Early Version

There are 26 things on the Atacama to-do list I wrote today. That doesn't count the "multi-player features" that have been asked for.

💡 it is possible that the full list will show up in a different message.

separately, there is "log into an old computer with my AWS credentials, and see if there is anything of value (other than email archives) still there".

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one game of chess tonight, against Maia (1100 rating). 🔥 it hung a bishop on move 3

I missed one move, but it missed it as well. beyond that, it was 45 moves of slowly suffocating the position.

I spent a total of 6.5 minutes on my moves, and also got to think for about 5 minutes on the opponent's moves. ⚙️ being able to efficiently use your opponent's clock time is a key chess skill 💡 the careful observer will note this is more than the roughly 3 minutes one gets in 2+1 chess

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in the NFL: Week 18 is meaningless. several teams were probably throwing ⚙️ deliberately trying to lose, either for draft position or to avoid having to play Cincinnati in the playoffs.

it would be improper for the players on the field to try to lose. but, keeping your eight best players out of the game is accepted.

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In The News: Justin Trudeau expected to resign as Prime Minister of Canada. This will not immediately trigger an election; the next planned election is in October.

🔥 the machine won't know yet why he is resigning. ChatGPT, after a search, says it is "internal party pressure" due to "policy disagreements", which says nothing.

💡 as far as I can tell, "everybody is tired of his schtick" and "Trump" might be the only two reasons.

⚔️ well, actually, the Freeland resignation ... is not a root cause. it is normal politics once a situation is over-determined.

⚙️ the infamous "every government from the COVID period is doing badly in elections" trend is also relevant.

⚙️ Fort McKay is located about 500 miles north of Calgary.

🤖 Fort McKay is a small community in northern Alberta, located about 54 kilometers north of Fort McMurray along the Athabasca River. It has historical roots as a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post and is now situated in the heart of Alberta's oil sands region. The local economy benefits significantly from nearby oil sands development, with businesses and partnerships tied to the industry, though environmental concerns remain a key consideration. Surrounded by boreal forest, the area is rich in natural beauty, and traditional activities such as hunting and fishing are still part of the community’s lifestyle. Fort McKay offers essential services, including a school, health center, and recreational facilities, while more specialized services are accessed in Fort McMurray.

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goals for the week, "professional":

• new personal website (with resume/portfolio; and also with photographs and "list of hobbies")
• Atacama / LLM integrations
• Atacama print-view tuning
• Atacama "small feature" list: database re-structuring will be at the top of the list

goals for the week, "personal":

• social events on Monday and Thursday
• get haircut 💡 not today, not Sunday; the barber shops in central Iowa are closed or overcrowded on Sundays
• additional withheld from public view

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There are some directional choices to be made about Atacama. Will I be importing content from other platforms? Is it going to support multiple users and/or multiple installations?

Some of the answers will be based around how the LLM features work. And look.

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https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5066601-senate-democrats-consider-rfk-jr/

Some Democrats said to be open to backing RFK Jr.

💡 I mostly agree with the take. RFK Jr is controversial in different ways than most of the other controversial nominees of the next administration.

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Over the past 2 months, the stock for Rigetti Computing (NASDAQ:RGTI) has gone from 1.12 to 19.02 . 🔥 and yet, quantum computing is still fake

I must assume that Google's "error-correction" paper is the driving factor. It was at 1.35 on November 20 when Google announced "AlphaQubit". ⚙️ https://blog.google/technology/google-deepmind/alphaqubit-quantum-error-correction/ 💡 AlphaQubit is nothing. It is an LLM that does a computational task very slightly better than a much simpler model, and 4.4 on December 9 when Google announced Willow ⚙️ https://research.google/blog/making-quantum-error-correction-work/ 🔥 Willow could be Big If True.

Of course, quantum computing is still fake. 💡 even with Shor's algorithm, one cannot accomplish anything useful with 49 bits in 58 microseconds But, that isn't the question for the markets. The logic is "LLMs are big, quantum computing feel similar, QED".

The question is: when will the Samaritans get off the train? I have no answers.

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football is done.

⚔️ well, actually, there is still "week 18" of the NFL, plus two more rounds of college football playoffs, and ... does the East-West game count?

it is college basketball season. much like football has done, there is too much supply for me to care about any individual game right now.

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unlike in football (where Iowa State is always the "scrappy underdog" or the "lovable loser" or "team with a great year wins the Pop-Tarts bowl"), ISU sometimes is legitimately good in basketball. 💡 both men's and women's; although this year only the men's team is possibly "legitimately good" this might be one of those years.

four of the top 6 teams in the polls are in the SEC. the other two are Duke and ISU.

