I'm working on my fourth attempt at a first novel :D
In all seriousness, I am about 10k words into a new draft I started a couple weeks ago. It's a far-future post-catastrophe sci fi type story, with some inspiration taken from Dune and a whole bunch of post-collapse fiction. Writing is tough between a full time job, a toddler, and a social life, but I've managed to squeeze in at least a few sessions a week. Hopefully this will be the one that actually lands!
I don't have anything to show for it yet, but I'm rebuilding my dotfiles from scratch with a (hopefully) reusable framework that I want to open source some day. I don't know if it'll be useful to anyone else as I have very strong opinions about how this kind of stuff works, but hey, maybe someone else will find it useful. I'm inspired to do this because I realized the other day that computers....aren't fun for me anymore? So I'm taking the opportunity to make my computer mine again rather than continuing to rely on VSCode and all the automated config my company drops on our machines.
In other news, my first astrophotography rig is _finally_ mostly fully put together, and I'm going to try to go out and do some captures tomorrow night!
I had a hilarious experience the other day with an (HP) laptop that I thought might be fun to share here.
I've been getting into astrophotography recently, so I went out to my local Astronomy club's dark site in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Ohio, star tracker, DSLR, lens and nearly brand new HP Gaming Laptop I bought specifically for this purpose in tow.
It was cold as shit outside - 25 with a wind chill of just under 15 degrees. But I came prepared, and the club has a small heated clubhouse on the grounds of the site, so I set up all my equipment, did my polar alignment, and left my laptop plugged into a power outlet and remoted into it on my iPad so I could monitor the data capture from inside where it was warm.
About 20 minutes later, I lost remote access to my laptop suddenly. No problem, I thought. I headed outside to go debug what was going on, to find that the laptop had shut down randomly. That's weird. I tried to turn the laptop on, and it spun on the windows logo for over 5 minutes. I got worried that somehow out of all this gear I brought out to the middle of nowhere in the freezing cold, somehow the laptop was what had died. I try force-resetting a few times, to the point where I get the windows recovery environment, and it boots _so slowly_ that I think something is seriously wrong. Then the CMOS battery reset screen comes up (what the fuck?) and I finally get it to boot after about 8 attempts. However, it's so slow it's completely unusable - the CPU is pegged at the lowest possible frequency and just opening up the controller software for my star tracker takes nearly 5 minutes. decide to pack it in for the night, assuming my laptop is dying.
I bring all my equipment inside to tear it down, and leave the laptop in the warmth for 15 or so minutes while I tear everything else down. Then I hear the familiar Windows 11 startup chime behind me. I turn around and the laptop happily boots up, running at full speed, as if nothing was wrong.
Friends, the laptop got _too cold_. I have never experienced this before in my life, and I have put laptops through similarly extreme conditions in the past for other projects, let alone all the Raspberry Pi's I've left to bake in the sun and freeze in the cold. I am so done with modern technology, I want to return to 2011 when Thinkpads were good, Macbooks were great, and phones couldn't break my brain's dopamine circuits. I'm so tired.
Ha! That's a right of passage, lithium ion batteries state of charge drops to almost 0 when it's below freezing. If you left your phone out with your laptop it'd have the same problem. There's actually special phones you can get that are meant to keep functioning below freezing, usually by means of a battery heater.
I too have done the same thing you experienced.
Now I run everything off of a minipc with a lead acid UPS.
This is also why most of your power packs to run astronomy gear are still lead acid and not lithium. Celestron's not just trying to sell you last generation equipment at a steep mark up, there's a reason for it
Currently working on building my first 3D printed star tracking rig for astrophotography (via the incredible OpenAstroTracker project) and beginning to think through a 3D printed Dobsonian telescope. Also working on some ceramic glazing techniques to try and make cool gas giant-looking tiles. I'm on a real space kick right now!
No, what we need is for people to feel safe in public again, for them to not feel like they're constantly one questionable picture away from their lives being ruined. Kill social media, kill gigantic public face tracking dragnets, kill privacy-invading capitalism.
I’m with you. The dichotomy between public and private needs to change. I should still have a degree of privacy even when I’m out in public. What has changed is the ability of others to “see” everyone everywhere at every moment with less and less friction, whether through pictures or videos shared on social media, facial recognition cameras, or location trackers like license plate readers. Historically, no one has had this ability, and now we don’t even know the degree of that ability that some have.
This whole thing reeks of a plant. I never heard a word about this, and I work in the entertainment industry, until this week. I'm going to assume this is manufactured attention trying to legitimize something that doesn't actually exist until proven otherwise.
Yeah, the ethics around _training_ models that generate embeddings is still suspect to me, but the use of embeddings as a cheap, efficient way to provide semantic similarity seems very valuable. I've started dipping my toes in doing real, honest-to-goodness "machine learning" at work and it's mostly involved having OpenAI create embeddings for support logs my team generates, and we're starting to get value out of being able to cluster certain types of issues together, which I'm excited by. But this kind of stuff is truly augmentative: representing complex ideas in easily-searchable vector spaces, making connections in datasets too vast for humans to comb through alone, that's actual value.
Already contender for my favorite puzzle game of the year. I would compare it to Outer Wilds or Animal Well, but that would do all three games a disservice. Blue Prince is a thoroughly unique game that is worth your time. And like another commenter said, a pad of paper is _absolutely required_.
In all seriousness, I am about 10k words into a new draft I started a couple weeks ago. It's a far-future post-catastrophe sci fi type story, with some inspiration taken from Dune and a whole bunch of post-collapse fiction. Writing is tough between a full time job, a toddler, and a social life, but I've managed to squeeze in at least a few sessions a week. Hopefully this will be the one that actually lands!
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