2023's Devlog
Closing thoughts
At the last days of the year, I came back to reading Peter Watt's Echopraxia and suddenly got myself lost within the story. It's definitely a welcome surprise for me, as 2022 wasn't a particularly fruitful year in terms of reading habits. It seems like my curiosity was in retreat due the last semester of my masters and the job change, happy to see that it's coming back to normal now.
In the last week I've been migrating my network infrastructure to NixOS, it's almost finished now.
Other things:
- It feels damn good to finish the masters degree!
- Jam sessions with newly met friends are definitely the best find of this year.
- Overcoming the fear of large concerts was worth it :)
- Transcribing Wintermute is finished, after 4 years of very slow progress (I might still work on minor articulation stuff, but that'll just be polishing something that already works fine).
- I've been learning lots of new things about space systems in Creotech so far!
2X.12
Implemented rate limiting for my Invidious instance, the instance has been moved to a server with a dynamic IP address. I guess YouTube has no way to ban me now :)
Reading:
- Mark Harrison - Contemporary Jazz Piano
- Tom Doyle - Running up that Hill: 50 visions of Kate Bush
Listening:
- Skalpel - Wpław
- Skalpel - 1958
- Etnobotanika - Fruwający Przestępca
1X.12
Swiss-Jazz.ch open directory.
Listening:
- Peter Gabriel - Mercy Street
- Virgin Magnetic Material - Owner Of A Lonely Heart
- Yoko Kanno - CHORALE
- Punch Brothers - Another New World
- Peter Gabriel - My Body Is A Cage
Watching:
- Falling Down (1993)
0X.12
Since I've been playing piano more and more during recent months, here's a small list of nice songs.
Listening:
- L'Impératrice - Agitations tropicales
- Mercy - Saint Saviour
27.11
Hiking at Duszniki Zdrój.
Work on Wintermute is almost finished, but I still have no idea what key the song is in. Nevertheless, the generated MIDI sounds close enough to the original melody and the rendered notes look almost proffesional.
Listening:
-Woodkid feat. Son Lux - Central Park
18.11
Went to the Ambientalny festival. Glad to see many people interested in the genre. Saw Hainbach live! After the concert he invited everyone interested to take a look at his setup and ask questions about it, super nice!
TODO: Find out about this amazing Krzysztof guy who was making absolutely stunning live visuals to Hainbach's music.
Listening:
- Martyna Basta
- Thomas Könar
- Hainbach
17.11
Came back my small transcribing project, nearly finished Wintermute, a few notes are out of sync, but the pitches sound 100% right to my ear.
Watching:
- Mad God (2021)
Listening:
- ∑tella - Girl Supreme
16.11
High-fiving Adam Neely and hearing a crowd clap in perfect sync in 7/8 time is quite something for just one day! Happy to be alive at the same time as all the people who were there :)
Listening:
- Sungazer
14.11
Watching:
- Układ Formalny - Balladyna
Listening:
- David Bowie - I'm Deranged
11.11
Yet again, some of my code travels into space. I won't be operating this new bird, but I still wish it good luck!
TIL: A Polish Movie Na Srebrnym Globie (On the Silver Globe) is available at 35mm.online!
08.11
Listening:
- Crystal Castles - Kept (Waltz piano)
- The Chemical Brothers - Goodbye
- Jungle - Happy Man
04.11
Some more polish gems:
- osiedlowy.sklep.pl - cool shirts
- mgart.com.pl - handmade ceramic
30.10
Finished a 1 year streak in Duolingo, learned basics of French and a tiny bit of Norwegian and Italian. Unfortunately, the app only makes sense as an addition to a "real" language practice, at least that's how I perceive its effectiveness.
Reading:
- Stanisław Lem - Summa Technologiae
22.10
Enjoying the sound of Jacob Collier's harmonizer.
Listening:
- Nation of Language - A New Goodbye
- Jiro Inagaki & Sould Media - Funky Stuff
14.10
Reading:
- Doughlas Adams - The Salmon Of Doubt
10.10
Listening:
- Urbanski - Everdome
- Jacob Collier & Brandi Carlile - Little Blue
Watching:
09.10
Exploring the world of Polish hand-made (at least what they say on the page) notebooks:
Listening:
- daste. - Telephone (What's Your Name?)
