35/Where I get off Twitter, now known as X
Created:
Monday, 2023-11-27 to Sunday, 2023-12-03
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I logged off twitter yesterday - 30 Nov 2023, and I plan to stay off it indefinitely.
I have gone off twitter before, and I have gone back. I have been on twitter since 2007, and it has been a constant companion ever since. I made many friends, many mutual, met many IRL etc. Of course, it is still probably the best place to learn about breaking news in world news, technology etc.,
However, it has also become a crutch. A crutch I use 24x7. A crutch to get away from facing difficult, and even minor inconveniences. When I went to US in 2008, I probably used it as a way to find a “community” that I lost when I moved out of Bangalore. But, it has long become my “default” community.
It is time to turn back to people in real life, and learn to deal with life as it is, without having to use twitter as a pain reliever. I do not want to put a date on when I will “return” to twitter, because doing so will only mean I’ll still keep twitter at the back of the mind.
If you are reading this coming from twitter – “Hi!”. You can always
send me an email at pradeep @ btbytes.com.
In the absence of twitter, I know I’ll have more time to read, reflect, and do “stuff” in real life. I will write more about all that here. In that, this newsletter should become more interesting and not just a dump of links I found online.
Farming
TIL punḍi/gongura is called Kenaf
Generating Power on Earth From the Coldness of Deep Space - IEEE Spectrum
“In the long run, it’s perhaps not unreasonable to imagine living in a faraway cabin, off the grid, without batteries, using incoming and outgoing radiation from far beyond Earth’s atmosphere to heat, cool, and generate electricity day and night.”
I first understood radiation to deep space in Tucson, when a waiter put up the umbrellas at the outside tables we were sitting at after sunset. When I looked at him quizzically, he pointed up at the night sky, “it blocks the chill”. Wild to see it put to use.
- rudraksha tree x 1
- butterfruit x 2
- lime saplings
- few ornamental plants
- guava x 1
- mango x 3
- jamba - rose apple x 2
Except the jamba and rudraksha, the rest of the plants were from Maddur nursery.
Generative AI
Easy Diffusion v3 | A
simple 1-click way to create beautiful images on your computer, by
installing Stable Diffusion. No dependencies or technical knowledge
required found via Dependencies
Belong in Version Control, where I also found version control for
ML, eg XetHub XetHub scales
Git to support collaborative development on repositories of over 100TB
with no extra commands or workflow changes.
Meta/Facebook announced Seamless
Communication A significant step towards removing language
barriers through expressive, fast and high-quality AI
translation
The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI | The New Yorker by Charles Duhigg, the author of “The Power of Habit”. Pretty even handed, plus behind-the-scenes coverage of Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck.
From around the web
“Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap pile up.”
On
Life in the Shadow of the Boomers – The Scholar’s Stage via
HMBrough.
The Neglected Books Page - www.NeglectedBooks.com: Where forgotten books are remembered; HN
Programming
Purchased tinkerwell, a PHP REPL? I don’t know why.. lol. I stumbled upon some Laravel propaganda ( impressive really!), and ended up making a license purcase. I don’t even write PHP. However, Zigsaw does look sweet for generating Static websites, I remember writing something similar with SwaroopCH in deeproot linux labs back in 2003, minus the YAML meta data etc.,
And this “The Great Deshittification — Dorian Taylor” is a great reminder to avoid PHP and MySQL in shitter formats… and if you call yourself a PHP programmer, you might be forced to deal with this enshittified combo sometime in your career. So, if you do want to use PHP (eg: great for simple backend functionality on Personal Home Pages), learn to avoid the bad parts of PHP, and MySQL altogether.
Good explanation of Futures, Promises and Continuations – Core C++ 2019 Avi Kivity Building efficient I O intensive applications with Seastar - YouTube; The tutorial looks interesting also – Asynchronous Programming with Seastar #toread
Blog roll
New blogs I came across
Programming:
- Redowan’s Reflections
- Spritely Institute – home of the Spritely Goblins Distributed Programming platform - the core of our vision of a completely decentralised social internet. They are developing that in Scheme (Guile and Racket). The Guile WASM compiler is called the Goblins.
Site Notes
Pages added
local-llm – with the
availability of ollama, lmstudio, and as of
this week llamafile, it is possible to run very powerful
llmodels on your laptop (Macbooks are excellent).
opensource-llm – open source implementations of LLMs are quite good, sometime almost as good as commercial ones. This is a page to keep track of them.
vanity-search – what I find when I search for myself on the web, this time what I found searching “btbytes” on github
Pages updated
llm – there is so much happening, as usual. this week - llamafile, the new Qwen models etc.