This post covers the period Monday June 11 to Sunday June 17. Read it to become rich, yawn at Lisp and Emacs, yearn to run free on the wide open plains and to learn Kung Fu. Not ambitious at all.
Front door nearby De Waal Park, in Cape Town. Photo taken on Sunday by GOU#1, age 12.
View of the False Bay from the Helderberg Nature Reserve.
The work part of the week flew by.
(I think this is the reason for the shortness of this post. As is often the case, we start with journal stuff, then nerd stuff and, hidden at the end, some backyard philosophy stuff.)
Dear diary
The weekend part on the other hand started with a welcome-back-braai (HI MOM!) on Friday, followed by a sublime oxtail potjie on Saturday and concluded today with a sublime long(ish, by my standards as always) run in the morning (showing a little solidarity with the Comrades participants whilst not completely busting my barefoot-style-acclimatising feet and ankles) plus Helderberg stroll and lunch, and is now ending with a WHV writing session.
(Right after the nerd news, there’s running and backyard philosophy. You can start wherever you like.)
Nerd News
The Weekly Nerd News Network (WNNN) wanted to bring the following points under your attention:
Emacs 26.1, the first major release since September 2016, when 25.1 came out, happened on May 28. Although Emacs reached perfection (and sentience, some say) a few decades ago, this new version does include improvements such as native line numbering for the VIM refugees and buttery smooth scrolling on X11 (read the very entertaining story behind this).
PyTorch (my favourite deep learning tool by far) and Caffe are merging. This is amazing because while PyTorch is some of the most dynamic and flexible deep learning software you can pay with, Caffe runs on your telephone. You’ll be able to fine-tune your deep network on PyTorch, and then click a button (or type some obscure incantation, probably) to get that network in a highly efficient compiled form on any embedded device or scaled up to run on your cloud. Although apparently not possible, this really does feel like free lunch!
Reunion
In Weekly Non Nerd News (WNNN), an old friend came to visit all the way from Omaruru, an occasion which served as the happy excuse for a mini-reunion at my place.
We’re getting back on track with the WHVs friends!
In the hardly started tradition of writing blog posts in music-backed focus blocks, I have my “upbeat thinking” playlist teed up and ready to go. The outline of this post formed itself as a Real Bullet List(tm) in my Emacs about an hour ago.
Let’s go.
They grow up so fast
Theory of Mind, or ToM, is an important mental capability that we use to model and predict the thoughts and desires of fellow humans.
Impression of AfrikaBurn 2018 by the Tall Philosophical Neighbour, aka DJ Fiasco, aka Super Hanz.
As we were walking back from the ice truck to the BURNIVERSITY, our home away from home, one of our newly-made Canadian friends said:
Albert is burning really hard.
Albert (name subtly changed to protect the innocent), who by that time had presented his first improv theater workshop at our camp, had struck me as a brilliant and already open-minded human being.
Matters have started heating up around here with the final preparations for a pretty intense project that is expected to launch in about a week’s time. I would prefer saying more about it after the launch, because reasons.
I’m mentioning it here as explanation for the paucity of this post, and just in case a near-future post manages to be slightly late or even absent.
More specifically, we started in Giant’s Castle, the place of no internet mentioned in the previous edition of the WHV, and also the subject of that post’s main image, but we spent the largest part of the week at Cathedral Peak.
Due to it having been holiday and all, the rest of this post will follow the trusty old bullet list form.
Winter is coming, somewhere on the R44 between Betty’s Bay and Gordon’s Bay.
Wisdom from the Twitters
Let me start this week’s edition with something that a friend forwarded, quite ironically, from the dark underbelly of the internet, also known as “twitter”:
Daily activities to avoid:
- Consuming endless (news) feeds - Discussion w/ anyone with a big ego - Thinking without pen & paper - Arguing on Twitter - Mindlessly saying yes to meetings