2023's Devlog

30.08

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.

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:

• Effective Rust

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:

• MIT 6.001 - Structure and Interpretation

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

1. 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.

   

2. Recently edited posts are now marked with an indicator:

   

3. 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.