Sometimes I don’t feel like working hard. I’ll procrastinate. Everyone does. I’ll fiddle with small stuff around the edges of the project. Bikeshedding. A trick I use to snap out of it is to “look back from the future”. I’ll pretend that I’m me but it’s the end of the year and I’m looking back at the achievements for the year. At all the projects completed. I will want to see the current project done, and more. If it’s not done, I’d be most disappointed. I’ll be asking hard questions, like: “Why the hell not? What were you doing exactly?” ...

I’ve been writing novellas for my kids for the last few months. The writing is fine. The stories, fine. Not mind blowing. The real trick is personalization. Telling stories about the kids as characters in places they know with our inside jokes. They are personalized stories. Written for them. This is key. It makes up for the so-so stories and writing. It’s a lot of work. It’s a heavy collaboration, a lot of careful specification by me of specific details to include. ...

I saw this on HN this morning: Show HN: I wrote a modern Command Line Handbook It’s currently number 3 with 63 comments and 245 upvotes. Nice! It’s for a book on how to use the command line on the big 3 OS. It’s a short, focused, basic handbook. I love those. I love making those. And I’m so happy that the tech community is still supporting them. And interesting in them. ...

I have a hobby as a quake archivist. It’s fun for two reasons: the nostalgia and the hunt (e.g. variable rewards). Many files I seek to archive are lost. They maybe in the deep web somewhere, or they may be in peoples personal archives, but unless I can surface them, they are essentially “lost”. Lost to the archives at least. I was thinking, soon the AI models will be good enough to generate list artefacts on demand. ...

Someone was asking me about investing the other day. I gave my normal spiel about not picking stocks and instead picking countries/economies and buying indices. I also said to stick with what you know. If you know property (she’s a real estate agent) then invest in property, you probably have some edge. The conversation flowed between investing ourselves and her kids starting to invest in stocks. I made the important observation that investment goals matter a lot and that the investment goals of hers will be different from her kids. ...

I was thinking about to early game modding. I made the most and best progress when I “just made stuff”. If in doubt, the second best thing to do would be to complete tutorials, e.g. coding tutorials, mapping tutorials, etc. The worst thing to do ever was to print/read manuals. There are two clear cases in my memory of doing this: Printing the DEU editor manual/guide (on my dot matrix printer) Print the Quake III Arena Shaders manual (in colour!). I never read them all the way through, and they never helped. ...

I was talking to someone the other day about how to earn some extra cash. I said something like: There is information in your head that is valuable to other people, so valuable that they would happily pay you to learn it. Even over zoom. All you have to do is figure out what information and what people. It’s true, but challenging advice. It’s the “All you have to do is figure out what information and what people” piece that is so hard. ...

I drink 3-4 coffees a day, sometimes tea (earl grey) as well. I was thinking, is this elevating my resting heart rate? Am m I going to die earlier because of my coffee habit? I don’t think so. I checked in with o3. The short answer: At the level you describe — about 3–4 single espressos a day (≈ 180-320 mg caffeine) — there is no solid evidence that your resting heart rate will stay chronically elevated or that you will damage your heart over time, provided you are otherwise healthy, keep your blood pressure in the normal range and sleep well. ...

About 20 years ago, I experimented by adding simple neural net and genetic algorithm based agents to quake2. Here’s what I did back then: Ecosystem: Constructing a simple self-perpetuating society of adaptable agents (archived) I was thinking about that again today. It might be fun to develop a suite of mini experiments using genetic learning an neural net learning in little q2 agents. To setup little ecosystems on server processes and let them run for days and weeks and see what happens. ...

Before Quake3 was released, there were a number of Q3Test releases. It was an exciting time in 1999 from about May to about December before the final demo and retail release. Q3Test releases were made for win32, linux and mac. I was mainly a win32 and linux user at the time and getting GLX/OpenGL working on linux at that time was hard work. Anyway, during this time many mods and hacks were developed for the Q3Test. ...