What did you learn last week?

I learned that my dad isn't my father. He didn't even know he wasn't my father. My mom passed away a few years ago and took this secret to the grave with her.

I took an Ancestry.com DNA to try to answer the question of: "what, in my ancestry, if anything, results in me not being able to tan well at all?" (compared to my mother/father). In doing so, I was also greeted with another surprise: my mother happened to do one of these tests herself! She showed up on my list of matches. This made it really easy to determine who all was on her side via the "shared matches" feature — you can see a list of names/usernames of people who have opted in to this feature and share some DNA with you.

This meant that it was very easy to distinguish who was on my (biological) fathers side.

I'm cool with it, though it's an itch I'm insatiably trying to scratch. Oddly enough, someone who I share a considerable amount of DNA with has an uncle who worked in the same town as my mother did the year I was conceived — otherwise, the entire family has no relation to the region my mom hung around in that year (or any prior year). However, for all my fruitful digging (and I'm usually very good at the finding-people-on-internet part), I cannot turn up any solid email address or phone number for the guy. Coincidentally, I can see his old law office from my patio, and he lives a few blocks away from my partner.

World is weird.

For tech things that I learn and want not to "forget" I create a snippet here: https://www.codrut.pro/snippets/

Last week was:

- Git refined diff output: https://www.codrut.pro/snippets/git-refined-diff-output/

- Test for Emacs compiler warnings: https://www.codrut.pro/snippets/test-for-emacs-compiler-warn...

Last week felt like I finally understand how webauthn and passkeys work - now my auth server has a "passwordless" login flow https://github.com/authcompanion/authcompanion2

I learned that it's ok to be working a job or on something just because it can be stable and it pays the bills. I think I've looked to work maybe too much for purpose, and if you're not working for yourself it's going to be very hard to find fulfillment when doing that.

So basically learned to be ok with not seeing work as a purpose driver for me at the moment.

I've been learning a lot, fast, by trying to build out the same (very simple) full-stack web application in using different frameworks. Different backends, different frontends and different databases. Admittedly, I've been doing this for slightly more than one week. It's been a lot of fun, I must admit. It's interesting to see the different quality levels in documentation, availability of help on StackOverflow, and tooling.

I'm not approaching it with any real goal other than to see how some other frameworks work but it feels very worthwhile.

I learned that I put my faith and trust in some people who were never sincere and were simply using me.

Sometimes you flock to someone because you see them being kind, considerate, and overall a strong leader.

It turns out that some people know how to fake these qualities. They’ll use you, and while you look up to them, they see you as a pawn in a chess game.

Assuming that people make mistakes and everyone actually just means “well” or has good intentions, it’s extremely naive. People will sell you that shit and take advantage of you.

I got gaslighted enough times and finally saw what was happening.

I've been trying to learn how to properly use Twitter to market my startup, and I found out that hashtags are better than cashtags when tweeting about stocks. That is, #AAPL is better than $AAPL.

This is the reverse of what I had expected because there seems to be vastly more people using cashtags but my theory is that 1) people still search for hashtags and 2) more volume means your tweet is visible for less time.

However, the best is obviously mixing them. I have a thread during premarket trading hours where I discuss stocks that the algorithm has decided is interesting and I'll print out the current score using hashtags, but use cashtags for quick discussion on stocks.

Example here: https://twitter.com/0xsmcn/status/1568155410191851521

I learned that Stable Diffusion can read! It's called a "typographic attack". https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/08/typograph...

For example, this site lets you create variations on an image that you upload: https://47725.gradio.app/

Feed it an image of text (type text in a paint program and save as PNG), and it seems to understand some words. https://i.imgur.com/aXELmHo.png

I learned that in SwiftUI if you don’t want a view to re-render when one of its properties changes, but you need it to have that property/state because it needs passing to children, you can just make it a regular variable without the @PropertyWrapper.

Seems pretty obvious in hindsight!!

I learned not to trust any home services contractors' word. Have been left out to dry by 3 of them in one week after confirming appointments a day or two before.

