S.T.A.L.K.E.R was a game I always loved but was never good at. I’ve bounced off it many times over the past 17 years because I’m not good at games, regardless of how much I love them. I have seen almost the entire game, from my bed behind my good friend S4R1N while he sat at the computer and played through on the highest difficulty. But finally I sat down to complete it and it has left me with more thoughts and feelings and respect than I know how to deal with.
The 80/20 rule in software development says that the final 20% of a project will take 80% of the total time to build.
Algorithmic tools are designed to make life easier. The new raft of AI systems is a great example of this; tools for translation, image creation, text generation, and more that allow laypeople to do a whole bunch of stuff they never could before with ease and simplicity.
Reccies should satisfy the following criteria:
An understanding of the recommender and recomendee’s contexts. Personal experience with the recommendation. Experience with relevant alternatives. Without this they’re about as useful as tits on a bull.
A friend asking for “good industrial tunes for while I’m filing TPS reports” is an easy suggestion to make if you both go to the same gigs. You have shared history in the relevant topic, you know the context (genre, purpose, etc), and you’re probably going to suggest stuff that you’ve at least heard.
It’s weird to be writing about a review of a 2023 yearly goal when it’s only September but I’ve surprised myself and completed this one by the end of the third quarter. While last year was the year of reading, I wanted to set my focus on something new this year and I picked gaming. It used to be one of my biggest passions until I was about 22 and the onset of schizophrenia coupled with the anhedonia-inducing antipsychotics really curbed my love of the pastime.
Understanding context is incredibly important. Without it, you might end up saying the following:
“You have depression? You should try meditation.” “I’ve just started, but I think we should rewrite the whole frontend in React.” “Hotels are too expensive, we should make an app where people can rent out their houses instead.” On their own, these aren’t bad thoughts to have; we’ve been presented with a problem and our natural inclination is finding solutions.
Recently I posted about GIS and why I love it, and I hope one of the major takeaways is that GIS is a field based on mapping abstractions onto the real world and a great way to quickly discover the complexities and difficulties inherent in doing so. This post is a lot wider than GIS, but we’ll use it as a leaping off point.
Coastline Paradox One of my favourite examples of why mapping abstractions to reality is Hard™ is the coastline paradox1.
I’ve always loved Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a branch of technology. I’ve worked with them in a professional capacity for about 8 years and had a focus on highly specialised data analysis and manipulation using GIS for over 5 of them. Of course, describing it succinctly and interestingly is one of the unanswered hard questions in the field. And getting non-GIS IT people to understand what makes it such a specialised sub-field of computer-booping can be difficult, especially when you want to capture the vagaries and complexity inherent in the subject.
A lot of people, especially developers, that I know or have worked with have issues keeping track of what they need to do and how they’ve spent their time. We have tools galore like Jira and GitLab that are supposed to manage our tasks but never really hit the spot just right. Especially in environments like consultancies where you need to track time against projects and clients to ensure correct billing this can get even harder.
I’ve talked before about making personal computing more personal and did this in a fun way with my Saitek Flight Switch Panel [1, 2] and have being enjoying it greatly. There’s been another part to this too.
Since last year I’ve been hunting through local verge/bulk rubbish collections for old monitors and found four to add to my setup. A week ago I finished my collection and set up all the cables and adaptors and now my desk looks like the following:
I’ve been rocking a mohawk as a haircut for over seven (7) years now and it always gets a heap of positive comments. Random people always come up to me to say “hi” and tell me they love my hair and families and tourists ask if I can pose for photos with them. I originally did it as a way to get over my social anxiety; I was always afraid and paranoid people were staring at me and having a mohawk meant I knew they were but for cool reasons.