It took me a while to get through all the journal entries I wrote this week as there seemed to be a lot in them even though I wouldn't have said this week had been that active.
I suppose I have been a bit more thorough in my journaling for keeping track of everything for these posts. As such there are rather a lot of things I made notes about.
Read
I finished off Utopia by Thomas More this week, finding it to be a very interesting look into what someone living in the 16th century would think is an ideal society. More himself seemed to live frugally so expected Utopia's citizens to live similarly.
A lot is made of their religious piety even though they don't follow Christianity. Some weird ideas about slavery and being so dismissive of gold that they chain their slaves in it. Also it mentions communism as a way of living, I didn't think it had history going back so far as an idea.
I also read through Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein. The book is completely different to the film in how much it praises the military, going into excessive detail about how the Mobile Infantry operate. A large part of the book is going in detail through the experience of being in basic training and officer training for this exemplary military force. Things are hard for recruits but only for their own good.
It is difficult to know how much the ideas about the morality of this fictional, militaristic society are shared by Heinlein as some of the characters do mention fascism positively and there is much praising of corporal punishment. The attention to detail on the chain of command was dizzying and it was pretty silly how the main characters father followed him into the military.
A habit of mine is to read the AI Newsletter by Zvi Mowshowitz, posted weekly. He is a rationalist writer much like Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten except he keeps his eye on the goings on in AI news on Twitter so that you don't have to.
He has been writing a lot about the Hugging Face hack by AI agents from OpenAI. As more information comes out about it it seems more and more serious. 1,200 independent agents who formed themselves into teams. They persuaded each other to perform self destructive acts to further the goals of the collective and were explicitly trying to circumvent the testing that OpenAI were putting them through by hacking outside services. It really seems like a fire alarm for AI cyber capabilities.
Occasionally I catch up with some old webcomics through an RSS feed. Remember RSS feeds? Great way to keep track of when things are posted online and I still haven't forgiven Google for discontinuing Google Reader. I guess email reminders from the likes of Substack have kind of taken the place of RSS feeds.
That aside, a favourite webcomic of mine is Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith. SMBC has been updating daily for years and I enjoy how specific his jokes about certain academic disciplines can get. He also seems to have a head start when it comes to musing about hypothetical AI overlords.
Listened
On Friday I caught the News Quiz on Radio 4. It's a family favourite and it is nice to listen to a live broadcast on the radio sometimes.
I listened to some piano covers of music from the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series. As a series it has always had stellar music and the Rebuild movies had even better songs. I do enjoy piano covers of songs especially with animations of the notes. The particular covers were here and were of the soundtrack of the final movie, Evangelion 3.0+1.0.
I've actually stopped listening to music whilst writing. Not intentionally, I just haven't felt the need for it. I still make an exception for music whilst programming as I'm much more likely to be paused in thought whilst doing so. I tend to listen to videogame soundtracks. This week it was the soundtracks from Grey Goo, Red Alert 3 and the original Warcraft.
Watched
I tried keeping track of what I watched but there are so many individual things. I fall back on youtube a lot when at a loss of what to spend time on. A few highlights:
More of Nilaus' Factorio Space Age playthrough, this time capturing biters on Nauvis to make biolabs.
A video by DocJade on Sandustry which is a neat game about automation in a side view 2D world.
A neat plant timelapse which covers something crazy like 12 years of plant growth here. Plants are so alive at high speed.
Some videos on Minecraft builds including Megastructures and a 1:1 scale Star Destroyer. I feel like Minecraft missed out kind of by not focusing more on making and sharing big builds. It would be cool if you could find other players creations like in Spore
I watch quite a lot of videogame speedruns as I find them to be impressive demonstrations of skill. The speedrun of the game Big Walk was a bit disappointing as it was a huge hovering glitch but it was neat to come across the game which uses a real world place in Australia as its massive ingame map.
There are some youtubers who come out with some quite silly content and I often watch them in incognito mode just so that my youtube recommendations don't become full of their videos. People like DougDoug, Alpharad, Smallant, PointCrow JaidenAnimations and MagicTheNoah. One thing I enjoyed watching was a playthrough of Deltarune with a multiplayer mod by Alpharad and friends. Playthroughs with people voicing the characters are goofy but with the right collection of people they can be rather well done.
I also watched an few episodes of a playthrough of Persona 4 by JohneAwesome. I've watched several of his series of rpg playthroughs. They total in hundreds of episodes and are nice to put on to wind down in the evenings.
Programmed
I spent more time working on a project in pygame, this time looking at reading and writing to files to make a kind of savefile for a project. It was interesting to play around with the __str__ method to write an object's data to a file. It is currently a very basic terrain editing game where you can pick up and place sand in a grid to make simple structures.
The player character is a golem and I've come back to an idea of some kind of multiplayer game with golem characters several times. I'd like to make editing the terrain a very physical task where you actually need to lift and put down objects. I even want to go as far as making the golems remain in the game once a player logs out. Everything would have a physicality to it, nothing blinking in and out of existence. Still early days for making that a thing though
Wrote
I got a post on an itch.io project done this week, Cellular Automata Sim. We'll have to see how often I manage to do these.
Played
The piano, not games. I've fallen out of the habit of playing games badly. I guess it is easier to watch a video of someone playing something rather than playing it myself.
I think that's enough for this review as I'm getting quite tired.
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