flickering

i suppose i should start again

is the outcast noble? i have more respect for the man who struggles in the dirt over the man who abandons all hope at the first prognostication of failure. i'm not sure which is happier in the end, it depends on the likelihood of success

today i made a library of babel generation tool in minecraft. i learned some things about command blocks and redstone, neither of which i'd never really used before

the biggest challenges were caused by the fact that the rooms are hexagonal and i can only clone rectangular areas. the way i solved this meant the cloned areas overlapped, i didn't see this at the time but on reflection i think i could've not had the regions overlap by using a larger area, which is interesting but i wouldn't have wanted to use this because i need to be able to delete individual rooms easily:

it took a while to figure out the ideal dimensions for the hexagons, and i had to alter the design of the room many times because it wouldn't line up properly when cloned

it isn't very accurate to the short story which i don't mind. most notably there are no stairs and only one floor in the y direction, which i prefer

i get lost in these rooms easily (it's even visible near the end of the video), and this isn't very useful to me in its current state. i added the room clear button to try and keep the space closed, however it's just cloning from a separate template with no lights or controls, and will remove one light from each adjacent rooms (more tolerable in my opinion than leaving random lights visible through empty doors). this still doesn't make the space feel closed to me. a better solution would be to fill it with stone, but it would have to be on a timer of a few seconds so you don't get trapped in the center. not sure what the best way to achieve this would be

the plan is to use this tool to create closed spaces that can then be manually modified and serve as scenes for visualisation. other next steps include creating different templates and somehow choosing between them when generating a new room. i will want a y direction eventually with stair templates but that probably won't be much more difficult than what i've already done

it might have made more sense to develop a mod to solve this and i think i may need to look into that (or a data pack? i've never worked with either) in order to get any further

i also ran into another obstacle which is my poor visualisation ability. i can only use places that i've been before and the people have no visual detail at all. this is also true for my dreams

i see this as a spatial 'house' visualisation thought type separate from both regular visualisation and spatial thought. i cannot visualise a cube, i cannot remember a map and use it to navigate, but i can imagine where the walls of a building are. as though fumbling in the dark

i can remember the streets to walk a particular route, but it is quite poor over such large areas and there are a lot of blank spots even imagining close to where i have lived for a long time

these also seem to be remembered forever, unlike events that happen to me which i barely remember at all. i think i can also remember places i've only been once or twice. so i suppose these places define who i was more than anything else. kinda shitty since i assume it's taking up a lot of space and is basically useless information compared to real memories

so for the writing i did today i had to use a specific section of a certain public library i visited frequently as a child. i can visualise minecraft worlds and remember any i have created in the past with the same fumbling-in-the-dark clarity, so i'm seriously considering using creative mode minecraft as a tool to design settings just so i can imagine them properly

have been writing a story. it's challenging for me, and apparently i write at least three times as slow if not much worse compared to ballpark durations i'm seeing online versus number of words. even these posts are more cautiously put together than they might look

i'll try editing less as i write and doing separate passes instead. i'll also avoid spending time searching for the perfect adjective/verb to describe something, although i think i've improved at that already (i recall relying on thesaurus a lot more in the past)

it feels like i brutishly apply a poorly suited mode of thinking to writing. i think i'm good at finding the right words to express ideas in a single sentence, but i struggle to use multiple sentences. there's always trouble with complex and heavily loaded sentences, which get mashed together in a mess of prepositions and have to be split manually. even here. haha

i found this to be good for non-fiction summaries in reports etc. when an idea can just be one sentence or a few sentences reforged into multiple, but it seems outstandingly terrible at writing fiction. it's like a sentence is a very easy translation for how the thought looks inside, but once the thought is translated that sentence has hardened and is difficult to process further, which starts to become an issue for more complex thoughts that need to be presented in a structured way

i don't think what i have written is good despite spending probably about 6 hours writing something that is not very long. i hope to write more and share it eventually

i only got 43/50 stars. unlikely i will continue

my eyes strain, twisting at right angles to take in the polarised light

i should add webgl fps controls. in the dark my laptop whirs at 25% cpu. perhaps 'next time'

the e's like to migrate to the end of words, but i won't permit it here. ideally they should balance out overall

catch-22 fatigue fasting death spiral

the day

inflammation is counter-intuitive

i also have been doing advent of code, the problems are starting to get better. i think programming problems with large amounts of input data tend to be trivial and uninspired. the difficulty of such problems usually relies on bugs caused by inherent rather than emergent complexity, and the first solution to come to mind will often be enough once you can successfully implement it

i'm glad i'm not usually around at the right time to care about completing the problems as quickly as possible, it's too stressful otherwise even if i'll never get a very fast time. project euler has better problems, but it can be a big investment of effort and there's a good chance i won't even solve it. it's rare that you will be able to solve a project euler problem without investigating the problem and trying multiple approaches. usually the first attempt will be too slow

one interesting thing i did learn from advent of code was that since accessing a list element is faster than accessing a dictionary element, it can be faster to use a list with many unallocated values across the entire keyspace than a dictionary, if you don't care about memory usage (and have integer keys). my intuition had always been to avoid using lists if you don't care about the order of elements

the snow is webgl and the voronoi is an svg generated by d3. needs to be tidied a little still

despite d3 claiming their voronoi implementation is much faster than alternatives, i still find it to be unacceptably slow for 200 vertices which is what i'm using currently. and it also seems to be too slow for update on scroll even though i don't recalculate the svg, just change its colour, so i wonder which parts are actually slow

i like webgl except it's challenging to debug

shadertoy is cool but it feels so far beyond anything i could make. i'm sure there are many techniques i can learn from looking at others' projects. i look forward to doing so

each day i hold in my dirty hands a fragile and liminal beauty you may never come to appreciate

new wallpaper

this is just temporary

this extreme resilence beyond what any non-gaslit individual would consider survivable almost grants me the right to live a mediocre life. but not quite

but for now, i rest

disabled search indexing :)

ah according to google GOOGL's voting rights aren't worth anything any more because non-publicly traded class b shares have a voting majority, but it's still unclear to me why GOOG would be worth more

next i will try to make a figure style with caption, maybe make them smaller so it's not so gross

tried to play with historical market data, i know very little about finance, i'm sure there's some zip archives i can download but i'd prefer to get it myself from a good source. i found a blog post (not interested in linking anything i'm discussing here) recommending i use the iex api because the yahoo and google apis had become more restrictive. however, since that post was written they also phased the old iex api out in favour of iex cloud (vomit, etc.) which operates on a poorly explained subscription model. the python library was also broken and i had to pull the most recent branch from github

anyway this is almost entirely just an excuse to rant but i was wondering what the difference between GOOG and GOOGL was so i compared the prices

i know it's not by much compared to the overall price but i wonder why GOOGL is worth more than GOOG now, that's not what i expected. is it an inconvenience to have to vote? this only changed fairly recently, so it would be interesting to see the rest of the historical data (might try to do that later)

unfortunately all the historical data you see in the above figures used 25k 'messages' which is half of the monthly free allocation. this reminds me of why i don't like data science, stuff like plotly (i'm comfortable with matplotlib now) and jupyter are just awful. it must just be the proximity to business processes, software development in general can be somewhat insulated from that but data gets fed directly to executives, and has less value to everyday users

i don't want to sign up to a subscription service please don't make me sign up to a subscription service