Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

I found out my crimson-bellied conure is laying an egg today! She's nesting in some towels now, chirping away while she works on laying it.

Having an egg is relatively hard on parrots. I've given her lots of food and warmth to prepare. She is comically hungry -- she's usually not such a big eater, but she's happy today to be scarfing down her apple slices, fruit pellets, and safflower seeds.

She usually sleeps at the bottom of her cage, beneath a towel I put down for her. It's already unusual for parrots! But tonight she has made quite a nest with her towel: It's folded in half like usual, but she has nuzzled her way between the fold, so she has the towel underneath and on top of her. It's super cute.

I'm treating her with delicacy but she is determined to be a wild child of a bird. She's still flying around during the day and moving around plenty. I don't think I would be so confident if I had an egg like that inside me.

She has a stone perch that she likes to nibble on when she's working on an egg. I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :)

So that's my night. Sitting outside of the metaphorical delivery ward with a metaphorical cigar, making sure she lays this egg that isn't even fertile to begin with! Birds :)

I got a handheld emulator console as a Christmas gift. Configuring shaders that emulate crt TVs, I realized I had no mental model of how those TVs worked at all.

I’m used to “pixels are three little lights combining rgb colors”, which doesn’t work here, so I went on a rabbit hole and let me tell you, analog TVs are extremely impressive tech.

Getting an electron beam to hit a glass, making the chemicals on it spark, covering it in a “reading motion” for hundreds of lines, and doing that 60 times a second! And the beam is oriented by just careful usage of magnets. It sounds super sci-fi for an already dead, 130 years old technology.

I also learned that my childhood was a lie. Turns out that the logic in consoles of the time was tied to the speed of the beam, which in turn used alternating current’s frequency as a clock. This means that since European current changes 50 times per second rather than 60, our games played in slowmo (about 0.8x). American sonic was so much faster! And the music was so much more upbeat!

I went on a tour of a miso factory today and learned about how it's made!

What surprised me the most was that shiro (white) miso and aka (red) miso are both the same mix of soybeans, salt, and rice malt but fermented for different periods of time. As the miso ferments for longer, its color becomes darker while its flavor becomes milder and more complex. Beyond 3 years of fermentation, you get diminishing returns as its flavor becomes too acidic.

After the tour, we got to sample some of the naturally fermented 3 years old miso, and it was easily the best I've ever had. Most miso you can buy in a grocery store is created through forced fermentation over a few months, so if you ever get a chance to try naturally aged miso I would highly recommend!

I live in a condo complex in Florida where the onsite staff at the front desk know me well and they are mostly bilingual and know I’m learning Spanish.

I went up to ask then something and jokingly said “no hablo inglés, ¿Hablas español?” and I was able to carry on a more or less complete conversation with them in Spanish and ask for what I needed without pre rehearsing lines for the first time.

So I found out within the past 24 hours that I can carry on a simple conversation in “survival Spanish”

My home office gets up to about 1500ppm of CO2 by the end of the workday, which explains a lot about why I often feel exhausted after the end of a long, uninterrupted session in there (especially when I’m on back to back zoom calls).

I now have several plants in there that are supposed to be especially good at sucking up CO2, and my sensor reports that the current level is slightly below atmospheric ambient CO2 levels.

I also wrote up a blog post about the structure of the Washington state legislature, which began its sixty day session for 2026 earlier this week. https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2026/01/how-the-washington...

I have started exploring Seneca/stoicism again. Prompted partly by a recent submission here, partly by personal reasons. Instead of consuming other peoples interpretation of stoicism I decided to go as close to the source as feasible for me. I have read Letters from a stoic a number of times before and my copy is filled with highlights, but this time I think I will try to limit myself to one or two letters a day and then really think about them properly.

The first one really hit me hard and prompted me to write out my own thoughts (https://jesperreiche.com/seneca-letter-2/) whether I will keep doing that I am a little unsure. It feels on the border of how personal I want to be/share on my blog.

P.S. I can see the irony in writing about me going to the source instead of consuming other peoples interpretation and then sharing a link to my own interpretation :)

Make your own. Your mental health loves you when you come up with stuff. Humanity has generated so much content and none of us have the lifetime to consume it all, but that shouldn't stop you from making your own any chance you get.

Make music - you don't need an instrument if you can whistle. Make stories - just say them to a recorder or your kids or write them down. Make food experiments - nothing will please your taste-buds more than listening to them and iterating on ways to get better. Make your own apps or experiences - with AI or by hand, your ideas may be surprising and worthwhile. Knit or make your own clothes, toys, wearable tech. Design your own 3D objects and maybe print them or animate them.

We know that workouts lead to endorphins for the body, but the brain version of that is not only enjoyable but also can be scaled to be enjoyed by other humans too sometimes. Don't go through life without trying your own things.

Surströmming, the Swedish can of fermented fish, is strongly recommended to be punctured while submerged in tap water. It is not pasteurized and is actively fermenting in storage, and the content will spray around if opened under atmospheric conditions.

When transported on cargo flights, they are double packed as cans in a barrel in a crate, and considered UN classified "miscellaneous dangerous goods" with identification number UN3334 "Aviation regulated liquid, n.o.s." with accompanying scary(albeit monochromatic) warning stickers, if at all accepted. When transported on ocean going vessels, they are often required to be in its own shipping container, again double packaged and correctly labeled.