04.10
Listening:
- William's Things - The Robots are Coming
30.09
My journey with SatRev is officially finished! I'll never forget the 3 years I spent there, with all the amazing coworkers fascinated with space and engineering.
Listening:
- Jungle - Volcano
- Il Quadro di Troisi - Il Quadro di Troisi
- The Green Book Copacabana Orchestra - That Old Black Magic
27.09
Visiting Venice and Florence. Getting some air between switching jobs.
15.09
Cleaning up and organizing many things at once, preparing to leave for another adventure.
Listening:
- Roxy Music - In Every Dream House A Heartache
- Baasch - Karuzele
- Nation of Language - Sightseer
- Nathaniel Merriweather Et al. - Ladies Love Chest Rockwell
10.09
Developing a taste for freeform jazz.
Listening:
- Charles Mingus
- Shiro Sagisu - Hedgehog's Dilemma
- Chet Baker - Chet Baker Sings
04.09
Started hosting LibreY (source code) since it looks like LibreX is not getting any updates.
03.09
Added line wrapping to post titles displayed on the map - a simple change which drastically increased the readability of nodes. Glad to discover yet another useful module in the Python Standard Library.
Watching:
- Układ Formalny - Balladyna
27.08
Testing out DrivenByMoss, incredibly powerful integration between MIDI controllers and DAWs such as Bitwig and Reaper (both Linux-friendly). It's a really great plugin, definitely recommended for all Bitwig users!
Rewatching:
- Dune (2021)
Listening:
- Joe Hisaishi - Kids Return
26.08
Started working on The Dharma Ławka Initiative page.
Updated the dependencies of tnb, polished the UX of the program a little bit.
Listening:
- Cory Wong - Call Me Wild
10.08
Listening:
- Jungle - Back On 74
- Wii Menu Music
14.08
Watching:
- Nightcrawler (2014)
04.08
Visiting Norway.
Refactored (or rather rewrote) my website map generation algorithm. The "related posts" section on each page now displays a fragment of the site map, centered around the currently viewed post.
01.08
Attempting to force my brain into not being 100% active right from the early morning all the way to late night hours - a habit I unwillingly developed while doing my master's degree and working at the same time. It's becoming a burden which could potentially lead to a burnout. I'm taking some time off, reading more books, trying to focus more on direct physical experiences rather than my thoughts.
It seems like one has to periodically embrace or fight against their own introspection and modeling capabilities. Developing mental models of various problems, systems, and situations, especially in the context of the role that one plays in them, is no doubt an essential skill when it comes to any kind of engineering (or any job which is done by one than one person). Unfortunately, if the desire to constantly improve those mental models is let astray, it leads to degradation of the models due to constant overthinking and breaking the feedback loop, validating the model against reality.
Reading:
- Philip K. Dick - Valis
29.07
Started using my physical motebook for more than just a worse version of Google Calendar. I've designated some dedicated space to various projects and "thought categories". Taking notes while reading is also less distracting, so I recommend it to anyone who has trouble remembering all the ideas which come to their mind while getting through a book.
Decided to finally organize my excellent words list.
Wrote a small tutorial about making music on Linux.
25.07
Reading:
- Spectres: Composing Listening
Watching:
- Oppenheimer (2023)
Listening:
- Peter Gabriel - So
- Jazz Against The Machine - Creep
- PlanBe - Najgorszy Numer
17.07
Defended my master's thesis! I feel sad about leaving the university though, lots of good memories were made there. I'd like to come back some time in the future, perhaps not as a scientific worker but just as a engineer taking care of their systems.
Watching:
- The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973)
- Lost (Season 5)
13.07
Discovered Bitwig - a full-featured DAW which I can run from Linux. Together with Diva it creates an amazing environment which uses way less CPU than Windows + Ableton and feels much more intuitive, at least for me.
Learning about drum patterns, a missing piece in my musical education.
