stochastictrebuchet

Literally me yesterday trying to decipher Baidu’s PaddleOCR docs. Have half a mind to aim Claude Code at the URL and just be like ‘plz help’

Been following Synergy for a while, hoping they’ll announce gamepad/steam deck support. The art style looks amazing!

Broke: file names have a max character length.

Woke: split b64-encoded data into numbered parts and add .part-1…n suffix to each file name.

Hahaha that second of hesitation right before the edge

Gotta say, it’s kind of a bummer to be downvoted for sharing my own experience. Are those ‘disagree’ or ‘doesn’t contribute to discussion’ votes?

AdGuard does more than DNS blocking. It strips ads from the response content.

Haven’t seen a single YT ad

I’ve really been enjoying Vivaldi. It’s also Chromium-based. It’s easy to customize and it has really good tab management. You can group tabs into workspaces, open split panes, and – this one I really appreciate – you can stack tabs by domain. Added bonus is that the company behind it, Vivaldi Technologies, is Norwegian, which ticks the ‘shop European’ box for me.

As for ad blocking, the shittiness of manifest v3 made me look at options outside the browser rather than rely on extensions. These days I pass all my traffic through adguard, which filters out ads from the request responses. All in all this has been a positive step, because now I can play around with any browser without ever seeing ads.

Word to the wise: stay away from productivity bro YouTube. You’ll learn a hundred systems for optimizing your obsidian-logseq-roam-notion hybrid gsd-kanban workflow with bidirectional zettl references and interstitial notes organized into a beautiful para system with more systems on systems and queryable data views and more fancy shit than you could ever dream of, and when everything is done and set up the way you think will work for you (which it won’t)…

… you’ll realize you haven’t actually accomplished what you were meant to.

(Source: myself, who’s fallen into the rabbit hole once or twice before)

I sometimes wonder what I would do or who I would be if I had a fraction of these individuals’ courage.

Having regained my freedom, I would leave. Hong Kong, it seems, is a lost cause – which saddens me to no end because I spent 6 years there as a kid. It was completely different than mainland China, which I moved to after. It was a beautiful mix of western and Chinese culture. It was its own thing.

Well-deserved win! Watched this in the cinema a few weeks back. What immediately struck me about the beautiful art style is that it felt more like what you’d expect from a labor-of-love indie game than from a dreamworks/pixar studio – and it was incredibly refreshing! Also, for a movie where water plays a big role, the fluid rendering was absolutely breathtaking. I could almost smell the warm plastic air of a GPU giving its all.

I’ll have you know I intend to keep using Covid as an excuse for bad decisions well into 2040

https://minilanguage.com/ is an interesting one to look at. There are exactly 1000 words in the total vocabulary. That’s Mini Mundo though. A second, smaller variant also exists: Mini Kore, with 100 words.

I started learning it too soon after learning Toki Pona and lost steam. But I agree with the design principles. They stem from the observation that Toki Pona, as fun as it is, is just too damn ambiguous for anything non-superficial. All too often speakers need to clarify what they said by switching to a natural language. Even my own Toki notes become indecipherable after a few days.

Toki Pona: fun, therapeutic mental exercise, made even better with sitelen pona. Feels like writing poetry. Never meant to be a useful language. Easy to learn, hard to use.

Mini: useful as a language for general purpose communication. Small, primarily latinate vocabulary. Harder to learn, easier to use.

Kalama Sin podcast is a good one for listening comprehension. No new episodes since July though

Final graphic shows why the far-right hates education. I’m probably jumping to conclusions, but I wonder if their relatively low popularity among higher-educated voters is due to:

1. Voters being more aware of their history (a “… doomed to repeat it” sort of thing)
2. Better at spotting populist lies (I don’t know enough about German politics to know how populist the Left Party is)
3. Leading more comfortable lives, thus less inclined to reach for extremes.

It’s an undemocratic thought, but sometimes I wish there were some sort of aptitude test right before casting a vote. Or at the very least, a quick quiz to confirm you’re aware of the party’s key program points. Obviously, both options are ripe for abuse.

So long as we’re not just singling out Meta. They’ve all done it.

At least Meta, with its Llama model family, has enabled the open source LLM space to flourish (along with Mistral, AI2, Alibaba, Eleuther, and many others).

What-aboutism. I know. I’m okay with what’s happening here in the sense that in return we’ve gotten magical (compared to the SoTA five years ago) models with seemingly emergent reasoning capabilities and expertise in basically every domain. That’s huge, even if it’s started to feel normal.

The issue, of course, is creatives whose content was stolen now losing out on opportunities or revenue that they relied on, meaning fewer creatives in the future and more AI slop.

Not seeding is hilariously on-brand for Meta though. Maybe it’s the ‘possession < distribution’ defence?

GenAI coding assistants are only as good as the data they are trained on. Less-used proglangs make up a tiny fraction of the available data, or may even be completely absent. There is a reason coding assistants give convincing results with Python and JS/TS, but underperform even on relatively up-and-coming langs like Rust.

Why Denmark

So, according to wikipedia there is a small shared border.

Real answer though: I’m an idiot. I remembered driving from Belgium to Denmark through the Netherlands and completely forgot passing through Germany along the way.

Still think those Danes should consider a wall.

In anticipation of this I propose both Belgium and Denmark start building a wall along the border and revise their building codes so that all doorways must be made inconveniently low.

Eh, I get it. There’s an overwhelming abundance of choice that’s growing faster than the average time it takes to form a connection with any one game. Why deal with the FOMO and misbuys if you know what works for you.

That doesn’t stop me from purchasing way too many (non-refundable) indie titles on the Switch, though. And I’m glad to say some of those feel like they’ll keep me hooked for a good while.

Still, nothing can ever top my love for one classic game in particular: AOE 1 (definitive edition). Why? (It’s unfair to the rest.) Years ago I used to play against my dad over LAN. It’s some of the most fun we had together. Standing outside while he took a smoke break mid-game, I’d explain how I was about to wipe his whole civilization off the map in ways he couldn’t possibly imagine. Sometimes when I miss him, firing up AOE lets me feel closer to him again.

All this to say, nostalgia is a tough bar for any new game to beat.

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