The origins of Port and Starboard on ships.

Chosen to be independent of a mariners orientation.

Starboard - most sailors were right handed and the steering oar was placed on the right. Star = steer. Board = side of boat.

Port - as steering oars got bigger, boats tended to dock on the left hand side. This became to be known as “lardboard” which sounded too much like starboard, so it was changed to “Port” (as in the side typically facing the port side.

I've learned that being truthful in your resume as a SWE doesn't work anymore. I've had nearly 0 response rate to my applications, even if I was nearly a perfect match. Dude that we fired a while ago for being abysmally bad and non-productive gets interviews, raises and just got into ycombinator backed company by making up 75% of his resume(which I saw). We need a reset, this is getting ridiculous.

I’m reading Domain Driven Development and learning why so many of my projects have been tough to maintain.

I also recently learned that you can get ancient coins for very little money if you don’t care about resale value or need them to be in pristine condition. I bought some coins from kingdoms that I’d never heard of. Many are thousands of years old! It’s fun holding a piece of history like that.

I learned about this book / concept: Tools for Conviviality [0]:

> Illich proposes the idea of a 'convivial tool', one which allows its user to exercise their human autonomy and creativity.

This came up as I was reading about UX / UI design and trying to understand the fundamentals of how to increase human autonomy. Although my key takeaway is a bit shallow at the moment, mostly focused on applying this map towards existing tools in order to try to identify ways in which they can be modified and improved to maximize autonomy.

The Wikipedia article also references this concept of radical monopoly:

> Tools for Conviviality also introduced Illich's idea of a 'radical monopoly', which describes a technology or service which becomes so exceptionally dominant that even with multiple providers, its users are excluded from society without access to the product.

Which has extended to me wondering about what the world will look like as people are increasingly pushed to use LLMs or other AI tools in more and more interactions. And in particular, what actions can or should be taken to maximize human well-being.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Conviviality

On a recent trip to Costa Rica, I discovered "Rice and Beans," which is not Gallo Pinto, but a Caribbean-influenced dish made principally of white rice, red kidney beans, coconut milk, and thyme. The dish name is in quotes because it's really the English words "Rice and Beans." It's marvelous, and I couldn't wait to try making it myself at home. Unfortunately, so far, it's been a mushy flavorless mess. I'll try a third go tomorrow. What I have so far:

- soften diced yellow onion and green bell pepper in 1 tbsp coconut oil

- toss in 3 minced garlic cloves

- toast 1.5 cups dry rinsed white rice in the mix

- pour in 1 can coconut milk

- add 1 can black beans (still looking for red beans)

- add lots of fresh thyme

- put in 1 whole habanero (still looking for Panamanian pepper)

- add 1 tsp salt

- add 1 can chicken broth

- if you have it, add a tbsp of Linzo sauce

Then simmer until the rice is cooked.

Next time I'm going to try with fresh coconut milk straight from a real coconut. That's what I explored today: how to make coconut milk.

Would appreciate advice on improving the recipe.

Late edit: on the plane back from CR I watched The Thinking Game, a documentary about DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis. Recommended.

It wasn't literally today, but about 2 days ago I discovered the -H (and --host) arguments to systemctl. These allow you to pass a hostname of a remote server, so you can use systemctl to manage systemd services on remote machines. It layers over ssh, so the cleanest way to do it is to have passwordless ssh with certificates set up to the remote host. If you do, running systemctl commands remotely is totally seamless.

https://www.tecmint.com/control-systemd-services-on-remote-l...

I found out today that the location header of an HTTP redirect can be a tel:+ URI and phone's will actually ask you whether you want to call that number.

I found 2 super cool blogs today, and spent most of my time digging into it

For understanding how internet works https://how-did-i-get-here.net/

How a computer runs our code (or anything in genral) https://cpu.land/

Also spent some time on reading about E2EE encryption because of some blog on HN I think :)

We've recently been without water in the UK for 5 days (water company failings). I've come to appreciate mains water and how its utility is hard felt by omission for toilets, washing & cleaning. Immensely grateful to have it back now.

I was reminded of the US Constitution's 10th amendment and reading some of the history around it.

> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Very relevant to what's going on today with National Guard and ICE deployments.

https://www.axios.com/2026/01/14/10th-amendment-ice-trump-il... (or please google whatever source you find reliable about the topic)

I'm doing PHP for the first time in years. I needed a function that returns the date of last week's Monday. Turns out PHP has a funky date querying language. I can just do: $today->modify('monday last week'). Makes me happy.

Reading up on the history of information management, and the real killer app for paper was double-entry bookkeeping, which made Venice rich and contributed to starting the Renaissance.

I'm building in robotics. Setting up a new 3d camera today. I found that the 10m active USB C cable that I bought transfers power in both directions, but only transfers data in one direction, it turns out to be some weird video USB variant. Next I needed to plug a gripper into a modbus controller. That uses an M8 8-pole 20cm cable. The controller manufacturer recently decided to switch from male to female connector, so now the cable needs to be male-male. After searching online for hours, I believe that is impossible to find as everyone only sells male-female cables.

I'm continuously surprised by how difficult it is to plug things together and how non-descriptive cable "standards" are about the actual capabilities of cables and connectors.