Listening:
- Ben Bohmer - Ground Control
- Thievery Corporation - Voyage Libre
07.07
Listening:
- a-ha - Summer Moved On
02.07
Watching:
- Lost (Season 4)
Reading:
- Peter Watts - Echopraxia
28.06
Grabbing some air after the last master's semester. I'm glad to notice that my mind has again started to produce ideas for extending my projects. Starting to rewrite Libretakt's user interface to work as a website-based remote controller to the sampler engine. Networking code is going to get simpler as the a single sampler instance is meant to be run only locally. Egui should work just fine for a mobile-first user interface.
Watching:
- Asteroid City (2023)
Listening:
- Boy Harsher - The Runner
22.06
Watching:
- Lost (Season 3)
18.06
Created AreWeSpaceYet.com as a 1-day project.
Edit (29.06): removed AreWeSpaceYet.com since its a duplicate of the
AeroRust website, which already has lots of
interesting content on using Rust in aerospace.
Watching:
- Lost (Season 2)
15.06
Reading:
Watching:
- Lost (Season 1)
12.06
Converted my website map generation algorithm from using TFIDF to text
embeddings, I'm seeing a lot of improvement in how the
generated map looks! It's a pretty lightweight solution (if you're not counting
the torch library which is a behemoth), the embeddings only weight ~90MB.
The embeddings really capture the general context between posts that they put
closely together.
11.06
Finishing touches on my master's thesis.
Started hosting Libreddit.
Fell in love with unplug.red/automatism, haven's seen such a beautiful website in a long time.
Listening:
- Oneohtrix Point Never - The Pure and the Damned
- Junior - Bluszcz
06.06
Watching:
- The Endless (2017)
Listening:
- Brodka - Wpław - Skalper Rework
- Rob Doughan - Clubbed to Death
- Joris Delacroix - Homie
- Moby - Long Ambients 1: Calm. Sleep
03.06
Listening:
- Baasch - Wosk
30.05
Watching:
- Videodrome (1983)
- The Fly (1986)
28.05
Watching:
- The Green Knight (2021)
Listening:
- BØRNS - Past Lives
24.05
In the middle of writing my master's thesis.
Watching:
- Beau is afraid (2023)
- Watchmen (2009)
18.05
Reading:
- David B. Lamkins - Successful Lisp
Listening:
- Kraftwerk - Computer World
- Yumi Zouna - In Camera
13.05
Listening:
- Nation of Language - Introduction, Presence
06.05
Listening:
- Yumi Zouma - In Camera
02.05
Switched all my computers to Arch Linux, automated the process of deploying my system configuration. Spent some time merging my configuration repositories and documenting the result.
Exploring ideas related with genetic programming, mainly how one should represent the structure of an optimisation problem in a form that would be viable for genetic programming approach. Mixed type cartesian genetic programming was the most interesting approach so far.
Watching:
- Alan Kay - The computer revolution hasn't happened yet
Listening:
- Son Lux - Ghost Melody
Started collecting some thoughts on thinking.
29.04
Switched to Nu Shell, learning about new ideas for OS shells which Nu is exploring.
Automating the deployment of my system configuration with Ansible.
Gerald Sussman on why MIT has switched from Lisp to Python in their introductory programming courses:
Engineering in 1980 was not what it was in the mid-90s or in 2000. In 1980, good programmers spent a lot of time thinking, and then produced spare code that they thought should work. Code ran close to the metal, even Scheme -- it was understandable all the way down. Like a resistor, where you could read the bands and know the power rating and the tolerance and the resistance and V=IR and that's all there was to know. 6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want.
But programming now isn't so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don't know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course.
21.04
Full focus on master's thesis!
Reading:
- Terry Pratchett - Moving Pictures
Listening:
- user18081971 - qu 1
- Aphex Twin - Alberto Balsalm
- Vulfpeck - I Can't Party
17.04
Watching:
- Wes Anderson - Moonrise Kingdom
- Wes Anderson - The Royal Tenenbaums
- Wes Anderson - Bottle Rocket
Listening:
- Joe Hisaishi - Merry-Go-Round of Life
12.04
Watching:
- Werner Herzog - On Death Row
Listening:
- Yazoo - And On
- Todd Terje, Bryan Ferry - Johnny and Mary
07.04
Had a breakthrough moment with Lisp, finally understanding the idea behind "code is data". Rethinking my approach to type systems and programming language architecture. All things Lisp-related are food for thought :)
Watching:
Reading:
- Peter Watts - Blindsight
03.04
Played a first jam session in my life :)
Listening:
- The Doors - Riders on the Storm
31.03
Trying to wrap my head around the database-centered (Postgres-centered in my case) approach to building web applications, especially:
- Declarative APIs, taken from the DB model (think Hasura)
- Storing business logic in the DB instead of relying on application-level validation
Learning how to minimize writing glue code and focusing on delivering value.
