nhuck

I am really enjoying this book "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler.

In it, he discusses that proper reading of suitable material should involve more than acquisition of new information.

Proper reading involves struggling to understand new concepts and applying those new concepts to new and old.

The latest version of hardcover IETF RFCs have gutter margins! They are finally in a state that I'm happy with!

They are now available for purchase!
physicalfiles.com

Yeah it's definitely useful for starting new projects. I've found it helpful for things like

- "Write the CMake file"
- "Write a GitHub CI yml"
- "Write tests for this class"
- "Update this function with X"

It really shines if you can give it a straightforward task with a narrow scope.

My trick is to write out a project skeleton with interfaces then ask for implementations.

I.e. most of the design work falls to you, but the implementation is done by the LLM.

I've also found that the model matters a lot. The paid versions of ChatGPT and Claude are necessary for bigger projects.

I've been learning to paint!

I see a lot of progress in these photos!

My RFC printing store is finally up and running!

physicalfiles.com

We are selling hardcover RFCs.

We currently have 5 RFCs listed:
- RFC 4271: BGP
- RFC 3261: SIP
- RFC 3550: RTP
- RFC 2328: OSPF
- RFC 5280: X.509

I added some color to my math animation!

This is with cycles.

For the second question it's complicated because I didn't know what I was doing.

I click a button in blender which uploads the .blend file to S3. The render farm downloads and renders that file.

It sounds like a universal scene description file would be less error prone.

$4

More animations from last night!

These are combinations of the sphere embedding R^2 -> R^3 with different wave patterns R^2 -> [-1, 1] scaling the radius

$0.00016 per second per GPU with 4 GPUs for 1050 seconds of execution time

I've been playing with my serverless render pipeline. I rendered this animation for $0.67 in 15 minutes.

I bought a used copy of Blaise Pascal's book.

I found a bonus item inside! Someone's homework from 60 years ago!

I hope they got an A!

My computer kept overheating while rendering Blender animations.

Instead of giving up, I built a GPU-enabled serverless render farm on runpod + GCS.

It took a few weekends to create the full pipeline.

I present to you: a very mediocre animation of the moon's orbit.

Exactly.

Toddlers develop a symbol for "thing exists but is not present" around age 2.

It's not a far jump to "thing does not exist but maybe could".

Those two symbols are the basis for human planning.

Early humans probably benefited a lot from cooperative manipulation of imagined scenarios.

This book asserts that invention is an evolutionary process created by market and social factors.

This process expresses itself on the medium of humans like a painter expresses himself on a canvas.

I'm reading about petri nets, they're super cool!

If you can understand the 2nd example, you'll understand why they're cool.

The idea is that a square cannot execute until all incoming circles contain dots.

Incoming dots must equal outgoing dots.

Super useful for distributed computing!

Yeah, I've reached out to the IETF Trust before about this. They said I'm free to print things so long as I don't use their logo.

My main issue is that the RFCs are 8.5x11 by default. That page size makes an unpleasant book.

They probably have them printed out somewhere.

They were originally for personal use, but I'm considering making them available for purchase.

The conversion process needs a little more work before I'd feel comfortable selling them.

That said, I'm not sure which RFCs to focus on. Let me know if you have any suggestions for specific RFCs.

IETF is a standards organization that governs internet protocols.

An RFC is a document specifying a protocol.

These documents are provided in a digital-only format. I am converting them into hardcover books.

So far I've converted these RFCs:

OSPFv2
SIP
RTP
BGP-4
X.509 PKI
SMTP
NTPv4
TLSv1.3

Wow! This is seriously impressive.

Do you have plans to use this as a component in a larger project?

linux/arch/arm/lib/backtrace-clang.S at master · torvalds/linux Linux kernel source tree. Contribute to torvalds/linux development by creating an account on GitHub.

I'm a little late to the party, but this reminds me of dumping stack saved registers during kernel panics for clang-compiled ARM kernels.

There's a fun trick to find the function prologue by parsing the bytecode of the instruction before the saved LR.

github.com/torvalds/lin...

I significantly improved the printing process for my IETF RFC books!

They are much easier to read now! Check out the new vs old.

I've been playing with GIS. I made an elevation mesh of Central Park.

Apparently NASA has a public S3 bucket containing their satellite topography data.

www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/instrum...

Interesting. Advertising an effective interest rate seems intentionally confusing.

If I need a loan, why not advertise the interest rate that makes the computations most accurate?

My current software pipeline is fairly involved. It requires reflowing paragraphs to fit the new column width.

It also tracks section anchors after resizing and updates the table of contents.

The screenshot is an application that I wrote in Rust :D

I looked at XML and PDF before writing this.

Only newer RFCs are available in XML. IIRC XML is unavailable for RFCs before 2016.

PDF is unsuitable because I specifically want 6"x9" page size. Scaling results in unreadable text sizes.

I'm working on scaling my IETF RFC printing process!

Starting with a TUI application for attaching formatting data to text files.

I believe that all IETF RFCs should be available in a high quality hardcover book format!