I had a great euphoric epiphany feeling today. Doesn't come along too often, will celebrate with a nice glass of wine :)

Am doing data engineering for some big data (yeah, big enough) and thinking about efficiency of data enrichment. There's this classic trilemma with data enrichment where you can have good write efficiency, good read efficiency and/or good storage cost, pick two.

E.g. you have a 1TB table and you want to add a column that, say, will take 1GB to store.

You can create a new table that is 1.1TB and then delete the old table, but this is both write-inefficient and often breaks how normal data lake orchestration works.

You can create a new wide table that is 1.1TB and keep it along side the old table, but this is both write-inefficient and expensive to store.

You can create a narrow companion table that has just a join key and 1GB of data. This is efficient to write and store, but inefficient to query when you force all users to do joins on read.

And I've come up with a cunning forth way where you write a narrow table and read a wide table so its literally best of all worlds! Kinda staggering :) Still on a high.

Might actually be a conference paper, which is new territory for me. Lets see :)

/off dancing

My day just started but I found out that when I type a message in a MS Teams chat open in Chrome in Mac OS there are three separate independent spell checkers fighting to twist my meaning.

Sorry, no positive news yet. But it's only noon.

Was reading about version control history and found out Git went from first commit to self-hosting in like a week. Linus was just mad about the BitKeeper licensing thing and hammered it out. Not some grand architecture - just "screw this, I'll do it myself." And somehow that became... everything. Wild.

Talking to insurance agents I realised, they don't bother to read the policy documents and have a very superficial knowledge of the policies they are selling. You can glean lot more information feeding the docs to an LLM and asking questions.

Today I learned about the difference betweeen "preconnect" and "dns-prefetch": https://web.dev/articles/preconnect-and-dns-prefetch

I have thought that they were the same...

I had some eye strain and think it is because my eye muscles are overused. A doctor told me the muscles in the eye are flat, like tapes, and that I would not feel a muscle ache. I noticed the strain when I focus on different points quickly. I started to pay attention to how I move my eyes and realized I read a lot of text while scrolling, for example reading X posts on mobile while scanning the text at the same time.

Yesterday I was reminded of “Rapid Serial Visual Presentation” for speed reading, where the words are presented so you do not have to move your eyes. I am currently trying it out with a Chrome extension called SwiftRead. I set the text size so it fits into my fovea area. I used a fovea detector website I saw on HN a while ago: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM (make the pattern full screen, then you can see the size of your fovea).

I also learned that I can reduce some of the strain by moving my head more toward the things I am looking at on the screen.

I’ve been slowing crunching through Math for Deep Learning, so spent a fair amount of time looking at Hessian matrices + second order optimisation. I’ve been slowly reading this book for a year, so stopping to do most of the math by hand each time. One chapter to go!

Then I was sick all last week, so ended up down a rabbit hole about the current card collecting bubble (right word?). Super interesting.

I've been exploring the origins of the 'relational turn' in psychoanalysis that began after WWII and ramped up in the 1970s. Psychoanalysis got vastly more interesting after Freud and I had no idea!

I'm exploring adding a firewall to my home network to detect if apps are using my network as residential proxy.

My daughter likes to install random games on iOS that have been advertised to her on other apps, and I wonder if some of those work as residential proxy behind the scenes.

The first thing your agent needs to know every time it wakes up is where it is.

“This codebase is health care SaaS. Compliance is mandatory at all times.”

Easy. Makes a huge difference.

Also, the collective noun for a group of agents is a bungle of agents.

When you use a microscope to magnify something, the objective (magnifying lens) is literally taking the Fourier transform of the image. The optical system recovers up to a limiting frequency, determining the spatial resolution of the image.

That the FOSS bazaar broke off into megachurches while still maintaining a healthy small scale and independent bazaar [0]. That FOSS sustainability is much more complicated than just "throw money at it".

That there's "metal paste" [1].

That the zodiac killer's messages have been cracked for five years now (I didn't know they were cracked to begin with) and that it was a shift and substitution cypher [2]. The telltale clue was that the symbol frequency was uniform but under shift it become non-uniform.

How to solder those pesky connectors that come on the tiny servo motors you can get from Aliexpress [3].

That Firefox only has 2.3% market share [4].

Multiscale 3d truchet patterns are freakin complicated [5].

That prioritizing tasks by the linear combination of priority and effort remains a good strategy.

[0] https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/01-cathedral-megachurch-b...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys-RMVJ89dk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CJsKJ0XKP4

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHulZtR2Qkg

[4] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

[5] https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2018/bridges2018-39.html#...

Today, and yesterday, I've been poking about the history of what was once the longest steam powered fresh water pipeline in the world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfields_Water_Supply_Scheme

I'm looking into rennovating a massive agricultural machine shed ~ two stories high in the middle built some 80+ years ago using sections of spur pipeline as central upright poles to hold up some beefy jarrah trusses.

The "verandah" wings flaring out from there were bulit from flimsier timber that's rotting and the iron sheet walls are starting to peel away.

The posts are of interest as they have old markings and water fittings, tee pieces, etc.

It's not far from one of the original steam powered pumping stations that moved water through the main line.

The company I work for is rather slow in adopting AI-based tooling. Recently, I discovered that our Databricks instance exposes an API endpoint that provides access to a wide range of LLMs. So I built a small local Streamlit-based chat app that lets me switch models within a conversation, add or remove files from the context, and clean up dead ends. It actually works much better than the Microsoft Copilot app we’re officially supposed to use.