Listening:
- KARAŚ/ROGUCKI - Czułe Kontyngenty
28.03
Reading:
- Terry Pratchett - Mort
Listening:
- RY X - Bound (Live from the Royal Albert Hall)
- KARAŚ/ROGUCKI - Jutro Spróbujemy Jeszcze Raz
- sanah - wars
Watching:
- Avatar - The Way of Water
20.03
Reading:
- Terry Pratchett - Eric
13.03
Re-learning egui, works wonderfully for making interactive
node graphs!
Reading:
- Terry Pratchett - Sourcery
Watching:
- David Lynch - Blue Velvet
Listening:
- Roy Orbison - In Dreams
- Jack Stauber - Cheeseburger Family
05.03
Moving website generation to GitHub actions. Considering migrating my VPS to ansible-managed.
02.03
Reading:
- Terry Pratchett - Making Money
Listening:
- Nation of Language - On Division St
- Ásgeir - Snowblind
22.02
Starting to think about the visual representation of the graph I'm gonna be evolving for my master's thesis
18.02
Learning Ansible, taking care of servers at work.
Listening:
- Depeche Mode - Ghosts Again
- Cautious Clay - Cheesin'
- Jacob Collier - Hajanga
- Juno Reactor - Guardian Angel
04.02
Reliving the cartoons from my childhood. Amazed to see that their website is still alive and active!
Watching:
- Code Lyoko
Listening:
- Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works
- Passenger - Things That Stop You Dreaming
- Kishi Bashi - 151a
- Sleeping At Last - You're Enough
- Depeche Mode - The Love Thieves
- Brian Eno - LUX 1
28.01
Recorded a small demo of libretakt - a sampler I've worked on during a university course.
Reading:
- H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
Watching:
- Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
27.01
Exploring ideas related with decentralised search engines. Wrote a small manifesto on a new paradigm for how we search the web.
Watching:
- The Call Of Cthulhu (2005)
Listening:
- Aphex Twin - #3
- Cory Wong - Power Station Tour
21.01
Starting to work on generating synth pathes from audio samples!
Listening:
- Rysy - Traveler
- Son Lux - Plans We Made
- Fiora - Let It Go By
- LCD Soundsystem - Home
- MC Virgins - Sundress (guilty pleasure, obviosly. Helps getting through the semester though)
17.01
Did a minor contribution to Mutable Instruments' documentation repo. Glad to see that I'm getting more comfortable with suggesting patches to various open-source projects! Also glad that it's possible to "just submit" a suggestion to software written by a prominent artist. Despite all the negativity coming from the media and politics, we live in a great age :)
Listening:
- Boa - Duvet
- Vulfmon - Boogie Man
- Jeanette - El Muchacho de los Ojos Tristes
- Rysy - Wyspa
- Rysy - Przyjmij Brak
14.01
Listening:
- Carbon Based Lifeforms - Live at Ozora Festival 2017
10.01
Not a good day. Those cubesats really had potential :(
09.01
Watching:
- Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities
Listening:
- Vulfpeck - Schvitz
- T.Rex - Get It On (Virgin Magnetic Material remix)
- Virgin Magnetic Material - LBDs mixtape
05.01
Reading:
- Sean Luke - Computational Music Synthesis
Watching:
- Warner Herzog - The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
02.01
Mood: reverb diagrams aesthetic.
01.01
-
Trying to improve the website map using Graphviz's gvmap. The clusters represented below have no real meaning, I've added them just to see whether this idea makes any sense visually.
Prototype of the website map generated with gvmap -
Recently edited posts are now marked with an indicator:
-
Added a simple tags system to post metadata, will help with map generation.
Reading:
- Nicholas Kristof, Shreyl WuDunn - Tightrope. Americans Reaching for Hope
Go back to 2022.