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.

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Welcome back friends!

(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.

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Welcome back kids!

Besides this post, which somehow turned out to be longer than I expected, my more nerdy alter ego also wrote a post titled Interactive programming with Fennel Lua Lisp, Emacs and Lisp Game Jam winner EXO_encounter 667.

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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.

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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.

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Hello there friends, welcome back!

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.

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Well hello there friends!

We have just returned from a ridiculously enjoyable holiday in The Drakensberg, or uKhahlamba in isiZulu.

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.

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I am currently in a place with no to extremely little internet. Just getting the photo above uploaded was an adventure.

I briefly debated breaking my current WHV posting streak due to exceptional circumstances, but decided against it, at least for now.

Anyways, I might have no internet, but the scenery here is phenomenal.

(It later turned out that just getting this blog post uploaded on Sunday evening was not going to happen.)

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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

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Welcome back peeps! Make yourselves at home.

It seemed that nothing much happened during most of the week, but I started writing anyway. It turns out there was slightly more than nothing much. Writing stuff down does have its perks.

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