An intern had trouble with an outdated exercise in Elixir that use an old version of an Erlang dependency, so we got to figure out how to depend on a local copy, dig into the Erlang code and do a little hack to make it work.

Basically it relied on a checksum algorithm that was previously in yet another external library but was now in the standard library so that call needed to be updated and variables carrying around the old external library had to be underscored out.

It was a good lesson in traversing error messages and going from an angry VM step by step to a clean success. Not to hairy for a junior to understand when explained, and also not too time consuming to burn out interest, while still a bit of a challenge.

I've been exploring making a camera trap to put out in my woods, to see if I can get a good photo of the very illusive bobcats we've got around here. I went out to California last month on a photo tour to get some nice shots of less skittish cats, and it gave me the motivation to continue my build of the camera trap. I just today received the custom little PCB I designed to read an IR sensor and have an STM32G convert it to focus and shutter release signals for the camera. I built the board up this morning and am getting ready to fire it up with my J-Link debugger probe attached and start the work on the firmware.

I found out that the adhesives I've encountered from time to time that remain tacky and easily moved or removed are called "non-hardening" adhesives. This was after using E8000 glue for a headphone repair today.

I have to replicate the little shoes on the cassette mechanics of a Becker Grand Prix car stereo from 1985. The plastic shoes are brittle from age, heat, and wear. I've spent the last couple weeks finding about two dozen ways that almost work. Their tiny and need to fit on three even tinier feet that ride rails for loading the cassette. This morning, I found out that I can probably make several possible plans work - good enough. Which is to say, I found out I was delaying the project with hopes for the perfect solution when good enough was already there.

That running and taking cold showers really do make me more focused! And that i will have to be the one that fixes my life and builds my future. Deep, i know

Found out that our (small company's) VPS was compromised by a mining script, attacker probably exploited NextJS' RCE that I forgot to patch. The scripts were using half of the threads at 100%, i deleted all of them, found the watchdogs that kept recreating them and updated NextJS, luckily there was nothing to steal, now everything seems alright, but I'm thinking that I should format/rebuild everything just in case that I missed something.

I'm a junior dev with very little experience, I would appreciate any suggestion/advice

That someone created a new country recently called Verdis, with a population of about 400.

I was planning a hostile takeover, figuring how hard could it be with these guys, until I found out Croatia already did that.

Learned some turn around licks from Freddie King's side tracked, and played them over and over on a blues backing track.

I've been playing guitar for a long time, but rhythm wise, it took time to click. I'm much better at feeling the pulse, and starting and ending licks at the right time in the bar.

Finished "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Hemmingway

Wow, so powerful. So real. I can see why it won the accolades at the time and why it stays. The ending. You could see it a mile away, but it was so hurtful still.

Would love to see another adaptation made of it, especially nowadays. Maybe a really long movie, 2 parts?

I used RfP (Request for Payment) today for the first time. It was ~11k USD between IBKR and Chase and the transfer was instant with verification on both sides. It's interesting to see the evolution of payments in the US moving so quickly over the past few years (FedNOW, etc...)

Today, I am revising Portuguese grammar and so I've mostly been exploring the things I can remember well and those that I can't. Portuguese has a lot of verb forms that I need to get right. But it also has really interesting constructions like "ir ter com" which literally means "to go to have with" but is an idiomatic way of saying "to meet up" (with someone) and I keep remembering and forgetting it.

Incorporated a cli AI to my daily work. Just impressive, was working on some networking code, I could think of 100 ways to stress test it, then I ‘prompted’? AI to implement those ideas, found many issues, hangs. Shared agent those, asked it to add prints, retest, improve my implementation. Now I got a good solution in a day. Previously this would take a week at least with my worrying about all the things I could test, improve…

I've been trying to research drone navigation tech from what we have learned so far from the russian/ukraine war. I'm very much not a hardware guy but software by itself has been feeling kind of useless or even crueler than usual.

Not strictly today. But I discovered that there exists a special class of algorithms that are designed with the use case of streaming data to your program. I just used one to get a uniformly distributed sample from a 10Gb log file.

I knew this was something coding interviews delved into: "if it doesn't fit in memory", but until like yesterday I never went down the rabbit hole. I have to say it was a nifty trick.

I found out that it is nearly impossible in Europe to buy a 10l enamelled bucket with a lid. I need one for my organic waste, since I found that both metal and plastic ones tend to keep the smell despite cleaning them weekly.

I've been exploring kefir. I'm looking at finding some live grains to boost the store bought variety here (10-20 varieties) up to 50-60 varieties or so, like the kefir in Eastern Europe / Russia. The store bought stuff in my country (UK) is more like a diluted, gimmicky thing. However, I believe the strains of bacteria they do include are some of the more influential ones. I think it would just be interesting to expand the scope a bit.

This came from reading about the gut microbiome, which was spun off from reading a book about Ultra Processed Foods (Ultra-Processed People). I've been trying to remove UPF foods from my daily consumption, trying to lower the ratio of them I eat (the average is supposedly 60% for adults in my country), since the academic link between UPF and dementia is quite strong now. It's quite shocking to see just how much of a typical supermarket/food store is UPF, and where many of the emulsifiers and preservatives come from.