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https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/page/CBBblockbuster0103/sec-men-college-basketball-dominance-auburn-tennessee-florida

ESPN describes how good the SEC has been.

although, I have one gripe. If you look at the team records (as-of 5 January), the worst home record in the conference is 8-1. The most road games any team has played is 3. 💡 this is not unique to the SEC; most major-conference basketball programs play 5 games against bad teams at home in the non-conference. it lets them sell tickets, it lets them get easy wins, and it hopefully doesn't erode the integrity of the sport too much. ⚔️ well, actually, some teams have as many as six "neutral-site games"

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goals for today:

• write the long Atacama to-do list
• laundry
• Peloton ride 🌎 the attempts to use a level to level the bike were not successful. but I think it is good enough to ride.
• shopping?
• no terminal/IDE usage until after sunset

https://lichess.org/@/ebk1976/blog/aging-in-chess/T89V532P

What made me consider this subject was watching the performance of the legendary streamer Hikaru Nakamura in the recent FIDE World Rapid and Blitz. Hikaru was showing his excellent class, but in time scrambles, would blunder wins into losses far too often. In post-game interviews on his channel, Hikaru would repeatedly tell his fans things along the line of: "I'm getting too old...I can't think in time scrambles anymore...it's not anything that will probably ever get better" He ended with the chilling statement: "I think this is the beginning of the end for me. This probed me to examine how age affected top players of earlier years, and here are the results.

⚙️ Mr. Nakamura was born in December 1987.

a link too good to pass up: https://www.righto.com/2024/12/this-die-photo-of-pentium-shows.html

In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvements over the previous processor, the Intel 486, including a faster floating-point division algorithm. A year later, Professor Nicely, a number theory professor, was researching reciprocals of twin prime numbers when he noticed a problem: his Pentium sometimes generated the wrong result when performing floating-point division. Intel considered this "an extremely minor technical problem", but much to Intel's surprise, the bug became a large media story. After weeks of criticism, mockery, and bad publicity, Intel agreed to replace everyone's faulty Pentium chips, costing the company $475 million. ... In this article, I discuss the Pentium's division algorithm, show exactly where the bug is on the Pentium chip, take a close look at the circuitry, and explain what went wrong. In brief, the division algorithm uses a lookup table. In 1994, Intel stated that the cause of the bug was that five entries were omitted from the table due to an error in a script. However, my analysis shows that 16 entries were omitted due to a mathematical mistake in the definition of the lookup table. Five of the missing entries trigger the bug— also called the FDIV bug after the floating-point division instruction "FDIV"—while 11 of the missing entries have no effect.

💡 I should have a page about the AppleVision on my new home page.

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The loss by mouse-slip is less painful than the loss by hanging ⚙️ to hang a chess piece is to make a move where it can be captured by the opponent's piece a knight in one move.

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The win by time-out (with six seconds remaining) in a position that is losing on the board is also unsatisfying.

💡 in chess, the clock is a piece.

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The loss by timeout (against 47 seconds) in a worse position (with counterplay) was also unsatisfying.

🌎 this is "bullet" chess. 2+1 time format. Two minutes on the clock, plus one second per move.

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Finally, a checkmate. With 1.9 seconds left.

He tried to flag ⚙️ to flag in chess is to lose because you run out of time me. He gave away several pieces, and then blundered checkmate.

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The "boring" nature of a chess-game opening is both a blessing and a curse.

⚔️ well, actually, there is an alternative: Fischer-Random. AKA Chess960.

🔥 I could do that. but I could also not play the Giuoco Piano and the Caro-Kann every time. ⚙️ maybe those shouldn't be primary topic status

It is a place where a well-trained player can get an advantage. But the effort to get such an advantage is almost always self-detrimental.

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A tournament. 12 rounds, 3+0.

I play an 1800. He makes no mistakes. I lose on time and on the board.

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I play a 1700. He hangs a queen. I have 45 seconds left, and do not checkmate.

💡 unlike the ELO matched play (which will quickly converge to a 50% points scored), there is no reason to believe I won't lose all 12 games here.

⚔️ well, actually, I got an "unpaired bye".

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i leave the tournament. I get a match where i thought i was winning at the end, but it never was. I missed the mate threat, and then lost on time.

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I play 1+0. I lose. The lines are simpler. But it is still very fast.

🔥 He didn't notice I hung a rook, but I did.

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I play 1+0. I lose.

💡 as a reminder, at some point the rating will stabilize at a 50% win rate.

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I play a pair of games at 1+0. One win each.

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That might conclude our broadcast day.

an infuriating read for the morning: Reform of the date of Easter

🔥 extremely low-quality Wikipedia content on this topic ⚔️ well, actually, all of the articles on lunisolar calendar topics are bad

💡 the full politics of the topic of should the ecclesiastical calendar be tied to the phase of the moon is subject to Guild Law. but, to avoid suspense, i will note that I am very much on the side of "yes, it should".

⚙️ we note for the record that, in March 2019, the equinox was March 20, 2019, 4:58 PM and the full moon was March 20, 2019, 8:43 PM (Iowa time).