On the flipside, I learned how not to paint walls, i.e. learned doing it the wrong way.

I learned a sump-pump advertised to pump 500 gal water per hour will take 3-4 days to pump the muck out of my swimming pool in 4-5 days, i,.e. not to trust those ratings.

I learnt to double check that an image will actually work on my device. Tried flashing a newer version of DD-WRT to a router I was using as a wireless bridge. That device is now an ugly paperweight and I have two computers without internet.

I learned that my favorite pizza place, that I've been disappointed with lately, is getting a lot of 1 star ratings from folks these days. Guess I'm not the only one disappointed.

It's a huge bummer. It took a while to find a good option!

Last week I learned that Sextus Empiricus argued that learning is impossible.

I saw a man with a device similar to a gameboy, it was a M8 Tracker. He showed a little and talked about music trackers. As a person far from music production, my mind was blown away. All week I searched on youtube everything about: Music Trackers(M8, Renoise, Milky Tracker, SunVox), Ableton, VSTs, Pure Data, Touch Designer, Synthesizers, etc I don't know what to do with this information, but it seems I will have a new hobby.

Stereo Reconstruction

It's the algorithm(s) for how to compute a depth map when you have images from two cameras spaced some distance apart (for e.g., our eyes). It's gotten really good recently and it's fascinating on a technical level. Check out this YT video/playlist if interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hr6xpOU-uw

Also, great question! Should do it every week.

The special software we're using for automation in the print industry switched to TypeScript with the last major release.

I finally found the time to get into that and wrote my first two scripts with TypeScript and the overall new system to do scripting.

Still struggling with the finer bits, but access to npm et al. really helps with getting done what needs to be done without reinventing the wheel.

Writing notes from this amazing 11 part series on anime layouts/storyboarding > https://note.com/masuyama56/m/m94192fe5c85e

even run through google translate it's better than some courses I've paid for. that 2x2 grid is a game changer alone.

I created 3 projects with Javascript. Maintained my C language project. Learn about infrastructure, aws and kubernetes. Continued my fintech and stock trading learning. Experienced an entrepreneur challenge with focus that is required to continue evolving a project, while facing people challenges.

Discussed with friends regarding economics.

Became alot more knowledgeable about using Jira and our clients expectations

Bookmarklets haha I didn't even know they existed(was always using tampermonkey and such), in addition adjusting html on the fly for our logging system

*13 days is a long week, next time you put your hand up for OT, specify that you meant either day, not both xD

Turns out it's pretty easy to do a multiple long day fast if you spend a few weeks cutting out carbs first

From a comment here yesterday I learned the [2n] [2n+1] array layout for a binary tree is also known as the "Etyzinger" layout.

https://algorithmica.org/en/eytzinger#the-eytzinger-layout

I learned that S3 buckets don’t have a concept of directories, even though a lot of clients make it look like they do. It is possible and valid to store an object such as

/foo/bar

Without /foo existing.

This can cause problems in certain circumstances. Beware.

Found an answer to this problem

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/66442643

which I detail at the end of the thread

I learnt that api gateway templates don't have a good stringify function. You can turn a string into json and do stuff with it, but you can't write it back without having your own function for it

More webgl / three.js. There seems to be a lot to learn. Starting to look into shaders. It’s hard because my math sucks and alot of it is maths, albeit basic matrix calculations and geometry.

I learnt how to backup data from Prometheus stored in a Persistent Volume in Kubernetes. many ways of doing this but the one I found backs up a tar to a bucket, which is pretty convenient.

Sometimes you know that uou are not the problem, but your response is a habbit and the habbit is the reason that you experience the feeling of having a problem.

The union

Went through The Art of Prolog and Prolog starts clicking on.

Dig dive into OpenStreetMap ecosystem by reading weeklyOSM archives.

[1] : https://weeklyosm.eu

I finally understood the difference between references and pointers and now the reason for Box pointers in Rust makes more sense.

Pumkin pie is not made of pumpkin, rather butter nut squash… why???

Grafana and InfluxDB