In 2026 I started writing letters. I mean, docs on my computer that will end up printed in physical form, then handed to someone, or shipped to someone in an envelope with a stamp.

I feel I will do more and more of this, this year, as a little experiment. I will most likely experiment with different types of papers, etc.

I learned about fan-out, and just how the average size of groups in messaging servers affects their load. It is pretty basic stuff I guess but not something you think about unless that is your jam.

I was stress testing a server I made and noticed a discrepancy between two tests. In on test 15 virtual users could send 450msg/sec (not realistic I know) for about 6750 incoming messages per second. In another, 1000 users sending a message about every two seconds was the limit, about 500msg/sec incoming.

Took me a little bit to figure out why, the outgoing messages between the tests were wildly different. In the smaller user tests the groups were about 3 on average, in the larger one they were 30. Group size is effectively a multiplier on incoming msg requests so when looking at the total traffic it was much closer between the two tests 15k and 20k.

Been working on sheet cutting optimization for https://measuretocut.com today and it sent me straight down the cutting‑stock / 2D bin‑packing rabbit hole. What started as “wouldn’t it be nice if the site could tell you how to cut your wood sheets optimally?” turned into reading about NP‑hard problems and flipping through old operations research papers like I was cramming for an exam.

The funny part is how far the mathematical version of the problem is from what measuretocut.com actually needs to output. In reality you have kerf, ugly offcuts, and the fact that nobody wants a cutting diagram that looks like a circuit board. We really have to take into consideration a 2nd optimization, it needs to be an output that a person in a shop can glance at and immediately understand.

I spent some very enjoyable time browsing courses and tutorials in the Santa Fe Institute’s complexity explorer![1]

I wish I had encountered complexity science earlier in life. It touches on so many of the questions that have sparked my imagination over the years, I’m so pleased to find such an accessible introduction.

I found out I can automate my 5,12kWh house battery through local-only RS485 connection, and directly setting registers using ModbusTCP from Home Assistant. I then drafted an automation with hysteresis and damping that tries to aim for Net-Zero export/import (pv surplus/grid). It appears to work!

I found out that killer whales hunt and kill great white sharks. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/orcas-spo...

I am deep down into the rabbit hole of assessing various open source projects to build a custom trackball with a 52mm billiard ball (appropriately, it’s the 8-ball).

Learned about superheterodyne receivers. Recently I've been studying up on RF technology, happened to come across superheterodyne receivers a short while ago, decided to research them today, saw that Technology Connections had a video on them, watched it, and felt reasonably enlightened.

Screws weren't standardized until ww2. And even then, they really haven't been.

Related video for those curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKNB04slCUA&t=3s

Set up motion detection on my home security camera. Caught four stray cats playing in the driveway at like 2am. Kind of annoying that the detection is unconditionally "object-based" (ANN is used to filter false positives like lighting changes).

Also been thinking about game ideas for a while. Finally settled on an open world RPG where you control multiple (>10?) characters. Core gameplay loop will be configuring / optimizing schedules (farming materials, grinding xp, etc) and watching damage / currency numbers go big. Though if I'm being honest, I just want an excuse to build something that involves a node-based UI. So even if I don't finish, I'll have at least scratched that itch.

I'm exploring writing a point and click adventure, and I've found out that they're basically just hierarchical state machines with a pretty UI. This is useful because it simplifies a lot of things.

The downside is that now I'm wondering if I could write one in SQL.

I explored the space of valid Spelling Bee puzzles and found out the lowest scoring puzzle is (x)bejkou with 14 points.

Hoping they do it for April 1st one year.

I found out that the reason my Mazda CX 5 infotainment console reboots repeatedly when the temperature drops below freezing is because of a low quality SD card used by the manufacturer. I'll be replacing it this weekend.

On the command line the `strings` command will list out printable characters in a file (including compiled binaries).

I don't do any systems level programming but found myself down a small rabbit hole of learning about reverse engineering tools. https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra is an open source one. It will show you the assembly code, does its best at giving you a C representation of that code and lets you interactively rename variables and symbols to make it more human readable.

Today I took the subway at a different time than I normally do, and I saw a very different mix of people. Fascinating.

Not today, but the day before I launched my 2nd attempt at making chocolate from cocoa pods. The 1st time, the fermentation failed and I just got rotten seeds in a pot.

I found just now that my telecom operator - Airtel - randomly subscribed me for OTT services and charged me for it. But upon calling them and contesting, they just asked if I want to unsubscribe and then reverted the charges. No threats, pleading, or back-and-forth involved from either side. Mildly surreal.

I wonder that's a new corporate strategy - charge randomly till someone goes through the pain of IVR and spends 15 mins with support. Must generate quite an upside for them if it is indeed a strategy.

currently learning 3d "solid" design with blender for 3dprinter. I am aware blender is not the fit a cad app would be (), but it 'works' if you are careful what you do (I am not). This morning I had to clean the poor 3dprinter of a spaghetti-gone-wrong accident, because my hubris-3d-design submitted last night was not as clever as I naively thought. () the advantage of using blender is that, as a byproduct I will eventually have learned blender..

I am in Mexico City and I learned quite a bit about Santa Muerte. Hard to know how much truth there is in what the locals tell me but supposedly people who live in such dire conditions they feel closer to death than to life pary to Our Lady of Holy Death for protection.

