Recent content in Blog on Topi Kettunen
For years, various hobbies and past-times have functioned as an internal compass for me. They have structured my time and justified me this “waste of time”. Days have been bent around those. Decisions have been filtered through them. Relationships have been negotiated in their shadow. These sort of past-times haven’t been an addition to my life but a more or less the directing…
I’ve almost completely forgotten about keeping my reading list up to date. Looking at the list here , it seems it was almost exactly year ago that I lastly updated it. I’ve kept on reading, although, probably not as much as I should, but still, haven’t just kept the habit of writing few words down about each of those. Well, let’s try reawakening that habit again with some…
Yet another massive loss in music. Black Sabbath was probably the first band I ever heard. Definitely the first band that I really got into. This was due to the fact my father introduced me into it when I was a literal baby. Hugely important band for me. Tragic loss. Thank you for everything.
This week has been horrible when it has come to death of musicians. We just lost Sly Stone and Brian Wilson. Now, one of the most influental artists for me, Douglas McCarthy from Nitzer Ebb. What a horrible year and week. Nitzer Ebb along with Front 242 were probably the two most influental bands for me which made me eventually to delve more deeply into the realms of EBM and industrial. Naturally,…
I recently stumbled upon a beautiful quote from Cesar A. Cruz that I just wanted to ponder. “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” Cruz’s quote is both provocative and elusive, a tidy aphorism masking a deeper tension. It implies a dual responsibility for art: to console those in pain while challenging those at ease. But who decides which group we belong to? What…
Haven’t updated my “What I Read Between” -series in a while mainly due just being busy in my own life but also due to the fact that I’ve reading and rereading veeery big novels. But finally having been managed to finish those, let’s gather some thoughts. Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment (reread) I’ve always been a huge fan of Russian literature, or at…
As you might’ve seen in my last post , I’ve been without an internet for good some time already. Still (like I mentioned in the last post) I’ve really enjoyed my time without it. I feel that I can switch off much better after working hours, and I still have energy to partake in various other extracurricular activities that I hold dear to my heart, like hobby programming projects,…
As some of you might know, I’ve been living in Berlin, Germany for a few years now. Wonderful city! Just what I was looking for couple years back when I moved here. City definitely has its flaws (like does every city in the world) but I still enjoy being here. City is definitely massive. Each district having their own life, own people and own quirks. Spectrum is wide from somewhat poshy…
Every once in a while I like to play around with Emacs themes. Of course, mainly due to yak-shaving and procrastination reasons and nothing actually valid. But it’s fun nonetheless, although occasionally very tedious. Tedious in a sense that Emacs tend to come with a lot of different faces, especially if you happen to use more than a few third-party packages. Defining a custom theme in Emacs…
Bret Hart saving the day in code review.
This one hurts. Steve Albini has his hands in so many of my favourite albums.
Some months ago I decided to join back to social media in the form of registering to Mastodon. I thought that maybe this could be the platform to fill the void (which I’ve later realised to be non-existent) of social medias in my life. But now I’ve decided to leave it as well. Not necessarily due to same reasons why I left social medias like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. But still,…
Haven’t written one of these in couple of months since I’ve mainly spent my time reading various papers - mainly computer science related - and not so much literature, but I finally got back to the saddle so here’s the latest reviews. William Strunk Jr.: The Elements of Style (reread) English is not my native language (even though I mainly write in it for this site) so…
In the domain of C++ optimization, we encounter two key players: Return Value Optimization (RVO) and Named Return Value Optimization (NRVO). These techniques excel in simplifying function returns by avoiding unnecessary object copies or moves, akin to a direct transfer from temporary to destination. Looking at the example: class Object { public: Object() { std::cout << "Construct at " << this <<…
So, again, I’ve been in this annoying procrastination rut when it comes to my writing (literature and coding) and reading. I’ve been quite active in other interests although, especially music, since I just recently had one gig after a long break of not gigging and it was super fun! But now, I’ve felt the urge to get back to books and programming, while still of course trying to…
Somebody contacted me and mentioned that there is something off with my RSS feeds, thanks for that. I don’t know what had happened and when, but for some reason my normal RSS link. Didn’t contain the correct information. It seemed to only contain the summary of the post. I recently did some overhaul in my own Hugo theme and its layouts so most likely I had put something to wrong place…
Have had a small pause on programming and writing due to vacations etc., but fortunately, now I’m back to normal schedule, so I’ll try to get back to it as much as possible! I recently wrote about implementing local variables to my compiler and next I would like to write about implementing the initial control flow to it. With the initial control flow, I mean stuff like loops and…
I just decided to gather all the songs I have included in my posts in the “Now playing” section to one neat page. This page can be found here.
