What are you doing this weekend?
22 points by caius
22 points by caius
Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
(- this-week 2) made me lose steam.Looking at the stock market with excitement, hoping the current bubble not only pops, but explodes, making as much damage as possible.
Painful time to be a small-time investor. I'm sure other companies will pick up the slack once the market normalizes, but it's not pleasant seeing my savings drop by a thousand euros overnight. (Which might not be big money in a more Western country, but it sure is here.)
Oh well, as long as it cools the fad and forces a bit more rationality...
Planning my move from a corporate OS built on increasingly brittle foundations to a community project built on something a bit more solid
I've seen a lot of this sentiment recently, but Linux has never felt more stable to me than nowadays. It's actually so stable it's "boring" (which is not a bad thing, but it's definitely not a statement I would've made 15-20 years ago, doubly so while running an NVIDIA card).
...it's not pleasant seeing my savings drop by a thousand euros overnight.
It's not, but speaking as someone in the same position, that money wasn't real to begin with. I'd recommend playing for the long term gains.
I'd recommend playing for the long term games.
I am. The way it works here is that if you make a legally-binding commitment that you don't disturb the money you put into so-called "Long Term Investment" accounts, after 5 years it becomes tax free. And I'm only buying broad ETFs instead of individual stocks, because I have neither the patience, nor the "skill" to play the stock market roulette wheel.
It's just that smaller number after bigger number makes the monkey brain upset.
One of the things I keep reminding myself is that the smaller number means my weekly auto-buy gets more bananas this week for the same price. It doesn’t fully stop the slight panic but it helps.
I'm sure other companies will pick up the slack once the market normalizes, but it's not pleasant seeing my savings drop by a thousand euros overnight.
Invest in companies whose products and longevity you believe in. If your time horizon is measured in years, this is just a blip. For example, if you invested in AMD one and a half years ago, your investment is still at about 250% of its purchase price.
Nice! I'm planning to switch my VPS from Linux to NetBSD, while moving away from Digital Ocean to Hetzner. I tried creating a NetBSD install on Hetzner during the week but wasn't able to boot it with ssh, for some reason, and the console doesn't work. Going to need a deeper dive to get it working.
Looking at the stock market with excitement, hoping the current bubble not only pops, but explodes, making as much damage as possible.
as much as possible
Would you please accept TSMC still staying afloat? I kind of like living in a technological civilisation, although not its excesses.
Dropping companies back to inflation-adjusted 2015 values should be enough…
I kind of like living in a technological civilisation
They had their fun, it's sticks and stones time now /hj
I was like 30% through writing a blog post on some of the optimizations I've found for the index doing the C++ translation when I realize, god frickin' damnit, I can completely eliminate pointer chasing and cut the disk read count for block traversal down to at most 2 disk reads as long as the postings list is less than something like 2-4 million items. (This is why you write about what you're working on. Nothing quite like it for shaking loose better understandings.)
I can't not keep working on this now. R.I.P. weekend, I hardly knew ye.
Yeah, so many times I’ve thrown away a complete solution because of what I realised while documenting, writing commit messages, &c.
I will be implementing the hardness setting in the brush engine of my painting software. At the moment I only support importing predefined textures and this setting would allow a user to create an airbrush dynamically during runtime.
(It's a very standard feature but just happened to be implemented after texture stamping since it was easier to test the shaders in that order)
Nocacon!
Probably the biggest gatherings of people interested in sci-fi in the UK at this time of year -- certainly one of the biggest. Walk-ins not a problem if anyone is looking for something to do.
An art fair tomorrow night, then on Sunday hosting Zig Day Seattle: https://zig.day/usa/seattle/4/ All experience levels welcome. There's also one in Portland on Saturday, but I won't be at that one.
Also hopefully playing some Valheim. Recently started a new game with a couple others I played with when it was first in early access. Now we're playing the 1.0 release.
Enjoy Valheim! A couple of friends and I recently finished it on a pretty old save we had. Was so satisfying! We missed a few things though since the 1.0 release added more content into the early game, which made me wish kinda wish we started from scratch.
Halloween party with friends, some even from the industry. Also figuring out what mental health professional to pick in order to untangle some matters I've been coping with my whole life. This paper prompted me to.
Continuing work on Garnet. I've gotten most of the data structures and infra done for integrating my PoC typechecker into the real compiler, so now I get to actually uncomment sections of it and tinker with them until tests pass. Very satisfying.
Mind sharing the particular NES game you love?
I recently have been playing Alwa’s Awakening (a recent-ish NES game).
Going to crappy London (Ontario) to produce a stand up comedy record. I've worked with this comic a number of times so it's exciting to do round 3 with even more experience. Also working with an old high school friend on setting up some video for the show as well. Very exciting time.
Until today, I've been safe from scrapers. Suddenly a domain went from ~400 visits/week to 6000 in the last hour all supposedly referred from aorc.org with incoherent windows agents (tablets on windows with safari...), all from residential proxies. Sigh.
This weekend I'm continuing to resurrect an old Samsung Galaxy Tab A 9.7 (SM-T555) from 2015.
Last week I managed to install LineageOS 20 (Android 13) on it. Its last official update was Android 7, so most of the apps I wanted to use had stopped working.
I'm running a completely debloated setup, with F-Droid as my main app store and Aurora as a backup. PipePipe for YouTube, Jellyfin for local media, Librera for books, and Fulguris for browsing. Just the essentials.