Wikipedia says it is the fastest growing religion in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Muerte

mDNS

In the past few weeks I have been exploring mDNS and IPv6. Your router doesn't provide local DNS? Not an issue, add .local to the hostnames and boom, everything works.

For example, run `python3 -m http.server` on your laptop, then open the browser on your phone and browse yourlaptopname.local:8000 ! There's more, services are advertised on mDNS, that's how your printer magically appears on your computers and phones.

Learning how much of a hassle moving house is. Will take me forever to get addresses on all service providers etc moved

Also learning more about mold and dehumidifiers

There does not yet exist a (strong) chess engine that tries to force its opponent to win against it (who is assumed to have the same objective)

I was looking at the llms.txt files of some sites today and saw how straight to the point they are and started thinking I'd love to have a browser that only loads these txt files and the markdown files they link to. It reminds me of the Gemini protocol tried to do. I think I'll try to make a PoC this weekend.

A search engine for llms.txt would be great too.

I learned there was a group of people in NYC in the late '70s and early '80s that may have been the biggest serial killers in American history. They killed at least 200 people, sometimes 4–5 people per week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_DeMeo

Exams in a week! I found out that it's actually pretty easy to fill an entire 150 page notebook with rough work in <2 days.

That my colleagues like me despite me being a bad fit for the role here at my company. I feel good, I really like them here at Chatwoot but I'm not who they need right now. It's my last week here, and it's only been 3.5 months but they feel like family. It's sad that I had to quit but I'll miss these good people.

That its impossible to find an oil can with a zerk fitting. I need one for my bridgeport that uses zerks for oil and not grease.

I found out that the guy who broke the thing I was working on was… me.

i learned that windows has many different touch/pen implementations, and that the most recent one takes multiple inputs for a location, one at the pixel scale and another at the pixel scale multiplied by something like 2600 or so. i havent figured out why they did that yet, but ill find that out by eod

OpenCode has 11 options for installation.

I knew curl, npm, and docker, but asked Gemini about the rest:

bun, pnpm, yarn, brew, scoop, chocolatey, paru, mise.

Although its wonderful that people are building and creating, I also hope it calms down somewhat so I can choose from well tested few options in the future.

That lodash-es doesn’t ESM lodash/fp, which means there is no straightforward way of using it with Vite after version 5. God help me.

I don’t even want to use it, I just want to get legacy code building on a modern version of Vite without rewriting a couple thousand lines of code. Aaaargh

End of the day for me, as usual trying to walk around as much as I can with my partner, with the hopes to stumble upon stuff. Just found a great pasta spot, followed by a watering hole. Grateful to live in this city! Hope you guys are having a good one as well.

Welp I'm going through my folder of notes on publishing type stuff - site generators, hosting providers, headless CMSs, all-in-one platforms, etc. First time seeing it all at the same time and being able to compare features/workflows etc.

Today I learned why Harry Potter's wand sometimes acted on its own. It had a will of its own (due to the phoenix feather core). It remembered the enemy (Voldemort) and attacked him to protect its owner.

That I promised my boss to check the office fridge for what we need for the team breakfast and forgot about it.

Also that Newfoundland has a pretty unique music tradition, that captures what irish music sounded before the Great Famine

I learned that the large tree near where I live in London that has visibly grown in the last year is a Coast Redwood (a.k.a. California Redwood, a.k.a. Sequoia) and that there are half a million of them in the UK.

Loving this post.

I explored the programming language nim a bit deeper for use in game programming with SDL3 bindings, but I came to find out that compiled nim code on Windows often triggers anti-virus because, from what I hear from people, nim is used a lot in malware development currently. Which is a shame because I really like that language. I haven't tested it myself, it's just things I have heard and read. Someone on r/gamedev told me to write the code in nim, generate C code and then compile it with zig cc.

If anyone has any experience with this, please do chime in :)

I’m learning about the “era of the nations” thinking from Hungary’s Balázs Orbán, via an episode of a podcast called the Winston Marshall show. YouTube just randomly suggested it to me.

I just rebuild a speed queen dryer that broke with spare parts from Amazon, which revealed a remarkably simplistic engineering. Very surprised by how simplistic the mechanism was. It’s incredible how over engineered most laundry systems have become.

Also spent some time digging into the integrations between Tesla FSD and rideshare services today. It’s remarkable how much progress has happened.

I found out that, as I thought, I'd probably rather have read Frederick Law Olmsted on his travels in the antebellum South than Tony Horwitz (Spying on the South) on Olmsted on etc.

I found out that falling out of bed is not just for children, and that bringing an adult's body mass is not an improvement. I don't suppose that I'd fallen out of bed since LBJ was president.

I found out that YouTube has some interesting notions about me: the opening ad on a rather bland video was anything but bland, astonishing even a jaded old man.

Found out about finding timing of http requests https://susam.net/timing-with-curl.html

Playing around with Dictionary Services[1] (an api in iOS and macOS).

Figuring out how to create my own dictionary with Dictionary Development Kit to create a dictionary where people can find definitions of terms.

Also let the system learn names of products and services, so the system can do better autocorrect.

1. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreservices/dicti...

I read the Wiki page for Thurgood Marshall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurgood_Marshall

This part surprised me:

    > Marshall retired from the Supreme Court in 1991 and was replaced by Clarence Thomas.

