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.
