tinker.ph

my hypertext journal + learning in public
© 2024 Marc Obaldo
  • 15,663,506 keys ⌨️
  • 5,327,404 clicks 🖱️
  • 174.04km mouse 📏
  • 2y6w5d5h45m39s 🆙
  • 6.72TB down 📉
  • 575.37GB up 📈

  1. A modern gameshow featuring tech CEOs?

    I came across this old video featuring @pmarca on a computer quiz show and thought: wouldn’t it be entertaining to have a modern version of this game show featuring current tech CEOs/founders?

    Assuming the topics are spread across a wide variety of science topics from computers to physics, who do you think would win? I think contests like these favor either the booksmart or the true generalist. Elon Musk would win regardless of who you ask - redditors and the media who despise him think his intelligence is nil and he’s only capable of speaking about things, while engineers who have actually worked with him would think it’s because of the latter.

    *I still haven’t figured out a good workflow for embedding tweets from Obsidian to markdown for Astro, but at least <blockquote> works for now.

  2. funtwo - Canon

    This is one of the most iconic videos of the early YouTube days. Couple that with the typical emotional-sounding Korean/Japanese sentences when translated to English, you get a caption that evokes a lot of nostalgic memories for me. Watching this video reminds me of coming home from school, loading up the internet via 56k dial-up, later on DSL, and waiting minutes before I could watch a single video end-to-end.

    The golden guitar with the brilliance coming from behind the invisible dragon’s eye, as if the god of music had come down and said, “I’ll show you what canon the god is playing.”

    The top comment by funtwo also highlights early internet culture:

    Wearing a hat to hide hair that sticks out. It was posted on a Korean site called Mule, but a few months later the video spread all over the world. In December 2005, an anonymous YouTube account called guitar90 uploaded the video under the title guitar. (We still don’t know who the uploader is) (Fun2 does not believe that this person stole the video. The early Internet video culture was an atmosphere where anyone could spread the video with a vague concept of copyright.)

  3. Moving from clicky to silent keys

    Part of the reason why I wanted to switch keyboards was because a bunch of my switches were already acting up. Keys like 5, Y, 9, and shift would occasionally chatter, leading to a ton of issues while coding.

    I’ve never used silent switches in the past, and they seemed attractive due to the fact that my mic picks up a lot of keyboard sounds if I’m not using a program that has built-in noise cancellation. I just switched to TTC Frozen Silent V2’s, and now they’re super silent except for the spacebar. I’ll find time to tinker with my keyboard eventually and figure it out.

    Here’s what they sound like:

  4. Capturing human intent in self-driving vehicles

    Personally, it seems wrong not take human intent (both inside and outside the vehicle) 100% out of the equation in the future of vehicles. For instance, FSD already has various selectable driving modes. It would be great if future AV’s automatically drove in chill mode if a passenger was feeling nauseous. Even if we’re not driving them anymore, there’s still people surrounding the vehicles.

    These series of tests by @edgebase411 perfectly capture what I’m talking about. It seems inconclusive, though, but we will probably get confirmation if this was part of the training or not sooner or later.

  5. Remember WhatPulse?

    I grew up in the nerdy corners of IRC and I remember WhatPulse was a huge thing back then. It’s essentially a keylogger, except instead of being used for malicious purposes, it just displayed a leaderboard of the top typers and mouse clickers. Being on the leaderboard somehow gave you street cred on the servers and channels that you joined, because it indicated you were one of the active users. Now, it’s branded as Productivity analytics for [...]. The site and apps are filled with all these charts and heatmaps of your keyboard, mouse, and application usage.

    I’ve been wanting buy a new keyboard, and haven’t decided on a layout yet. I recently installed WhatPulse again just to track my keypresses. I have this irrational fear of losing my F keys, and I really just wanted to validate whether I use them enough to justify the F-row or not. I’ll be using it for the next ~30 days and hopefully it can give me enough insight.