I’ve been little bit slacking on the writing aspects of things but also little bit on the side of adding new features to the language as well. So much of my time have been spent on various bikeshedding topics. Although important work nonetheless. I won’t be writing too much about those cleanups and refactorings but you can follow the development of Sila from the link above. After the…
NB : I’ve since decided to quit Mastodon In the digital landscape, social media is an indispensable tool for communication, networking, and content sharing. Yet, the way these platforms have been implemented and designed isn’t praiseworthy. From content suppression algorithms to opaque data policies, it’s no secret that the leading tech giants have cultivated a restrictive…
So, like I mentioned in a previous post , my hands have been quite full with Baldur’s Gate 3, so I haven’t been able to program too much Sila. But thankfully, while I enjoyed the game through and through, it’s nice to be back to hacking. I started to add more parser rules for Sila, simple ones still, but crucial nonetheless. These included stuff like parsing equality (==, !=),…
During September I seemed to spend quite a bit of time by reading books about addiction due to personal reasons. Judtih Grisel: Never Enough Grisel’s book focused mainly on how different substances work and how they cause addictions offering wonderful knowledge about the drug use and the development of human brain. Great book! Gabor Maté: In the Realm of Hungry Ghost Maté’s book…
Soo… Baldur’s Gate 3 was finally released after many years in open beta, and I have to be honest, it really made me forget pretty much any other project I had going on and just focus on playing it. Yesterday, I was finally able to finish the game after over 100 hours, and all I can say is that it truly was a great experience! At one point in time, I played quite a bit of video games,…
Summer months went by fast when you had lot on your hands. Didn’t feel like keeping the reading log up to date during these months, so I’ll just do one big post-summer update here. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (reread) On May, I seemed to be rereading bunch of classics especially with the common theme of dystopian future. Why you might ask? That I don’t know, maybe something…
For the initial implementation of Sila’s parses, I decided to go with the recursive descent route due to its simplicity. So what it is? Recursive descent parsing is a top-down parsing technique employed to analyze the syntax of structured input, such as programming languages or mathematical expressions. It operates by breaking down the input into smaller, manageable components using a set of…
A while ago, I wrote about why would anyone start writing a new programming language . Consequently, I decided to gradually initiate the project. Simultaneously, I found the idea of documenting my progress to be intriguing. I opted to adopt a strategy of incremental development, wherein I would construct small, functional components and refine them over time. This incremental methodology draws…
In the vast and ever-evolving landscape of software development, programming languages play a pivotal role in how developers interact with computers and build applications. While a plethora of well-established programming languages exist, there has always been an intriguing curiosity and desire among some developers, including myself, to embark on the quest of creating our own languages. Existing…
I stumbled upon a fun-sounding challenge from Werner Vogels' blog so I wanted to partake in it personally. The challenge was to list your favourite album for every year of your life with a restriction of only one album per year and no repeats of artists. Here is my list: 1995: Alice in Chains, Alice in Chains 1996: Type O Negative, October Rust 1997: Deftones, Around the Fur 1998: Neutral Milk…
I’ve been a longtime fan of Julie Evans’ writing and recently stumbled upon a great post of her called Some blogging myths which inspired to me write something about the same topic. I have always seen blogging or personal websites as this powerful platforms for self-expression, enabling people from all walks of life to share their thoughts, ideas, and experiences with the whole wide…
Not so long ago, Geoffrey Hinton, another “godfather of AI”, raised his concerns about the future of AI and his own feelings towards it . Now it seems, another “godfather of AI”, is feeling lost with his work He is the second of the so-called three “godfathers” of AI, known for their pioneering work in the field, to voice concerns about the direction and the…
Lots of non-fiction for me this month, mainly revolving around attention span. Very interesting topic overall, especially considering the highly technological dopamine filled world we live in today. Gloria Mark: Attention Span, Adam Alter: Irresistible, Alex Soojung-Kim-Pang: The Distraction Addiction : I decided to group these together since all three of these books revolved around technology,…
‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google and warns over dangers of misinformation Hinton, 75, said he quit to speak freely about the dangers of AI, and in part regrets his contribution to the field. He was brought on by Google a decade ago to help develop the company’s AI technology, and the approach he pioneered led the way for current systems such as ChatGPT. […] Hinton’s concern in…
cries in corporate… “Difficult” labour laws make it hard for corporations to fire people. Voluntary departures and individual settlements are favoured In the US, companies can announce widespread job cuts and let go of hundreds if not thousands of workers within months — and many have. Meanwhile, in Europe, mass layoffs among tech companies have stalled because of labor…
Pretty technical month in my reading this time. Liz Rice: Container Security I got free copies of this book and the couple of next books from an event so I decided to read them through due to how close they are to my profession. While working as a plumber, container security tends to be a very common topic and also topic that I’m very interested in. Rice is pretty popular public figure in…
