Posts

I spent a few hours yesterday developing an evolutionary computation simulator. It’s called EvoLab: EvoLab: Browser-based neuroevolution sandbox Here’s the code project: EvoLab on GitHub It’s your classic “evolve a creature for an environment” thing. Here’s a screenshot: Back in the day I tried to develop something like this for iphone and it took weeks just to get the physics and creature working. The first working version of EvoLab was developed in a few minutes using Claude Opus. Then there were a few iterations of refining the user interface and evolutionary mechanisms. ...

It looks like Fabien Sanglard is writing a Quake Engine Black Book. This will sit along side is excellent Doom and Wolf3d engine black books: Game Engine Black Book Wolfenstein 3D Game Engine Black Book: DOOM See the series here, which includes free PDF downloads. I read his “The Book of CP-System” book, but it was not as nostalgic as the other two. He has not come out and declared the Quake book, but he’s been writing a lot about Quake recently (~4 months), for example: ...

I’ve developed some new Quake archive projects. The first is a Quake Rally archive: Quake Rally Archive This includes all releases of Quake Rally, all third-party maps, and even precursor mods and extension mods. One of the precursor mods was “Quake Kart” by Quake Command, an early quake mod group that later went on to work for Valve and work on Half-Life. Very little of Quake Kart surrives and I found it fascinating. I ended up going deep and writing a research essay on it: ...

New year, new goals. Write more. Blog posts. Monographs. Answers on forums. Write more. It’s good for you.

Building on yesterdays idea of a Quake Press, a small tech press does sound fun. I guess I did already, with SuperFastPython for Python concurrency. But other niches might be fun to explore, especially a tiny niche where I could cover it completely and move on. It’s easier if it’s motivated externally, e.g. using a tech at work, cover it at home, or a market starving for info on niche. Otherwise the “why” behind the whole enterprise has to be fabricated. ...

I’ve been thinking about mini tech books on Quake for about 15 years. My first google doc of ideas is dated 2010. I was thinking today, why not develop a “quake press” with a large suite of books over many years. What kind of books? All kinds! There could be references, e.g. quakec reference, release histories, bsp file format reference, etc. There could be code walk throughs, e.g. how do weapons work, monsters, bots, etc. There could be mod walk throughs, e.g. reaper, quakeworld, ctf, team fortress, etc. There could be interviews, e.g. mod authors, community leaders, mappers, etc. There could be tutorials, e.g. weapons, monsters, bots, etc. Each book could be high quality yet short and sweet (highly targeted), e.g. ~100 pages. ...

I read a book about Denisovans this week in the book: The Secret World of Denisovans: The Epic Story of the Ancient Cousins to Sapiens and Neanderthals It book was not bad, buy not as exciting as Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins about discovering Homo naledi. A different kind of a book, more of a general story/history of what we know. Anyway, I took away two interesting titbits. ...

I’m about half way through Nick Bostrom’s “Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World”. I love it. I don’t love the discussion/socratic sections (skip), but I love the lecture sections. Anyway, early on he talked through groups of people now/historical who don’t work as a model for what it might be like in a post-work future. Obvious and helpful. Why didn’t I think of that. I typically read books about retirement/retirees to get thoughts in this space, but that is only one of many groups. ...

My eldest son started working out at the gym this year. It’s really great! Something I tell him all the time is: …once you gain good muscle, you will keep it the rest of his life What I mean is, if he stops for some period of time then later, with modest retraining, he’ll be able to get back to the same tone/size. Or something like that. I tell him that once you gain the increased number of muscle cells, you keep them. They may shrink if you stop training, but they are there waiting to grow as soon as you start up the exercise regime again. ...

This week, I finished the book: The Gold of Troy: Story of Heinrich Schliemann and the Buried Cities of Ancient Greece It was great! Here’s a summary from gpt5.1: The Gold of Troy: Story of Heinrich Schliemann and the Buried Cities of Ancient Greece tells the dramatic story of Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy, self-taught archaeologist whose obsession with Homer’s epics drove him to search for the real Troy. The book traces Schliemann’s rise from impoverished beginnings to international fame, focusing on his excavations at Hisarlik in modern-day Turkey and his discovery of what he claimed was “Priam’s Treasure.” It explores both his groundbreaking contributions to archaeology—helping to uncover lost Bronze Age civilizations such as Troy and Mycenae—and the controversies surrounding his methods, exaggerations, and destruction of archaeological layers. Overall, the book presents Schliemann as a complex figure: visionary and passionate, yet reckless, whose legacy reshaped our understanding of ancient Greece while raising lasting ethical questions about archaeological practice. ...