I remember watching the hearings about Clarence Thomas as a kid. At the time, I had no idea what a legal giant was Thurgood Marshall.

I don't really musically understand reverb (to the point where I just know oh this needs a plate at X length), so I've been learning future garage forcing me to use a lot of reverb hoping it will click. Inspired by Urban Waifs sharing of some of their process in their Youtube videos. https://www.youtube.com/@UrbanWaifs/videos

A talk about creating from Ethan Hawke called "Give yourself permission to be creative"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRS9Gek4V5Q

But my takeaway was more like "Give yourself permission to be bad"

Felt good to be reminded that if you want to make interesting things, it's ok to flail around. It'll feel foolish and that's completely ok, perhaps necessary.

Today I recorded myself skateboarding and found out that I don't move nearly as much as I think I do! No wonder I'm going so slow!

As a student in embedded and systems programming that never did much in high level langs, i found out how fun html+js can be.

Tangentially related: if I do this frequently how can I frame it as a hobby normies can understand?

Knowledge explorer sounds too esoteric.

Recently procured an AirGradient air quality monitor and set up the build environment so I can customize its reporting capability and perhaps add some different sensors. Also didn't realize how much CO2 builds up during the night in my bedroom. Will have to mitigate this as I believe this contributes to my poor sleep habits.

Postgres replica identities and logical replication, while working with some RDS blue-green deployments in staging. Very impressed with how good the blue-green deployments are now. I haven't used them in a few years and the UI and documentation around them is really solid.

setup a desktop with n8n, ollama, open webui, comfyui, and aider. work is dragging it's feet on AI orchestration and workflow tooling so figured I learn it a bit to get ahead of things. just need some personal projects that are interesting enough that I'll pour time into them.

I found out and explored the Relax-and-Recover backup software ( https://relax-and-recover.org/ ) that makes a bootable rescue ISO and a nice backup of my 'new' Debian 13 box.

I found out my second bicycle is a claw hanger mount rear derailur, because I bought a direct mount derailur and had to find an adapter part.

Trying to get my Klipper-like thing for ClearCore up and running (currently called Cutter) so I can have a smaller mostly unchanging c++ codebase on the mcu and do higher-level application control of motors, outputs and sensors on linux in rust.

I am cleaning up some pointer arithmetic stuff for multi-dimensional C style arrays. I managed to replace the code with a std::inner_product minus a std::accumulate (to accomodate for the fact that the upper array bound is exclusive, ie one-past-the-end).

I learned that my fav part of Apennines is famous for a lack of light pollution and thus is an astro-tourism target. Never paid attention to that aspect.

I also learned that on Aug 12th this year a total eclipse of the sun can be observed from certain parts of Spain.

I found out that Claude Code and OpenCode doesn't do vector search and embeddings but relies on grep to power their agents. Most people are satisfied with this even though I think vector search approach is way better and saves on tokens.

I found out that Eastern Europe includes the Baltic States (northern) and the Balkans (southern).

I learned this because I play a daily game called FoodGuessr, where you have to guess which country a food dish is from. I tend to struggle in Eastern Europe.

I cannot add git Bash as an option for a terminal in VSCode. I had it installed via PortableGit and the chat told me it doesn't work unless it's in a standard location. I installed in a standard location and still no dice.

I found out I turned 24 today :)

I now know that in Italian I should say 'mi piacciono' to convey my liking of things (plural), e.g "mi piacciono i libri" means "I like books", as opposed to singular 'mi piace il libro' (I like the book).

When I refer to likes of multiple people, e.g. "we like this book", I should use "ci piace il libro". Plural people speaking about liking plural books would be "ci piacciono i libri".

One of my goals for 2026 is to reach level B1 in Italian language.

I've been working on a litle raspberry pi pico project with kafka. As someone that used to have an Arduino uno, it made me genuinely shocked at how small controllers have gotten and they're massive capabilities

That yoga classes give me more anxiety instead of reducing it. The calm and quiet of the yoga class does not similarly make my mind calm and quite. Instead, my wandering mind always wanders to bad things.

I've explored various VPN settings/configurations/protocols to see what works best with my ISP that tends to throttle traffic to my work VPN.

Some things work OK, but still not as good as commercial VPN providers.

Related to this, I spent three years looking up 1,000 things and writing about them.

https://deanebarker.net/huh/

concept maps being different from mindmaps and that its better to make them by hand than on a software like cmaptools

last week: Worked with son to find time period of a pendulum (a bell attached to a rope) .. the exploration was to get to microseconds precision). I sincerely hope more people could appreciate H C Vermas physics teaching methodology https://hcverma.in/Experiments

Go:

    r, err:= fn()

Compiles if r is already declared. Creates a new lexical scope that has no access to the outer r. So the outer r doesn't get set. And I get a bug!

I had a long boring meeting. I decided it was time to grow up and learn a little Lean. Let's do formal methods. Let's be serious, you know? It's pretty cool!

Why Bluetooth is detecting peripherals but won't connect to them on the new PC I built. Getting an antenna today but only 50% sure this will fix the issue.

I found out more ways in which our entire socio-economic system is a scam. I literally learn something new about this every day.

