I need a break from the goal structure of this blog; I’ve determined this by being unable to keep up with the goal process, even though I like it a lot when I can manage to use it. While I wa…

Ce code permet de calculer et visualiser des ensembles de Mandelbrot. MetaPost n’est pas un langage spécialement conçu pour ce type de calculs longs, cependant, il s’en sort étonnament bien ! Ce code ...

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This month’s train conversation award goes to two students discussing a paper assignment they resented. _I just want to, like, go working or something? Let’s not hand it in. Let’s just stop doing all this. I’m totally not motivated._ Dear students, I’ve got some bad news for you: in just one year (they were graduates), your wish will come true: you can go to work. And do that for the next forty years. In ten years, you’ll be _Thirty Something And Over It_. Let’s talk then about motivation. Previous month: February 2025. ## Books I’ve read I picked up Roman Krznaric’s _History For Tomorrow_ , incorrectly assuming it would be a philosophical work. It’s good but concerns itself with global and local politics more than I want it to. After about two hundred pages, I switched to something more light-hearted: Haruki Murakami’s _The City and Its Uncertain Walls_. He never disappoints: it’s a classic Murakami. I have no idea what is happening and how the protagonist got there—great! ## Games I’ve played I’m a month late for the Dos Game Club’s _DOOM_ revisit. I’m really interested in trying out the new Legacy of Rust episode in collaboration with the original dev(s) and Nightdive Studios. Quake’s new Machine episodes were simply amazing. It’s crazy to think that this semi-official “expansion” came out thirty-five years after the original game was released. Because it’s _DOOM_. Oh, and I recently learned that yes, you can run DOOM in DOOM. Another worthy _DOOM_ post is Fabian Sanglard’s recent uncovering of why FastDoom is fast. I never tried that `.EXE` on my 486 and remember reaching almost 25 FPS when overclocking to `80 MHz`. Who knows what FastDoom might add to this? The roll & write post from February was the push I needed to hunt down _Dinosaur Island: Rawr ’n Write_ , _Rajas of the Ganges: The Dice Chambers_ , and _French Quarters_. I now officially own too many roll & write board games. _Dinosaur Island_ is great, through, but I’m not sure whether it’s worth it to own/play _French Quarters_ if you already have _Three Sisters_ lying around, as coming from the same designers they do feel remarkably similar. Speaking of board games, I decided to try and review them at The Codex. Ora & Labora was a test drive and the Board Game Geek connection seems to work just fine. More on that soon. ## Selected (blog) posts * Toni Sagristà wrote a Rust program to kill make: use Just instead! I still write too many dirty `Makefile`s… * Opinionated Gamers put up an overview of their Solo Gaming 2024: End of the Year edition. * Similarly, Daphne from In The Nap of Time wrote about her 20 favourite solo games of 2024. I went ahead and put _Conservas_ on the wanted list. * Tobold’s Tiktokification of YouTube is alarming to read and something we all know but just let slide? * Winnie Lim talks about the minimum effective dose: _Nobody says we have to be good at everything we do_. She got a lot of positive responses from people who can relate, trying to raise their kids to that mantra. _For whom a little is not enough, nothing is ever enough_. * An interesting programming related article: why Discord is switching from Go to Rust. They also seem to have thrown Elixir into the mix. I approve. * Speaking of languages, Andre Garzia thinks that Lua is an often misunderstood language. * Dave Rupert asks: when do you know something will work? You won’t—unless you build a prototype. * Ana Rodrigues put up a fair point: is it okay to prioritize readability and learning over cutting-edge optimization in the browser that killed view-source learning? * I really like Marieke van Vliet’s “Brein Paleis” (_Brain Palace_) personal note garden. If I wasn’t into baking, this could have been a Brain Palace. * Juan Martinez explains the growing problem of LLM web crawlers. It’s so sad that we as admins have to jump through hoops in order to block that shit. And the hoops keep on breaking. The current state of computing makes me very sad. * More AI bullshit that also hit me: the mass book piracy to train AI also includes _The Creative Programmer_. It “only” took me 2 years to write. And the algorithm half a minute to gobble up? * Pedro De Bruyckere points us to research discovering that while AI tools can boost creativity (ideation, which is only a part from it, but hey, whatever, right?), it diminishes experience in a creative writing task. Creativity also means having fun. Letting a tool do the fun part is no fun at all. * If AI doesn’t make you sad, then the front-end development treadmill will. * Ruben Schade shares invoices from his 1992 family PC. I’m a sucker for that kind of thing and have one from 1994 lying around as well. Should I? * Ton Zijlstra learned about squeezing minds from stones. That book sounds to be right up my alley! * Julia Wise writes about how marrying young went well for her. The post also contains interesting demographics and other data. * Here’s another cool web museum collection by Kori. I might just go ahead and steal the layout. They also harbour a cool Tamagochi hatchery! ## Other random links * Cathy Rain 2 is in the making and the demo is already available on Steam! * I switched to using difftastic for my `git diff` and it’s much more readable now. * p6spy is a handy little (Java) tool that allows you to spy on SQL statements without making any changes to your code or the DB settings. * OBS Studio is a popular open-source broadcaster tool. I saw it floating by before but took note of it this time: perhaps one day I might need to replace my retro DScaler solution. * Marimo seems to be the new and hip Python Jupyter Notebook replacement. I’m typing this on the train and picked up on another conversation between students: > I used ChatGPT for this assignment. Because I felt the pressure, like, you know, everybody is doing it. Then why shouldn’t I do that? Very sad indeed. tag icon `metapost`

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