Recent content on Consumption Exhaust
I spent a few hours yesterday developing an evolutionary computation simulator. It’s called EvoLab: EvoLab : Browser-based neuroevolution sandbox Here’s the code project: EvoLab on GitHub It’s your classic “evolve a creature for an environment” thing. Here’s a screenshot: Back in the day I tried to develop something like this for iphone and it took weeks just to…
It looks like Fabien Sanglard is writing a Quake Engine Black Book . This will sit along side is excellent Doom and Wolf3d engine black books: Game Engine Black Book Wolfenstein 3D Game Engine Black Book: DOOM See the series here , which includes free PDF downloads. I read his “The Book of CP-System” book, but it was not as nostalgic as the other two. He has not come out and declared…
I’ve developed some new Quake archive projects. The first is a Quake Rally archive: Quake Rally Archive This includes all releases of Quake Rally, all third-party maps, and even precursor mods and extension mods. One of the precursor mods was “Quake Kart” by Quake Command, an early quake mod group that later went on to work for Valve and work on Half-Life. Very little of Quake…
New year, new goals. Write more. Blog posts. Monographs. Answers on forums. Write more. It’s good for you.
Building on yesterdays idea of a Quake Press , a small tech press does sound fun. I guess I did already, with SuperFastPython for Python concurrency. But other niches might be fun to explore, especially a tiny niche where I could cover it completely and move on. It’s easier if it’s motivated externally, e.g. using a tech at work, cover it at home, or a market starving for info on…
I’ve been thinking about mini tech books on Quake for about 15 years. My first google doc of ideas is dated 2010. I was thinking today, why not develop a “quake press” with a large suite of books over many years. What kind of books? All kinds! There could be references, e.g. quakec reference, release histories, bsp file format reference, etc. There could be code walk throughs,…
I read a book about Denisovans this week in the book: The Secret World of Denisovans: The Epic Story of the Ancient Cousins to Sapiens and Neanderthals It book was not bad, buy not as exciting as Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins about discovering Homo naledi . A different kind of a book, more of a general story/history of what we know. Anyway, I took away two…
I’m about half way through Nick Bostrom’s “ Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World ”. I love it. I don’t love the discussion/socratic sections (skip), but I love the lecture sections. Anyway, early on he talked through groups of people now/historical who don’t work as a model for what it might be like in a post-work future. Obvious and helpful. Why…
My eldest son started working out at the gym this year. It’s really great! Something I tell him all the time is: …once you gain good muscle, you will keep it the rest of his life What I mean is, if he stops for some period of time then later, with modest retraining, he’ll be able to get back to the same tone/size. Or something like that. I tell him that once you gain the…
This week, I finished the book: The Gold of Troy: Story of Heinrich Schliemann and the Buried Cities of Ancient Greece It was great! Here’s a summary from gpt5.1: The Gold of Troy: Story of Heinrich Schliemann and the Buried Cities of Ancient Greece tells the dramatic story of Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy, self-taught archaeologist whose obsession with Homer’s epics drove him to search for…
My eldest loves playing video games, which is understandable. We limit screen time per day. Why? Generally, I say things like: It feels like you are achieving goals, but it is all fake. And: It ramps up your emotions and makes you overly angry when you talk to us. Fine. What does gp5.2 have to say as the main negative points against: It crowds out real life — games take time away from school,…
I read “ Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes ” last week. Good book. Half was a rough biography of Archimedes the other half was about the history of the Archimedes Palimpsest . I found the latter a whole lot more interesting. It dug into the history of this important document, something I was interested in/hoping for recently ( for example, with plato’s dialogues ).…
I’ve read a few books about Troy recently. This week I read “ Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor ”. It was serviceable. Who were the people living in Troy? Was it an break-away Greek settlement? Nope. Many peoples have lived at the site, there are layers and layers of settlement. I guess I’m interested in the Bronze Age and the time of Homer’s poem. Checking in…