Utah has become the first US state to require social media firms get parental consent for children to use their apps and verify users are at least 18. The bills will give parents full access to their children’s online accounts, including posts and private messages. The move comes amidst heightened concern over the impact of social media on children’s mental health. Under the measures…
Another neat finding in Go’s language server. Basically, I wanted to include some sort of way to run some static analyser with my language server. I remember golanci-lint was long the “de facto” tool for this, but seems that staticcheck has grown a lot in popularity. So I wanted to integrate that with my gopls . Naturally, the first step was installing the tool itself.…
Purely Functional Data Structures by Okasaki, Chris (reread) I read this book when I was in my deep-deep functional programming phase couple of years back. Coming from imperative and OOP world, I already had a pretty good understanding of algorithms and data structures, but that knowledge was very much grounded in the imperative world. This book got recommended to me on how similarly useful data…
I needed to write some funky Go code using relatively new Go generics in it, just to quickly notice that my LSP client in Emacs didn’t recognise those like you would expect. Fixing gopls was relatively straight-forward, since my issue seemed to be just an old version. So I just installed gopls while having Go 1.18+ installed. In my case, I had already generics-aware Go version installed but…
So in recent days, I have stumbled upon some REALLY NICE (at least in my own standards) Emacs tweaks, which I wanted to share with you. First, something very trivial, I knew that Emacs had some sort of jump to previous location etc., type of feature available, but I never got into using it. Turns out there’s is a built-in keybinding for that or a couple. First, one was C-x C-x , which jumps…
Turing Award winner Yann LeCun dropping some much needed wisdom about ML advancements : Hotter take: ML would have advanced faster if another front-end language had been available and widely adopted instead of Python. One that is interactive yet fast & compilable, multithreaded (no GIL), isn’t bloated, doesn’t care about white spaces,… E.g. Julia or some Lisp. Hot take: Machine…
Recently stumbled upon this great quote about the description of AI: AI is magic. You see a magic trick. You are amazed by the magic. You are shown how the trick works. You are impressed by the technique. You learn how to perform the trick. Now it’s not magic, it’s sleight-of-hand, or mirrors, or misdirection. Unknown Nice way of saying AI is bullshit.
As some of you may know, I’ve been a practising Buddhist for some time, focusing mainly on the teachings of Early Buddhism and Theravada. One aspect of this practice is keeping up with Uposatha, which is also present in other schools of Buddhism. Wikipedia describes Uposatha as follows : The Uposatha (Sanskrit: Upavasatha) is a Buddhist day of observance, in existence from the Buddha’s…
Update : Go decided to go with opt-in telemetry, which at leastpersonally speaking I’m very happy with. [https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-opt-in](Read more about it from here.) Last week, Russ Cox from Go team started a discussion about the possibility of starting to collect telemetry from Go usage . How do software developers understand which parts of their software are being used and…
So climbing world seems pretty stoked that Shawn has recently been projecting the infamous Burden of Dreams, 9A/V17, in Finland. Boulder is famous for being the first 9A boulder first ascent made by Nalle Hukkataival in 2016 after three years of projecting. Lately, Shawn has also uploaded his projecting videos of the boulder to his YouTube channel, so check those out!
MIT study finds huge carbon cost to self-driving cars The study found that with a mass global takeup of autonomous vehicles, the powerful onboard computers needed to run them could generate as many greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centres in operation today. These data centres currently produce around 0.14 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year, equivalent to the entire output of…
Despite not using Twitter, I stumble upon some Twitter threads every once in a while, and I have to read them through. This time, it was one of the tweets that John Carmack, for whom I have tremendous respect, wrote: Programmers are also users, and “funnel drop offs” apply. “Show source” was pivotal for the web, and I wish native code behaved similarly — ctrl-break any application and be in a…
Some time ago, I decided to start keeping a book list and wanted to start writing some notes about them . But, unfortunately, life happened, and I forgot that I was supposed to make these notes. Of course, I don’t have anything or anyone enforcing me to do these, but I still want to keep my own promises. So, now when I found some time, I decided to do this small overview of the months that I…
The EU Commission proposes to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content – generally and indiscriminately. All of your chat conversations and emails will be automatically searched for suspicious content. Nothing remains confidential or secret. There is no requirement of a court order or an initial suspicion for searching your messages.…
Vienna, Austria and Leipzig, Germany representing! “Beastie Smashing Fascism” -sticker was made by: https://raw.at/materialien . Unfortunately don’t know at the moment who has made the “Run BSD stop fascism” -sticker. Source
So yesterday, I, at least it seems, successfully migrated to Contabo. I’ve been looking for a small server to serve my home page and other self-hosted services for some time. Yesterday I decided to ask for some recommendations around the lazyweb and got many good and bad recommendations. One of the better recommendations, it seems, was Contabo. While I don’t use too much computing…