.) - YouTube: here come the Sea Peoples!
- DIY: Flat Folding Chair Build (Easy Step-by-Step Tutorial) #america250 - YouTube
- We Let Beavers Transform an Old Farm - YouTube
- This Device Goes Past Equilibrium - YouTube: yes, counterstream heating/cooling is cool and also much more obvious than being described here. The really annoying thing is that it's not in everything, from aircon systems to shower drains.