February updates
Days are passing quicker now that flow is here. I’ve settled in with the change of the season.
This week I started Ellen Ullman’s Close to the machine, and it is so deeply relatable. I feel incredibly validated on a number of programmer-centric eccentricities.
I could relay many of the anecdotes here, but it seems a bit indulgent. I’ll say that my personal highlights are mentions of the true insecurity of jobs, and the sardonic grimness of programmers who stick to a legacy program for 20 years at the same job.
I’ve successfully gotten Sharkey going (as previously mentioned), that’s been running since at least early January. Learning maintenance for an instance is nice in a pastoral way almost. I can’t really describe it otherwise.
I also have tinkered with Home Assistant stuff. I can go out for an evening, and come home to the lights being on, and music playing. I’ve also had mixed success on getting my LLM server working on that. Speaking of…
I have placed one of my old HDDs w/ an Ubuntu image onto a uhh…non-personal computer. There’s an A2000 in there with 12GB VRAM, and it’s not being used for much else. Got to tinker with a number of things, including CUDA install on Linux (somewhat complicated). I also setup some systemd services, so now whisper, llama.cpp, and piper load at boot, as well as a helper service or two to expose those to Home Assistant. In all, my shit is getting pretty automated.
I’ve used this all as part of building out my home automation, but also in polishing gaps on where a business model might pop in. I think selling personalized AI to people might be a hot ticket item, at least for tech enthusiasts.
Well, I’ve been reading and watching things too. I finished up Eric Fromm’s Art of Loving. I can certainly echo what many reviewers of this book modernly say. It has some dated stuff in the front half, but the back half hits hard and good. It’s a recommend with an asterisk, being that you have to get past his armchair psych and modernly-weird gender essentialisms that clearly haven’t held water.
I played through ZeroRanger, and now I’ve been on and off with a demo Shoy sent me, it’s called Rainchaser, and it has hella polish. I actually quite enjoy bullet hells.
On the other hand, Hyper Light Breaker’s early access has been kind of a stinker. Supremely unfortunate, but I’m sure it’ll be a lot better in a few years if Preston keeps it going.
Finally, I played a few idle games I should mention. Bezerk B.I.T.s for one, is a lovely little homage to Tamagotchi and the Megaman Battle Network games. Visually, very much the latter, but effectively, virtual pet. I like it and the demo was quite a bit of content.
I also started but did not finish, The Barnacle Goose game, which is a very cutesy and absurd thing.