Happy Advent Of Code 2023! I’m learning Scala this year. I had a lot of fun with Kotlin in 2021, and was traumatized by Haskell last year, so I’m hoping Scala’s mix of functional and iterative hits the right sweet spot again.
Note to self: this video is super cool, so maybe Lua on Playdate (or some similar outside-the-box idea) would be good for next year.
There’s a good chance that reading The Hobbit to my six year old son will end up being the last time I read my childhood copy.
People say “the customer is always right” but the original quote is “The customer of the covenant is always righter than the water of the womb.”
No salute emoji gets it right.
Imagine a cylindrical glass with radius 1 and a cube of ice in it, and then bourbon poured exactly to the height of the top of the cube. What cube side length will result in the most bourbon poured?
I have an answer, using calculus for the first time since probably 2000, and the answer is not a particularly notable value.
Make a movie that’s sort of found footage for the 2020s. It’s a continuous view of someone swiping thru their FYP on TikTok or something similar. You have vignettes of various random things happening, but eventually you notice a pattern, several videos talking about the same thing. And a story slowly unfolds, from lots of different perspectives.
In 2005, I went to E3 with a small handful of friends. I wanted to blog a bit from the floor, but didn’t want to go through what would have been a huge hassle to use a laptop. So I set up a system that we could all send emails to with our phones and it would save the text and annotate it with the author’s name based on phone numbers. I called it a “moblog”. This was 10 months before the first Tweet, and 16 months before Twitter became publicly available. We probably wrote all of this with T9.
Here’s some of what we moblogged for E3:
Here is calendar prototype 2
(This is what prototype 1 looked like.)
I’ve been living with this new, larger calendar for a couple weeks now. It’s got 5 weeks instead of 4, and the days are 50% larger. I even used posterninja.com to get a long printed spool that’ll last until October. But it’s not perfect yet, here’s a few notes:
It’s good that the Android keyboard is a bit shit because it means I text my friends less dumb shit when I’m high than I would otherwise
If you woke up tomorrow the only human on Earth and also immortal, where would be the best place to live? Cities wouldn’t be particularly safe because buildings will eventually collapse. You want to be near water and long growing seasons and fertile soil. You want to be far from hurricanes or monsoons or earthquakes. You might want to be near fishing opportunities and existing farm animal populations.
It shouldn’t be surprising that a very good answer is “where the densest forests in the world are”. What is surprising to me is that a lot of Europe has a good case, too. In terms of getting started, existing farmland in Europe (there’s a lot of it) or newly-cleared land in the Amazon (also a lot of that, sadly) might be the best bets. I’d be afraid of the maintenance necessary to keep the Amazon at bay, but on the other hand intercontinental travel with no other living humans is bound to be a challenge.
Like last year, I played a bit of video games in 2022, almost all on PC. Early in the year, I dropped Stadia and switched to PC Game Pass. I loved Stadia’s technology, but the game selection on Game Pass is shockingly good. And everyone knew it was just a matter of time until Stadia was killed.
I again spent most of my gaming playing co-op with my brother. My favorite game of the year was absolutely We Were Here Forever – the fourth in that series. They stepped up the visuals and the story and the puzzles this time around, I was very very impressed with it. Other good games we played this year: BBQ Simulator, Biped, Unrailed, You Suck At Parking, Deep Rock Galactic, and Grounded. We also continue to get tons of playtime from Escape Simulator, thanks to two great DLC releases and a very active map building community.
When I was playing alone, I was typically churning through Vampire Survivors, but occasionally also the Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels DLC and Trackmania 2020. I also got my Playdate just a week ago, and I’m excited to play through those Season 1 games in the coming months.
The closest thing I have to synesthesia is a perpetual desire to find the volume of music that “fills” my ears. It’s an indescribable and elusive point that’s pretty loud, but not very loud.
Happy December, and happy Advent of Code. As per my tradition, I’m trying to learn a new language. Since I enjoyed the functional-ish aspects of Kotlin so much last year, I decided to try a fully functional language this year: Haskell. And oh boy was day one a challenge!
Follow my progress at my Github repo
I just deactivated my Twitter accounts: @Plutor and 9 bots. So long, fucko.
One bot I can’t get into because I can’t get the emailed confirmation code. And another was apparently suspended for some reason I don’t care to investigate and you have to appeal the suspension in order to deactivate the account.
I’m building a storage bench for my kids shoes and hats and such, and it’s gonna turn out fine, but it makes me want to buy a table saw and a build a real workbench so I can make great stuff.
This is my new calendar idea, the spool calendar. The spool currently goes until the first week of Feb 2023, each week I can just pull it upwards and cut off the excess.
The biggest problems to resolve for the next prototype are 1) make it easier to mount and feed the spool, and 2) how to keep it from rolling back up (I’ve got it sorta taped there right now, but some sort of little clip might be better)
Also it’s about 14x10 right now but it should probably be more like 18x16, the days are a little cramped and a squarer 5-week layout is more typical for calendars
In response to this tweet, I asserted we were in the latter group and literally everyone else on the server was certain we were in the former. One said “It goes to show how much Plutor is holding back”
My friend group’s Slack in 2020: “We should move to Discord”
My friend group’s Slack in 2021: “We should move to Discord”
My friend group’s Slack in 2022: “We should move to Discord”
My friend group’s Slack today: [tumbleweeds, because everyone’s on Discord]
In June 1976, aliens landed on a quiet farm in northern Wisconsin. Three of them left their ship and walked a couple hundred yards to the farmhouse. When the farmer answered the door, they were shocked to discover that we didn’t look like aliens. We looked just like them. After a brief discussion, the landing party decided this wouldn’t make a very good press release.
They went back to their ship and left to find a planet with more exotic looking aliens, and have never returned.
I invented a new type of wall calendar last night and I can’t stop thinking about it.
This video allowed John Conway to blow my mind from beyond the grave. I can’t stop thinking about it.
Coding in JavaScript makes me feel like Harrison Bergeron
Painting of Plutor holding a large plate of vegetables, by Frida Kahlo
Stable Diffusion trained with Dreambooth, try it yourself
The scariest part of my commute has bike lanes now, but I’m not totally sure if it’s in improvement. Part of Cambridge St in Boston is wonderful (separated by plastic posts close to City Hall), but other parts are weird (no separation) or bad (the Blue Bikes in front of Whole Foods is.. IN THE BIKE LANE!?), and the pavement is still a potholed disaster.
And after biking in Chicago a couple weeks ago, I really wish this city had dedicated bike traffic signals.