My relationship with tech has changed a lot over the past few years. Everything feels increasingly soulless and samey, and somewhere along the way I lost the excitement I used to have for it.
But playing with this old tablet reminded me of a time when I'd spend hours rooting phones, hunting down custom ROMs, I honestly can't remember when or why I stopped doing that.
It's been surprisingly nice to rediscover a little of that old excitement. Even with its low pixel density and aging hardware, I've found myself using this eleven-year-old tablet more over the past week than my fancy 2026 Pixel.
Do you ever feel like we get too distracted by toy systems and local games instead of focusing on more important stuff? Lately I've been thinking about what are the most interesting questions that we could be asking.
The most recent question I'm trying to understand is: what do we have wrong or what is missing in our current understanding of learning to make existing systems so inefficient? I've been reading the Sutton book on RL, and I'll probably continue doing that this weekend until I get bored. Should I read something else?
Once my Claude weekly usage resets I'm going to continue some reverse engineering work. I think I should write down some of the lessons I've learned while doing this in order to help others, but it's unlikely the post will get written. In any case, since I'm already here one of the key lessons I've learned has been to adopt a scientific research journal style logbook. Each run proposes a question or hypothesis which it tries to answer before stepping back to evaluate if the path is worth continuing. This simple technique has served me well.
Pedagogy is a very indoctrinated field; it's been a few generations since the main focus was on actually transferring knowledge better. [1] Language learning is a good microcosm of this. We have seen a few gains like spaced repetition, but much academic effort even opposes sensible definitions of learning (demonizing things like memorization). Bloom's 2 Sigma effect is cool, and grad students are plentiful.
The last 20 years of my life have been crawling through 19th and early 20th century methods until now where I can memorize a page of text in a few minutes. Designing a good text (and easily searchable) is a hard problem. I wish I could find existing work to save me another 20 years.
If, if you, if you read, if you read out, if you read out loud... A text in such a form, paragraph by paragraph, or trailing with the prior sentence, you can memorize arbitrary texts in almost any language, learning a few new vocabulary pieces a minute on high yield texts (with glosses). If you stop during normal reading to summarize something in speech every 5 minutes... Then in writing on the hour... You will see great progress. Better notations/systems a la APL are very useful here (explaining much of my focus on this.)
Generally, I find people dillydally a lot, spending time on the "mouthfeel" of new words, laughing at how they sound etc. instead of saying them as fast as possible 30 times. Indeed, if you suspend the idea of deep sorrow in your mind and physically repeat "Trübsal" 30, yea 50 times quickly, then another 50 for good measure, easily achievable within a single minute, you will have etched it into your brain with boring trauma. Rote is powerful. Yet I find irrelevant details really help with longer term recall. If you (bad example) want to memorize your country's presidents, you can quickly power through them by rote, but if you sew them together with some anecdotes or look for patterns in how many children they had, whether their wives outlived them etc. you will forget a lot of this "irrelevant" information quickly, yet be remember the main parts well (as well as the more interesting surplus.)
Applied to programing, at this point I will read a sample of code (or e.g. a full program in a domain I'm learning), then try to write it down without looking. Once I get it working, I will delete it and try again, much faster now. Then again within the week, SRS and all...
[1] This is why public Obsidian sites discussing memory span etc. are primarily pre-60s research (Hake, Garner, Miller, Flemmer, Frick...). Afterwards, there is next to no research on autodidactism, how motivated students may improve etc. MathAcademy puts out good stuff, I will email this guy.
Sewing a fursuit, just like the last 5 weekends and the next 8; my fourth this time. While I entered the internet from tech and hacking, I carried the love I gained for technical writing over to this hobby and have been posting my works near daily. Just in case anyone's interested, you can find it here.
The bots can't take my love for hand-crafting a large physical object.
Hoping to finish my garbage-collected Lisp I built from scratch! After that I will be working on my own programming language. Though, I've been thinking I'll support a subset of my dynamic language via transpiling to Lisp to avoid having to do lots of compiler work multiple times. One of these days I'll be able to use my fancy domain!
Oh, I'm also setting up a website for a software collective and inviting some people to chat!
Going to eth0:2026 Autumn! So, catching up with some old friends, making new ones to the best of my ability and just having a good time.
Some projects that are on my mind:
For Handmade Cities: we have a Seattle co-working session today!
P.S. We also have London and Australia slated for later this month.
Martial arts level-graduation exam tomorrow. Then flying to Germany for two weeks on Sunday. I'm off work for the rest of the month!
Recovering from a week of intensive exercise while trying to resist the urge to do more.
Also, continuing to prepare my therapy app for my therapist appointment next week, so that I can make the best use of time.
Energy willing, trying to push through a major update to FreshBSD.
There's roughly 9,000 lines between live and my internal dev site, including a 2,500 line Rust rcsfile(5) tool I wrote for the new CVS indexer. So much has changed, doing One More Thing over and over, it's starting to feel like a FreeBSD 5.0 tribute act.
Making signs for an anti-datacentre protest next weekend here in Scotland. Cleaning the flat for a game of Eclipse: Second Dawn on Sunday. Probably carry on my perpetual "Make a dwarf fortress like game until I get bored" side project.
Visiting family whilst a bunch of parcels arrive for me at home. I am both happy and impatient about this.
Going to the Vera Molnár retrospective and exhibition at the V&A (Saturday) https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/degrees-of-disruption-vera-molnar-and-generative-art
And hosting HackWimbledon (Sunday) https://hackwimbledon.org