I read Artifact by Jeremy Robinson this week. Great fun. Here’s the blurb: In an isolated Alaskan town, the local sheriff uncovers a secret lab where generative A.I. and bioprinting have unleashed grotesque, living anomalies—and now, something monstrous is loose. Sheriff Colton Graves prefers the quiet life in Raven’s Rest, Alaska, a remote town accessible only by tunnel and home to a hardy…
I read a great course on Greek Philosophers this week and another on Ancient Writings: An Introduction to Greek Philosophy Writing and Civilization: From Ancient Worlds to Modernity It got me thinking about the corpus for a given writer, e.g. Plato. There must be hundreds of copies of his dialogues that have survived. Each copied at a different time, in different condition, with differing levels…
I tripped over another LLM + Evolutionary search post yesterday on HN: OpenEvolve: Teaching LLMs to Discover Algorithms Through Evolution (news.ycombinator.com) OpenEvolve: Teaching LLMs to Discover Algorithms Through Evolution (algorithmicsuperintelligence.ai) I like this area of research. It’s an area I’d dig into, if I was compelled to do research. I’ve touched on this before:…
I loved learning programming and writing code as a student. The nuts and bolts stuff. The learning curves. There was a thrill in unlocking a new feature, a new language, a new library, in building a thing. I was thinking about re-capturing some of that. One idea I had was to write a series of mini-books on programming, e.g. 6"x9" books, with about 100 pages. There are many ways this could go, but…
I finished another book on the Ptolemaic Dynasty this week: The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind Very good. A thing that got me thinking was that so many of the scholars in the great library wrote so many monographs. Some wrote many hundreds of works. The length may have been short, but that doesn’t matter. They were working hard and outputting stand-alone work…
I was thinking, how do we know “who” wrote “what” in ancient Greece? There were many scholars and artists grinding out monographs and plays over centuries, and they was all happening on paper-equivalents. We must have surviving copies of materials that give ideas, but what exactly? My first guess would be copies that survived 2k years in various monasteries/libraries. My…
Thinking about my trip to Athens, Greece. I was thinking, what are all the cool ancient monuments we should see? Looking at google maps, many are in the city center, in walking distance of each other. Searching google returns pages and pages of travel-blog-ad-spam. Useless. Here’s what gpt5.1 gave me: Acropolis of Athens – The iconic hilltop citadel overlooking the city. Parthenon – The most…
Reading books about the Ptolemaic Dynasty recently and I was thinking about Alexander’s tomb. Where is it? It’s a whole thing, e.g.: Tomb of Alexander the Great, Wikipedia In various books, there’s mention of Romans coming in and visiting the tomb in Alexandria. So he died somewhere (Babylon), was buried (Memphis, after being stolen while on the way back to Macedon), was dug up…
I finished Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut yesterday. Not sure what I read. It was a fun, I guess, and a little unstable. Yes, I could see the subtext of American consumer automatons. But there was too much bad language and sex to no real effect (i.e. delete it and it has the same story/message). Gave me vibes of Infinite Jest . The pithy short sentences. The “and so…
I finished a book on the Ptolemaic Dynasty yesterday: The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt From Alexander the Great to Cleopatra Not bad. Perhaps a little boring. The dynasty did not last as long lasting was I thought (less than 300 years), and perhaps as expected, Alexandria – specifically the library , is the most interesting part. The early part of the dynasty was more interesting (e.g.…
I’ve been sniffing around for more niche books on the Greeks. Less overarching historical books and more biographies and reviews of specific topics. For books on Archimedes , I chose: Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes , Alan Hirshfeld, 2009. For books on Aristotle , I chose: Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction , Jonathan Barnes, 1982. For books on the Ptolemaic Dynasty (in…
I’ve been sniffing around for more material on Naxos , an island in the Cyclades I’m plan on visiting. I came across an episode of the TV show “ Parts Unknown ” by Anthony Bourdain focused on the island circa 2015. There’s a few copies on youtube here and there, e.g.: Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown | The Greek Islands | S07 E03 Very nice. It looks like he visited out…
