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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   474 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for December 17, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Last Sunday I took the time to do a full dismantling of my musical instruments. After a thorough cleaning of the tone holes, oiling the internals, I also fixed up a few keys that had action in them that needed fixing. Overall, very happy with my limited toolset. Instruments also seal well so no need to change pads.

Long term repair goals would include getting more comfortable with adjusting springs. Woodwind springs are simplistic in that they're hard metal springs and can fatigue over time. Bending them the wrong way can significantly shorten their lifespan. There's a bunch of specialized tooling available, but as I'm using solely gig money on music costs, I'm holding off on digging deep into instrument repair.

I'm posting this on behalf of a person in one of my Signal groups. I think it's a cool project and completely Motte worthy. I might post it a few times in case no one sees it...

https://projectqrio.com/

From the About page:

The basic idea is that we are investigating specific topics (called 'claims') together. Each claim is a declarative statement, but don't assume the statement is true! Click on any claim on the homepage to see the page where the claim is being investigated.

Each investigation page will have a title and a brief explanation of what is being investigated or why. There may already be evidence in the "For" or "Against" columns, or it may be blank. You can use the form at the bottom of each claim investigation page to add evidence "For" or "Against" each claim, and click on the "plus" sign to leave comments under evidence that other people have added.

Comments should be directly related to the evidence you're commenting on. For example, if you have reason to believe the source is not credible or is missing some context, you can explain why.

Please stick to submitting evidence that is relevant to the claim, and please be respectful in your comments. For now, I will be moderating manually.

It's a bit like a debate where evidence is gathered and commented on and each user gets to use a slider to determine their confidence in the claim. A bit like Metaculus but for sensemaking instead of predictions. I've helped by providing some evidence, but what the site really needs now are users. If you have a few minutes, maybe take a look find a topic you know something about and put some links up. I think Stacia has something pretty cool and interesting and I'd love to see it grow.

Cheers!

I like this idea very much, but I would caution you to be selective about the userbase and not promote it too widely as it seems easy to abuse and depends upon having relatively neutral users that aren't just going to slam the slider to 100 or 0 and downvote every piece of evidence on the wrong side. So I question whether an open forum like this will ever be successful. I would love to do, not exactly an "adversarial collaboration" (as have been popular here in the past), but a collaborative investigation of one topic or claim like this but just restricted to a personal project amongst friends the goal of which would be to produce something similar to Scott's deepdive posts

@Southkraut, I know you've been busy with real stuff lately with little hope of things improving, but since you haven't cancelled your pinging service, here's your weekly: how are you doing?

I ended up writing a few pages of lore.

Hell. I didn't know I still had that in me. I used to write a lot of worldbuilding fluff before I started programming, i.e., something like 15 years ago. That took a backseat since because I was more interested in procedural content, simulated systems and emergent dynamics. But now that I rarely get to do any of that...it turns out that I can still write a few thousand words even when dead tired and nominally out of time.

It's not good, mind you. Low-quality drivel, maximally cringe, the opposite of literature, certainly not going to post any of it. But it felt good to write down something, something at all, even if only inert verbiage rather than code. Given a lot of editing, it could be turned into a tutorial narrative for a specific scenario, and/or maybe just some fluff dialogue. More game stuff than sim stuff.

I'll also be on vacation for the rest of the year, so maybe I can eke out a few hours of concentration time at some point. Hope, yet.

But now that I rarely get to do any of that...it turns out that I can still write a few thousand words even when dead tired and nominally out of time.

It makes sense, it's exercising a part of your brain that didn't get tired out during the course of the day, which is my main struggle with my projects.

certainly not going to post any of it

Well, I can definitely sympathize here, and won't bother you about it this time. I like thinking up stories too, but every time I actually sit down and write anything down it 's a) torture to get any words down on paper, b) utter cringefest that goes straight into the garbage bin

It makes sense, it's exercising a part of your brain that didn't get tired out during the course of the day, which is my main struggle with my projects.

Makes perfect sense, honestly. Doing software dev during the day certainly saps my enthusiasm for doing more of it in the evening.

It used to be that I picked up new methods and ideas at work and thought to myself "I need to try that at home", and then I went and did that. But I guess nowadays I no longer encounter exciting new ideas at work.

Well, I can definitely sympathize here, and won't bother you about it this time. I like thinking up stories too, but every time I actually sit down and write anything down it 's a) torture to get any words down on paper, b) utter cringefest that goes straight into the garbage bin

It comes rather easily for me, pretty much a flow state, but the outcome is the same. Not fit for human consumption; at least not the first version.

You didn't think this was all just about "boids" did ya?

I finished cleaning up the code, and while there might be a way to compress / segment it even more I'm pretty happy with the result. It's still a bit unwieldy, but I no longer have to scroll past an endless stream of shader initialization code to find a variable I want to tweak.

