Notes for the Week #47 (2025)

This week note covers the week of 17th–23rd November.

• Starting with health, this week was again fraught with infections. They say toddlers are walking Petri dishes, and it’s not far from truth. My wife and I had a minor viral infection this week but thankfully the toddler was fine. Still, I didn’t feel at 100% and could not get a lot done.
• I finished reading This is How You Lose the Time War! This is the first fiction book that I’ve read since 2021. Early parenthood is difficult, and sadly, reading fiction was the first thing I gave up. I tried, but it just didn’t hold my (scattered) attention. Thankfully, it’s coming back to me. The book itself was a fascinating read. I’m not much into romances but this one was very different. I’m yet to take the full feeling in, and I will certainly go back and reread parts of it. I wholly recommend it if you are into reading sci-fi and/or romance.
• This week, I finally had time and motivation to work on a side project that I’ve been trying to do for months. I wanted a service that takes an RSS feed, and sends me 10 (or 3) items from it every day using a space repetition algorithm as another feed. That way, I can provide it a feed of my favourite articles that I want to keep coming back to, and get to read them again and again over years. After mulling over this for six months and doing two overly complex prototypes, I finally came up with something that works well enough and fits under 500 lines of code. Six months to think, one day to write!
  I had to let go of using a spaced repetition algorithm because that requires statefulness, and I wanted a stateless minimal solution. So instead the program selects entries randomly with exponential weights calculated from age of entries using the A-Res algorithm. This biases selection toward older entries, making them more likely to be repeated. The repeated entries have their timestamp updated, and become less likely to be repeated again in the near future. I call this program feed-repeat and it is running on my VPS now, echoing my Linkblog and Blogroll feeds.
• After the widespread Cloudflare outage of this week, I removed Cloudflare fronting from my website. Let’s see how my tiny VPS holds.
• One of my quips on Mastodon about Rust led to a large thread. Even Graydon Hoare pitched in.
• Some interesting links for this week:
  • Towards interplanetary QUIC traffic
  • Why Lexing and Parsing Should Be Separate
  • Why you speak more Latin than you think

That’s all for this week. You can subscribe to the feed of my week notes for updates.

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