I enjoy reading books about explorers and adventures, especially in their own words. And especially when they were out there causing trouble in the 1700s and 1800s. Related to my Greece kick, I’ve been looking into the discover of key civilisations, e.g. discovery of Knossos by Arthur Evans, and Mycenae and Troy by Heinrich Schliemann . Let’s start with Arthur Evans and his work on the…
Building on yesterdays dig into Phaedrus from “ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ”, I was thinking of ancient Greeks in other books I’ve re-read many times. I came up with “ Demosthenes ” from “ Ender’s Game ”. Ender’s brother and sister stir things up on the “socials” of the day and eventually his brother becomes some kind…
Thinking about Greek stuff, I recall that Pirsig referred to himself as “Phaedrus” in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . I enjoy the book. I’ve read them a few times, and reading them makes me feel smart. Anyway, I figured Phaedrus was some Greek philosopher related to rhetoric, the area of study of the main character/Pirsig. Why not dig in. Here’s what GPT5.1…
I’ve been sniffing around for documentaries on Greece. I’ve watched a few, and they’re fun. I found one on Prime video called “ Visions of Greece ” (2003). Here’s the blurb: A beautiful virtual tour that lifts off from Athens, and embarks on an odyssey as varied and dramatic as Greek history, exploring islands scattered like stones in the blue Aegean, ancient…
I live in Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne gets (relatively) cold for about 1/2 to 2/3 of the year and it’s a tradition to escape further up the east coast of the country in search of warm weather. We do this most years, typically in the Autumn or Spring and leave winter for warm weather in the northern hemisphere. The problem is, we always seem to go to the same old towns:
XGBoost is all you need (for predictive modelling with tabular data), or so they say. I have used XGBoost for a long time, since shortly after it was developed. I wrote one of the first books about it in 2018. Last year, I created a website with 500+ recipes showing how to use XGBoost: XGBoosting.com And the twitter feed: @XGBoostAwesome The site is doing well, getting many thousands of visitors…
A nice idea I’ve come across in my reading of the ancient Greeks is what they call “ Arete ”. Perhaps translated as virtue or excellence. Really it’s about striving to be the best version of yourself. I think I noticed it while reading “ The Last of the Wine ” by Mary Renault, perhaps when our narrator goes to the Olympics. I could be wrong. I also think it was…
I continue to read books about Greece, ancient and modern. The timeline was fuzzy, but I started watching a history channel documentary on disney+ and I think I have (some) things straight now. Here’s the documentary, I watched it with my kids, it’s great: The Greeks (3 parts) Importantly, there perhaps three key time periods I needed to sort out: Bronze Age Greece Greek Dark Age (the…
I finished stuffing my last batch of printed photos into my 2025 photo album yesterday. See My (lame?) Family Photo Backup Process . Anyway, I was thinking that I only print a fraction of the photos taken. The rest are essentially lost, or will be with time. This applies to most people, e.g. most families that take hundreds/thousands of photos every year. So many photos/memories are lost. Now…
I understand why people write travel guides. There are a few times in life when “normal people” (non academic researchers) do a lot more research into a topic than they otherwise would, such as travel, parenthood, marriage, buying a house, etc. They are not used to deep research and don’t want to see all that work go to waste after the decision point. I feel the urge two, but…
I finished an audio version of a course on ancient Greece yesterday: The Greek World: A Study of History and Culture It was fantastic, great high-level coverage of the topic. I am planning two more: The Long Shadow of the Ancient Greek World Ancient Greek Civilization I also like the look of the following: Great Tours: Ancient Cities of the Mediterranean Famous Greeks And more. Great for consuming…
I’ve been reading books about the myth of King Theseus . Specifically, I finished Mary Renault’s “ The King Must Die ” and am about to finish her “ The Bull from the Sea ”. These are fun historical fiction versions of the mythos of his life. And it’s myth. According to our gpt5.1 friend, there’s not evidence for a real Theseus: There is no direct…
Related to yesterday’s post on Lovecraft manga , I also recently read illustrated Lovecraft stories by François Baranger . Specifically his two volume: At the Mountains of Madness vol1 At the Mountains of Madness vol2 The story is good, of course (one of my faves), but the illustrations are beyond words. Sublime. Look at examples on google image search! I want to order his illustrated:…