This means I could move on to something slightly more fun. There once was a game called Phobia. I'm not sure if it was ever more than a demo for DirectX, but it had a surprisingly compelling game loop, where a horde of aliens would come at you, some sort of a space marine, and you'd have to dispatch them using various weapons. The horde was endless, so it was really only a question of how many times can you pull off squeaking through to pick up a power up allowing you to deal unholy levels of damage, and what kill count you could rack up, before finally succumbing to your enemies.

This was an old game, and all the logic was run on the CPU, so I doubt there was ever more than a couple hundred enemies on screen at any given time. Wouldn't it be fun if you could redo the whole thing on a GPU with enemy counts going well into hundreds of thousands? So I downloaded some open source assets, and recreated the basic setup. Little is happening so far, other than the monsters chasing you, so the next step will be implementing a compute shader that handles shooting and killing them.

Have you played any survivor genre games like Halls of Torment?

I'm pretty sure I played something that fits the bill, but no specific title (other than the one I mentioned) comes to mind, and I'm not familiar with the ones people are bringing up.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=JdQweTEsOUE

it had a surprisingly compelling game loop, where a horde of aliens would come at you, some sort of a space marine, and you'd have to dispatch them using various weapons. The horde was endless, so it was really only a question of how many times can you pull off squeaking through to pick up a power up allowing you to deal unholy levels of damage, and what kill count you could rack up, before finally succumbing to your enemies.

Oh, like Crimsonland?

Never played it so can't tell you, but by the looks of the screenshots and blurbs, yeah kinda. I think Phobia was more basic, but still loads of fun.

I took a 3 month break from my jujutsu.el VCS Emacs mode and only restarted continuing on it because in three different online places, as someone that isn't a lot in online spaces, I got pinged about it. There must've been a new Hacker News post about jujutsu. Haven't seen it, but for the programmers out there, I can still highly recommend jujutsu and the command line interface is pretty neat, which is why my project is not as essential as when using git.

Got a bit farther with the vDOM aspect of the text editor interface. It was already done 3 months ago but only rendering every frame from scratch. Now I've worked on a diffing reconciler, to improve performance for cases that I haven't encountered yet but someone will.

I uploaded it to github but I'm explicitly not interested in collaboration, because this is my eccentric way of doing things and I'm still exploring functional/data-driven paradigms and how they can apply to Emacs. Let me tell you, after working with persistent data structures for 7 years and then going back to doing place-oriented programming is a bitch.

I picked up a used microscope a few weeks back. Got it off a former veterinary student on Craigslist who no longer needed it. It has 4x-10x-40x-100x objectives with a 10x eyepiece and it came with a bunch of accessories (slides, slide covers, dyes, tools), enough to keep an amateur microscope user occupied for a while. I just bought some slide mounting media (for making permanent slides) and immersion oil (for the 100x eyepiece, I learned that some high-magnification objectives are designed for a drop of oil between itself and the specimen being observed).

I have scraped off various samples from around the house to look at. They include:

  • Slime from the bottom of the kitchen sink (surprisingly not very interesting)
  • Wool fibers (pretty neat)
  • Moist soil from the garden (found several energetic critters in the sample)

I found a dead bee on my patio outside and brought it in with the intention of making a permanent slide, but while waiting for the mounting media to be delivered, my cat found it and ate it, so there goes that.

Next time I am out and about, I will try to gather some interesting samples (pond scum? tide pools? decaying plant matter?)

At some point I intend to get an eyepiece camera so I can connect it to my computer and take photos and video, which would be cool.

Anyone have any suggestions on other things I can do with this thing?

See if you can find any of those mythical dust mites that are supposed to be living in our eyebrows.

Pollen grains. Crumbs of various minerals, rust, graphite, chalk etc.

@George_E_Hale has already suggested sperm so I'll add on blood and tears. In the interests of science you could also test for the presence of sperm in precum and post-ejaculatory urine. You could also try chilling, freezing, and then reanimating them.

True story. At age 22 I lived in the Kgalagadi. As it happened, on the grounds of a junior secondary school with a science lab, to which I had the key. I spent a hell of a lot of time alone. I blame this solitude for what happened next.

I was curious if one could actually see human sperm using the microscopes there in the science lab, and one weekend when no one was around I managed (somehow) to acquire a sample of my own.

The answer is yes, the sperm are visible, if tiny. They also wriggle and move wildly, enough to have made me really realize the humbling wonder of conception and birth.

I am not making a suggestion, just relating a brief story. I've only ever told this to one other person, so let's keep this our little secret.

If it works with dead bees (my only microscope worked only with transparent media, I would try various vegetables and fruits. Skin, slices, mold.

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