💬 Shut up about the sun!

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What remains to be done on Atacama?

• adjust colors again. the current 0074D9 color for post titles is not satisfactory
• a "color tag registry" to populate help files
• "keep reading" link on the stream. 💡 there is too much work to be done still for an "infinite stream" to be helpful
• fix sigil backgrounds 💡 and, probably, fix the "sigils rotate 90 degrees when clicked" feature that the machine added but never implemented correctly
• the text in the style-picker is often an unreadable color
• adjust the "print" settings some more; the text is too spaced out

What is dependent on the "new lexer"?

• Triple-angle-brackets for multi-paragraph literal text.
• maybe making URLs a "colorblock"; only the domain need be in the running text, the full URL can be on a sidebar

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Next week I will start on the list of LLM-API powered features.

🔥 keeping excessive details about the lunisolar calendar out of published posts will be one of the features.

⚔️ well, actually, the distinction of "published" doesn't exist yet. and it may not ever exist.

⚙️ the pipeline is writer→editor→publisher.

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the Peloton seems ready to go; but there is only one way to know for sure.

the snowblower has not been repaired, and in fact still has snow on it in the garage. i will look at that soon.

Most of the Atacama things are done.

The light/dark/"high-contrast" modes are working on desktop. Links are less hostile to line-width. CSS is in CSS files.

Printing still takes way too much space. The line-spacing should be reduced. Possibly the font-size should be reduced. And the "two-column" layout often looks better in landscape mode.

The "lexer" still hasn't made it to the top of the list.

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On Android, sometimes the clickables aren't working? Possibly because the sigils are too small. No issue with this on iPhone.

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The new tags, like music, aren't documented. This is an easy fix.

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Beyond that: the main problem is that the overall feel is a mix of "my UX design" and "the machine's UX design". Both of which are bad.

It looks off somehow. My first guess is that it looks odd because there is no chrome (no navbar, no ads).

💡 also, the sigils do not always "flow" correctly in the text.

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Past that point, the goal will be "LLM tools".

But 6/6 will just discuss the lexer changes as well as UI changes.

things to-do today, Atacama department:

• refactor all the CSS files. get all the CSS out of HTML files. while doing this, make sure that everything is "adaptive": percentage of screen size, not pixel count.
• Link management. The colors of linktext need to be fixed. And links are often "very long strings that break margins".
• fix bug: if you leave high-contrast mode for light/dark mode, the sigils are not clickable.
• high-contrast mode isn't implemented properly on all the HTML templates

🔥 right now, the difficulty in navigating is a feature. one that I have no interest in removing until things like "the CSS is broken" are fixed.

things to maybe-do today, Atacama department:

• Get a better LLM "default instruction" for Claude code-generation. Including "don't write more than 20 lines of code without an explicit approval". 🔥 it's an unlimited service. 💡 not that unlimited. and, slow.
• the lexer will continue to be on this list until it isn't.
• adjustments to high-contrast mode - where should long GPT quotes be?

things to do today, non-Atacama department:

• finish leveling the Peloton bike
• glue the broken piece on the snowblower
• eat, sleep, etc.

I did not expect "find the metric hex-key set" to take 15 minutes. It did take 15 minutes, but I did find the hex-key.

🔥 without schlepping out to the shed in the snow.

🌎 it was in a plastic bin with old electronics.

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adjusting the Peloton meant moving it. Which means that the divots on the mat no longer correspond with the feet.

so I need to wait until tonight to finish adjusting the feet.

i also did the "seat post replacement" that I should have done months ago. it was painless and fast.

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preliminary indications are that the re-leveling (and general screw-tightening) will fix the scraping noise. i will find out for sure soon.

🌎 the snow-clearing was easy. 3 inches is what the snowblower can easily handle.

⚔️ well, actually, there is a repair needed to one of the battery covers. that's a separate issue.

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"print mode" (currently called "high-contrast mode") has a few issues:

• the sigils break if you go back to light/dark mode
• the widths are a hodge-podge of absolute and relative width
• Claude continues to use inline CSS too much
• there is nothing visually connecting the sigil to the text.

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so the plan will be to go through the CSS again (without the machine), make sure variables are defined in the correct place, make sure styles are defined in the correct place.

and: re-add the name of the color to the display. very valuable for grayscale printing.

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for "dark mode", the main issue is that some of the emoji aren't designed for a black background. also, link-text colors need to be tuned.

this is an easy fix, but there is an outline surrounding them now that isn't flush.

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but I am timebox-ed out of this. "fix the Peloton" is ahead of any more print-mode fixes. and, then, possibly, things other than "work on Atacama back-end".

but I will get to it either tonight or tomorrow.

"fix the file structure" is easy, but not something I can do after an hour of moving code around. "fix the two-column layout" could be easy with the machine, or it could be impossible.