I need my Universal Basic Income now! Help.

during the pandemic I was exposed to the "Today I learned" comment in slack, and I really liked it because it was usually something interesting (or comical, or painful) and relevant, and also helped me connect with my coworkers. I highly recommend sharing both here and in your group/team message channel random & interesting things you learned today with the #TIL tag.

Learned to spin dopa star from cyrus, who traveled to spend some time with his parents, who work at a college near my village.

he gifted his dopa star to us.

I found out that reading 900 wpm and actually comprehending what you are reading is actually possible and not that difficult at all.

Plumbing together stuff so that the files from a service that can only push to sftp server end up delivered in a Dropbox folder.

I've read the adverserial attack paper, and I'm currently implementing a captcha based on images that have masks on them so that any LLM agent with a visual model will classify it wrong.

The idea is to use something like a slider that shows different images combined with a memory task, like "find out the pair of images" and then offer maybe a text input field where the user has to write 1,2,3 or something similar with the image numbers to pass the captcha.

The tldr is that I'm abusing the famous panda image that's classified as a gibbon as a technique to build a bot captcha.

I am exploring various levels of prompting in Github Copilot at Org, Repo and Personal level.

Think of it as an exploration manual.

Messed with Remix for the first time after seeing Shopify's Hydrogen sites. Previously only used Next.js.

Syncthing-Fork, the primary Android app for Syncthing, isn't exactly reliable anymore. TLDR a new completely unknown dev has taken over maintenance and doesn't communicate well; it's probably not reliable without checking if someone has recently audited the source code.

https://forum.syncthing.net/t/does-anyone-know-why-syncthing...

I am working on layouting library(inspired by the concepts behind Clay). There are two modes in which these things operate - immediate mode where you recreate everything anew for every frame, or retained mode where you create everything only once and then mutate the existing state for every frame and render only the differences.

HTML DOM uses retained model as it would be unimaginable to completely throw out the entire DOM and rebuild it anew with every frame. But React, Vue and other libraries use immediate mode to communicate with HTML DOM. They might internally have retained mode, but in the end they only perform mutations based on their internal differences.

So the whole web ui is layer upon layer of immediate, retained and hybrid modes all talking to each other. Now imagine how much wasted resources all of this layering implies :)

Another interesting fact is that when you have opacity or translucency in web ui, the browser render the background elements off canvas and uses it as background for the element with the opacity in order to avoid issues with various elements seeping through in many unexpected ways.

tl;dr this topic has been thoroughly discussed in here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYFBOIr6n_s

Google Earth Engine's Foundation model via the ITU's seminar! This thing is incredible!

Went for a walk today.

Found a $100 bill in the grass. No-one nearby to think it might belong to them.

Duckdb can read in json, so you can dump kafka messages into a file and filter with SQL

Started learning about ollama with a goal to setting up some kind of self-hosted LLM.

replaced the broken spring on an ABANA style treadle hammer.

breaking it in the first place was more fun

That exporting an svg from Illustrator and dropping into Fusion as a sketch is not a very wise approach - the scale is completely off! DXF is the way to go, keep your units in mm across the workflow.

I've not used any CAD tools in a significant way in nearly three decades - all very familiar and yet not at the same time. Form-Z and ArchiCAD were my bread and butter back then, despised AutoCAD but here I am back in the Autodesk realm again with Fusion :-(

I found out it's easy to write Swift/Appkit apps without the dumpster fire that is Xcode! It turns out it's really easy to do it with good old `make`.

I found git worktree today.

nixos docker container where a non-root user can install packages

Adding arbitrary raw UDP connections to my browser based web tool.

DBSCAN for grouping locations. Well, still slow...

I'm sick of using React for personal projects so I've been building a lightweight, functional, and minimalistic reactive web framework. Turns out there are a lot of decisions that go into something like this, it truly is an iceberg of complexity. It creates plenty of enjoyable problems to think about though

tweeks.io let's you edit any website.

Where and how Cursor store all its workspaces, chats, prompts, thoughts, context, completions, tool calls, searches, schemas, and images:

"Cursor Mirror" Anthropic Skill and Python Sister Script:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46629604

cursor-mirror skill: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/cursor-...

cursor_mirror.py script: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/cursor-...

DATA-SCHEMAS.yml schema map: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/cursor-...

PR-CURSOR-MIRROR-GENESIS.md pr description: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/PR-CUR...

cursor-chat-reflection.md session log: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...

I-BEAM-CHARACTER.yml a spirit familiar embodying Cursor's soul: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/cursor-...

IMAGE-GALLERY.md analysis of images dropped into Cursor chats, their context, and meaning: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/cursor-...

>Note: This gallery contains descriptions, analysis, and context — not the actual images. The images live in Cursor's workspace cache. The point: cursor-mirror can find them, the Read tool can see them, and I-Beam can narrate their significance within the conversation where they appeared. Image archaeology!

you can now use windows apps on linux without emulation: winehq.org

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Published an edit today (post dated in Nov. but I've rewritten it 5x now) on my tutorial to use llama3.2:3b to generate fine tuning data to train tinyllama1.1b https://seanneilan.com/posts/fine-tuning-local-llm/ It took a while to figure out that when I made llama3.2 generate json, it didn't have enough horsepower to generate training data that was varied enough to successfully fine tune llama1.1b! Figured that out :) Something you never learn with the bigger models. Every token costs something even if it's a little bit.