What are you doing this week?
13 points by caius
13 points by caius
What are you doing this week? Feel free to share!
Keep in mind it’s OK to do nothing at all, too.
I am working on my final submission before I graduate. It feels a bit weird, to be honest.
I bet. You're so close, though! (also, nice to see you on here)
Yeah, soo close. Just got to finish editing this one last thing now. In the meantime I got elected to the Matrix governing board though, which is pretty cool
(Pretty cool to see you here too, took me a second to figure out where I knew you haha)
In-between work stuff, I'll be wrestling with Content Security Policies. Yeah, fun... I'm working a lot on my latest hobby project - https://setlist.rocks and as I've started picking up users, I need to focus for a little bit on things I should be doing, instead of just the stuff I want to do. My aim is to go from a B to an A on the Mozilla HTTP Observatory Report and this is the last bit I really need to tackle.
The background (a Ruby on Rails site to help organize bands & musicians) and technical details were covered here: https://lobste.rs/s/jreqtw/returning_rails_2026. Given that I'm much happier and more comfortable with backend dev work, all this CSP stuff has been a bit of a challenge and one hell of a learning curve. Seemed straight-forward in theory to start with, and I vendored most of my dependencies, but hooooo boy. Lots of false positives, browser oddities, Rails defaults and things that I'm used to "just working(tm)" triggering alerts. It's a proper minefield, and an uphill struggle to work through.
That said, I seem to be most of the way there and just need a few more rounds of tweaking and monitoring my Sentry logs before I pull the trigger. Problem is although I've learned a lot, because this is the part of development I find least enjoyable I've been procrastinating a bit and focussing on more fun backend tasks and suggestions from users. Set myself a deadline of the end of the week to have everything in place, we'll see if I actually get there!
I also want to find some time to play with a new 8-bit retro project, as well as practicing bass for my next gig all while trying to juggle home and work life. Not enough hours in the day!
CSP is definitely a giant pain in the ass at times. One of the few times where I've had to dig out the actual spec to figure out why things were going wrong. My condolences :)
The biggest issue I've had is all the corner edge cases where things don't quite behave as they should. Surprisingly, there seem to be a few defaults (or common patterns) in Rails & the Hotwire stack that cause issues. And despite having gone through everything now many, many times, and having dozens of daily users with no apparent genuine issues reported, it's still a scary prospect flipping over into enforcing mode, knowing that it WILL break things if you get it wrong.
And all the weird noise from browser plugins and extensions that tends to flood the logs also adds to the pressure - each one I have to investigate and work out if I forgot something in an infrequently used code path, or if it's yet another extension injecting JS into my pages.
Any tips or tools you've encountered that can help ?
Currently exploring Alicante. Then going north, stopping in a few more towns, and finishing in Barcelona.
Work can wait a week or 2.
Maybe finishing "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius. However, the goal is to learn, not just 'finish' books. My thinking on it reached equilibrium a few days ago so I wrote a post about it.. There's more to it, and I'll probably also do a second pass next week collecting quotes. Maybe a second writeup, but I'm also missing a writeup I need to do for my two readings of the Book of Five Rings.
I would like to be ready for "team lead/lead developer/founding engineer" roles, so I'm studying some product design and writing specs while building out my side project backlog. I found something from StackOverflow on the technical side, so trying to find resources about the product side.
I've been hacking on a fork of the Ghidra decompiler for a while, and my Rust-based testing/verification layer has slowly morphed into an independent decompiler framework. The IR has been a major sticking point, but I think I've finally got something reasonable put together.
It's a sort of MLIR-ish syntax -- I was originally hoping to use real MLIR but couldn't make it fit the data model. Syntactically it's ... very busy, but after many many attempts to make WAT-style s-expressions work, I've given in and used what feels like every sigil on the keyboard.
There's too much LLM in the development process to escape the vibecoding tag, so this probably won't ever be a project I can submit as a link, but hopefully a comment isn't out of bounds.
block.if {
block ^b4 < params = [%v69] > {
op.cond_br < true_target = (jump ^b5) false_target = (jump ^b6) > {
op 'cbranch' < addr = @ram:0x9fcf8 in = [%v59] >;
}
}
block ^b5 {
val %v52 < loc = @register:0x0 size = 4 symbol = $local:0 >;
op 'call' <
addr = @ram:0x9fd06
out = %v52
in = [@ram:0x8a5a0 %v62 (const 0x0 1 < type = :t6 >) (const 0x0 4 < type = :t14 >)]
>;
val %v50 < loc = @register:0x0 size = 1 type = :t6 >;
op 'subpiece' < addr = @ram:0x9fd06 out = %v50 in = [%v52 #0:4] >;
op.br < target = (jump ^b7 %v50) > {
op 'branch' < addr = @ram:0x9fd0e >;
}
}
block ^b6 {
val %v53 < loc = @register:0x0 size = 4 >;
op 'call' <
addr = @ram:0x9fd1b
out = %v53
in = [@ram:0xf3e30 %v62 (const 0x0 1 < type = :t6 >) (const 0x0 4 < type = :t14 >)]
>;
val %v51 < loc = @register:0x0 size = 1 type = :t6 >;
op 'subpiece' < addr = @ram:0x9fd1b out = %v51 in = [%v53 #0:4] >;
jump ^b7 %v51;
}
}
Other than looking for work, going through the overall excellent Ziglings, and contemplating a "real" project to get myself back into Zig. Meanwhile, on-and-off working on omry, my contribution to a growing list of similar projects, which lets you archive and search web pages. I'd like to move my search backend from Typesense to tantivy.
