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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  8d ago (text post)   260 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for March 25, 2025

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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Still intermittently sick, and had guests over last week, so small incremental changes only, unworthy of mentioning.

How are you doing @Southkraut?

Dipped a toe into animations, but it's still a foreign country to me. Keyframe animations sound like a simple concept, but actually wiring things up takes some getting into. Not sure how much I'll be doing with it, it's mostly idle curiosity driving me on that point. Going through some basic tutorials right now.

Other than that, not a lot. Work, parenting, and being very tired.

Away on holiday from the 15th-18th, then sick as a dog from the 19th-22nd from which I haven't fully recovered even this morning. Girlfriend said it was the sickest she's seen me since we started going out, and she was right. No fault of mine I made essentially no progress on my NaNoWriMo project since this day last week.

Update on this:

@lagrangian and I discussed this over PM, and he introduced me to the wonderful concept of memoisation, which took the difficulty from exponential to quadratic. So, stuff that would have taken weeks (or millennia) now takes minutes, and I turned this into this in a couple of weeks (most of that being me moving data around and doing formatting).

Hurrah! Go team!

Pedantry: I'd describe it more as dynamic programming, with memoization being a detail, and memoisation being a dirty British spelling.

I was already breaking it down into smaller problems; the part I was missing was memoisation to let me do all of those smaller problems only once instead of >9000 times. The algorithm we built would still run in exponential time if I took out the "@cache" on the key function, and if you'd told me memoisation was a thing I'd have probably managed it from there. Necessary and sufficient.

Also, uh, in case you weren't aware, I am Australian, so yes, I do use Commonwealth spelling.

Ah, in that case, I suggest turning the computer right side up to make it run faster.

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