What are you doing this weekend?
21 points by caius
21 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!
I can absolutely empathize with this but I have found that the best medicine, for me anyway, is to do what you want to do anyway and not let anyone take it from you. The anxiety mostly exists when I'm not doing enough creative work, and fades into the background when I am. It's not pointless and this community is full of people who still celebrate it.
I've been thinking about Candide lately. It's a short satirical novel by Voltaire.
It's mainly arguing against the popular position at the time that this was the best of all possible worlds, and that things were for the best, by just showing how bad things really were and how much pointless suffering there was, the story set against the backdrop of a war-torn Europe (Seven Years' War was a kind of World War 0 or -1 or something), and the great earthquake in Lisbon.
It closes with the conclusion that if this isn't the best of all possible worlds, instead of despairing and worrying about all the horrors in the world, the wars and the disasters and problems of state and cosmos, that we should instead tend our garden. Metaphorically, to focus on what is close to us, and is within our domain of control, to operate locally.
I think in your case, hacking on a toy lisp machine is just that.
Share!! And don't care about the rest of the world!!
AI definitely doesn't make anything pointless. Here is the analogy I use. Sometime in the past skilled woodworkers were all the rage. The made beautiful furniture by hand for all of us. Then the industrial revolution happened. Woodworking became niche or obsolete because machines made furniture.
Did that make woodworking unattainable? No. In fact tools became cheaper and you could do it as a hobby more easily because you could buy wood even i fyou didn't have trees around.
I doubt that there will be boutique programming stores like there is for woodworking, but no one can stop you from hobby coding all you want.
I myself want to build a little robot box that does something, say facial recognition. The AI revolution, once the dust has settled, will mean cheap fast SBCs that we can run local LLMs on. Let the fun begin!
Keep at it my friend!
I don't know.
Movienight with some friends this evening!
Going to the local Hackerspace on Sunday. I was working on something to couple DS1962 ibutton keys to LDAP, going to see if I can make some progress on that
I'm probably going to build up my knowledge of Retro Forth programming. I am definitely in the honeymoon phase, but honestly it is so refreshing to use a language whose implementation I can read and understand in one afternoon.
Also reading some articles and watching some videos to close some tabs :-)
I actually once wrote an implementation of the virtual machine Retro Forth ran on (Ngaro), it was a pretty nice exercise. The current VM is just called Nga, I'm not sure how much it has changed since
Nice! Yeah I don't know what changed since then.
I see that you did it in Rust. Someone apparently implemented a minimal Rust Nga a few years ago, but I haven't looked at it yet.
Oh and I've received the old slide rule I've bought, so I'll also be learning how to use it. Quite a nerdy weekend, I guess!
I'll be at Long Island Retro Gaming Expo all weekend showing off my Japanese import computers including a NEC PC-8801, a NEC PC-9821, and a Sharp X68000!
On Saturday I'm going to a local street festival to see some bands I don't know and practice photographing crowds and artists. A lot of the bands don't have a wikipedia page, so I might write some up on Sunday. Then on Sunday evening it's back to the semi-weekly Traveller game.
I'd also like to write up a script to generate simple image collection web pages. Basically just list all images in a folder, generate thumbnails, and have a static html document showing the thumbnails with links for full size jpeg+raw underneath.
More work on some of my Zig projects.
I recently took a stab at learning Zig for a side project, but had trouble finding a good introduction to the language (a problem exacerbated by the seemingly-rapid pace of development). The stdlib documentation also seemed rather incomplete. Are there any resources you'd recommend, or should I maybe wait for 1.0?
Zig by Example is a good overview of the basics. A lot of documentation, like you mentioned, is incomplete. My experience so far has involved reading a lot of standard library code, but I feel like that is a good thing. :)
Standard library is an excellent place. It takes more effort to understand how things work but you'll understand it much better in the end. The poor documentation is a double-edged sword in a way, but thankfully Zig is designed to be readable first and foremost.
1.0 will be a while still. If you want to use it I'd recommend trying it. I normally refer to the [reference documentation] (https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.16.0/) even if it's incomplete. Should be enough to get you started along with Zig by Example (I never used the latter but I've heard good things about it).
Annual Framily Camping trip, about 20 of us going to White Lake up here in New Hampshire. For the 3rd or 4th year running, it is going to be over 90 with 110% humidity, so it doubles as some sort of cleansing spiritual journey by Sunday.
Working on my novel. Think a bit about https://projecteuler.net/problem=1005. Enjoy the weather. Enjoy the garden. Read more of "The Will of the many"
suffering im learning golang and i use helix but ive been wanting to switch to emacs and pick up either CL or a scheme dialect ive already used emacs, quite alot, actually. but i feel like re-learning xah fly keys would be a pain
I'm going to see the new spiderman movie and working on my new bare metal server. It's my first time renting a bare metal server, so I'm pretty excited
First in awhile, but a concert tonight at Capitol Hill in Seattle and a BBQ tomorrow!
Then working on updating an old 2D game engine I made awhile back to work on Wayland and adding OpenGL ES support to it for a fantasy console project on some raspberry pi zeros I have sitting around.
Trying to get some sleep, going for a hike, trying to come up with a better way of building the x86 encoding part of a JIT without hardcoding every instruction, otherwise i think i will go insane :O
Otherwise have a huge amount of pintxos
Wife and I are visiting my parents this and next week. We can’t really go outside because of wildfire smoke, so we’ll probably just play dominoes. I also found my childhood dsi and have really enjoyed playing through pokemon platinum. I love the art style :)
Probably finally move my moderately cursed setup from long-EoL-upstream FUSE2 to FUSE3 (which means mostly updating the Common Lisp bindings, as the layers above shouldn't really care, given that the logic of simple things is the same).
Speaking of asking for help, anyone interested to be a user of a flexible FS-as-UI tagging setup?
As a side-effect of my setup, I have an very flexible tagging setup, tags applied by dragging things around in a file manager if you are so inclined (or ln -s in command line if you prefer), filters yielding directories with symlinks to things… except it turns out that I prefer hierarchies to tagging. Basically any logic around tagging (or anything simple around virtual FS backed by DBs, real files, or something similar) is now easy to implement, but I don't know what would be useful to others. It sounds like some people want file tagging, and want easy management of tags via UI like a file browser, any takers for tag management literally via file browser?
Working on a deployment tool to scaffold apps automatically to fix Caddy vhost and systemd service skew between staging and production until it deploys itself.
Continue working on Social Maps, an API-first user reviews service for OpenStreetMap.
I'm planning to implement "import from Google Maps" using Google Takeout, so the user needs to request their Google Maps Reviews from Google first, wait for the completion notification, download it, unzip it, and then upload the GeoJSON to Social Maps... Google also has a Data Portability API exactly for cases like this but it's only available in EU unfortunately.
In the meanwhile, Tripadvisor requires you to submit a GDPR form and then asks you to validate your identity before they'll send you the reviews you wrote. I requested mine 3 days ago just to see how it works and I am still waiting. I think this is pretty much a hindrance, so I am also trying to urge folks like NOYB to take action.
Saturday: Going on a group motorcycle ride through one of the local national parks, then watching a movie (Cosmic Princess Kaguya) with a loved one.
Resting on Sunday.
Possibly driving up for a nephew's birthday.
Probably some more Baldur's Gate 3.
And some walking around outdoors.