I'm on vacation in the Adirondacks but might be working on my Ocaml Gameboy emulator on the side. I've been finding it immensely rewarding. I've also gotten to use some of the Objective features of Objective Caml in this project, which are ironically a little overlooked :)
Creating / fine-tuning some small (<1M) purpose-built models. It feels like a superpower to generate some synthetic data, run through 30 min of GPU and get something working!
Specifically I'm adding support for some languages in the PaddlePaddle OCR model, so I can drop the Tesseract dependency on my app
I'd love to hear more about this if you have the time. I've been investigating rapidocr, an onnx port of paddleocr, to accelerate my accessibility stack and some new things I want to integrate into it. Sadly I've been hamstrung so far by AMD's terrible compute stack, preventing me from running it on their GPU or NPU.
What does your training setup look like? what's the hardware? how does the software look? what documentation did you read to figure it out (it's all in chinese and has been pretty difficult to digest for me)? Any details you can share would be appreciated, like I'd love to read a full on blogpost about this.
Feel free to send me an email. Detection/Recognition work OK on hw, but they are fast enough to run on CPU (my app runs on phone CPU and it's fine).
For the models I just used the Paddle tools from github. The training setup is synthetic data generated with a python script (render text on some noisy background, "degrade" it via JPEG noise, rotation, blur, etc), and the hardware is some cheap 5070Ti from vast.ai (~$0.15/hr, finetune is 300k samples, runs in 40min, cpu bottlenecked, didn't bother optimizing)
Training is just tools/train.py from PaddleOCR, with the paddlepaddle-gpu==3.2.0 wheel
Then just export the pdiparams -> onnx -> mnn.
I've only tried finetuning the recognition models from PP-OCRv6 small (very new). The best (and maybe obvious) tip I can give: use as many fonts as you can get, my initial runs had only 3 fonts... adding 5-6 more helped dramatically.
For now the only problem I had was that some characters get confused in hebrew (ס/ם) and adding more data, more resolution, etc, didn't help
Side-problems: I don't read Hebrew so it's hard to tell if it's accurate, and pasting any RTL character into an input box immediately makes life terrible (inputs behave very differently from what I'm used to)
For the 4 Indic (is this the right word?) scripts I did, the only problems I had was getting some real data for evals (I still have like 3 pictures for each..)
If you speak (read?) any of these languages send me a message! I need a handful of signs/advertisement/paper/whatever photos for testing
Hebrew, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali
Just released Abject 0.6.0 (https://abject.world) which now has a full 3D desktop. This week I need to finish deploying the mobile client that works via p2p and optimize the communication channel.
Fixing my Gemini site up a little bit, reading some more Ellroy, reading some more Vollmann, maybe learning some rust, fiddling with gentoo
I'm working to get Harper's issue and pull request queues down. They're quite long after a month of heads down hacking.
I’m continuously improving sekrn, a zero-dependency agent powered by DeepSeek V4 Flash. It’s highly affordable and handles most tasks efficiently. https://github.com/chunqiuyiyu/sekrun
I just moved to Austria for a summer internship, I'm getting accomodated and starting at the job.
We are leaving this weekend on a vacation to Singapore. Last time when we planned an international trip (to the UK) covid was unleashed into the world and we had to cancel. So nervous that we should go and return safely.
My team is tackling some tech debt that’s been around forever, in a service I’ve talked about here before, and I’m quite excited about it. It’s a fairly big project. We have been at this for weeks, and will be at it for a few more.
Also tackling some “gardening debt” (clearing weeds) to prepare for a barbecue with friends this weekend.
Returning to work after taking 8 days off so there's a bit of a backlog:
Shouldn't be too bad all in all. Hopefully I'll have some time to work on my resume and apply to some jobs.
Travelled yesterday with my GF to our previous residence in Barcelona for a The Cardigans concert today. That's from a different period of my life, so I don't know how it will work out, but my last live music stuff was in 2019 (and those were exceptions)... and I don't have so many chances to see live bands I've been obsessed with, so I guess I had to do it.
That means also some time off work. I'm now mostly doing Nix stuff, which is somewhat tiring from all the learning I have to do, but I think it's an investment.
I'm also toying with sr.ht these days for my community creation experiments. I don't think it's the final form, but might be the way to bootstrap things.
Just for completeness: The Cardigans exceeded my expectations. I still think live is not one of their main things, but well, they've toured forever, so they know how to do it.