I’ve been reading manga by Gou Tanabe . Specifically his adaptations of Lovecraft stories. And they are so good! 5/5! More modern, more fun than the origional stories. Stories that I’ve read many times over. I’ve read his “ The Call of Cthulhu ” and “ The Shadow Over Innsmouth ”. I have “ The Hound and Other Stories ” next and am about to order…
I’ve been casting around for good books for my eldest to read about Greece. I came across a series of historical fiction books by Mary Renault that are well regarded. There are one-offs like: The Last of the Wine Two book series, such as this one about Theseus : The King Must Die The Bull from the Sea And three book series, such as this one about Alexander the Great: Fire from Heaven The…
I was reading and re/reading Mark Sisson books this week. For example: The Primal Blueprint Primal Endurance Good ideas. Eat whole foods. Low carb. Lift heavy with few reps, etc. Anyway, one thing he mentioned a few times across the books was to: Minimize lifetime insulin secretion Now, this does not mean become a type 1 diabetic. It means something like, the mammals/people that minimize insulin…
In preparation for our trip to Greece, I was thinking of movies I could watch with my eldest. The idea, along with a reading list, is to fill his head with history/culture and build anticipation. He’s 14-15, so I’m leaning more toward action/battles/greek gods/etc. Here’s what I came up with: Percy Jackson & The Lightning Thief (2010) Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013) Troy…
Like most (all?) families, we take tons of photos and videos. Mostly of our kids. Mostly on holidays. And we typically holiday 1-2 months per year. Therefore, we have hundreds of new photos each year. I back-up our family photos once every year or two. This involves: Syncing photos from both my and my wife’s phones with the Photo app on my workstation Exporting all new photos (since last…
I’m preparing for a trip to Greece. As such, I’ve been sniffing around for good travel memoirs. Specifically a memoir or travel log. Not a fictional travel love story. There are zillions on Amazon. And not just party stories from the islands in the Aegean. Boring. I picked three: The Colossus of Maroussi , Henry Miller Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece , Patrick Leigh Fermor. Mani:…
In primary school, by eldest son loved the “ Percy Jackson ” books by Rick Riordan. Even now, they will be a fun/quick re-read for him when he’s looking for a comfort-read. These books gave him an interest in ancient Greece. I’ve purchased a few books for him over the years to kindle the interest, e.g.: 300 , Frank Miller Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold , Stephen Fry. Circe…
I read “ Notes on Being a Man ” over the weekend. Good story telling. Good tips. I’m always trying to think hard about the lessons, ideas, memories to jam into the heads of my son’s. Exercise and working out is a big one. “Boys should be strong” is something my wife and I say to them often. At home and more recently my eldest has been hitting the gym 3-4 times a…
I finished watching “ A House of Dynamite ” on Netflix last night. Oh man. What a movie. I don’t remember being so stressed out watching a movie for a long time. I also don’t recall the last time I watched such an “adult” movie. Thank god. It feels like most of the movies that wash up are for kids/teenagers. It’s nice to see something tense and difficult.…
I finished “ The Ape that Understood the Universe ” (Steve Stewart-Williams, 2018) this week. A good book on evolutionary psychology , probably the best I’ve read in years. Anyway, there was a piece at the end talking through the evolution of culture and memes, and the “Protestant Work Ethic” (PWE) as a meme and its effect. Very cool idea. So, here it is: Protestant…
As part of my Quake 2 Bot Archive project, I’ve been doing research into old quake bot websites. I gather the research in markdown so I can re-trace my steps later, and also for good file provenance and complete mod coverage for the archive. For example: Quake II Bot Research Anyway, this lead into into capturing links to old collections of Quake2 mod tutorials and bot tutorials. For…
Warren Buffett had a quote along the lines of: if you only had one car for the rest of your how would you look after it… It was a thought exercise and analogy for how you should look after your body. The paraphrase of the quote from chatgp5 is: Imagine you had a car and it was the only car you would ever have in your life. You would maintain it carefully and treat it like a treasure. Well,…