• Gaming

    ๐ŸŽฎ Giving Starfield another go and itโ€™s been growing on me. There is something about letting me ease in all its systems at my own pace. It has issues but at this point I canโ€™t accept blatant thrashing of the game or Bethesda. Starfield gives you space to get into it and enjoy it. Pun intended. ๐Ÿš€

    โ†’ Tuesday March 12, 2024
  • Technology

    ๐Ÿ’พ While there is disappointment about platforms striking training data deals with AI vendors, I think we see the writing on the wall. If companies donโ€™t make such agreements, AI will be trained on public data anyway as itโ€™s been so far. At least formal deals work against the fair use defense.

    โ†’ Friday March 1, 2024
  • Casual

    ๐Ÿ““๐Ÿ’ฌ A quote often attributed to Niels Bohr or Yogi Berra:

    It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

    โ†’ Friday February 23, 2024
  • Casual

    ๐Ÿ““ For a while now, the cringy face thumbnails on Youtube โ–ถ๏ธ have the opposite effect on me to what the authors aim for - views. Even when creators that I like and follow do it. Itโ€™s so infantilizingโ€ฆ like a mass game of peekaboo. Ugh. ๐Ÿ˜‘

    โ†’ Tuesday February 20, 2024
  • Casual

    ๐Ÿ““ I value The Economist as a publication but their subscription cancellation process uses several dark patterns. ๐Ÿ™…๐Ÿปโ€โ™‚๏ธ For example, they offer you a discount for renewal (could be nice but still) and just now I had to chat with a person to cancel (who tried to offer me discounts).

    โ†’ Monday February 19, 2024
  • Technology

    ๐Ÿ’พ Conversed a bit with ChatGPT about GPU rendering pipelines. Now that I’m testing Pro, figured I’d ask it to generate a diagram as well. DALL-E has a different “brain”. Welp, I guess it makes for a nice T-shirt design… from afar.

    AI-generated diagram of a GPU rendering pipeline showing complete gibberish of connected boxes and misspelled text.
    โ†’ Friday February 16, 2024
  • Casual

    ๐Ÿฟ Bullet Train ๐Ÿš… is the right kind of silly I needed today.

    โ†’ Thursday February 15, 2024
  • Casual

    ๐Ÿ““ When I ask for a shopping list from my partner, invariably there is 1 โ€œimpossibleโ€ ingredient. Itโ€™s either not available in every store, itโ€™s sold out, or it requires next level treasure hunting skills to find the right isle. Either way - one does not simply get everything on the list. ๐Ÿ‘Œ

    โ†’ Sunday February 11, 2024
  • Casual

    ๐Ÿ“ฑ I canโ€™t believe it - I canโ€™t close all my Activity rings because of 1 stand hour, multiple days in row ๐Ÿคฆ๐Ÿปโ€โ™‚๏ธ It will break my weekly streak and most likely itโ€™s due to having the watch off charging here and there ๐Ÿ˜ก

    โ†’ Saturday February 10, 2024
  • Gaming

    ๐ŸŽฎ Finished Disco Elysium as a confused superstar cop ๐Ÿ˜Ž and a true blue moralist ๐Ÿคท๐Ÿปโ€โ™‚๏ธ Happy to have taken a bit different path as it was the second time I picked up the game. Surprisingly, the ZA/UM legal mess bugs me enough to affect how I feel about the game. Some sort of irrational guilt.

    โ†’ Thursday February 8, 2024
  • Casual

    ๐Ÿ““ It’s been a week that feels like a month. Reviewing my daily journal helped me recollect a lot, even though I felt it in my bones. One theme I’ve paid special attention to is what recharged me ๐Ÿ”‹:

    • Walks, strictly not in a rush
    • Deep work - thinking and “designing”
    • Solid mid-day breaks
    โ†’ Sunday February 4, 2024
  • Casual

    ๐Ÿ““This is quite an unshaped thought. Integrative garbage - the ugly outcome of combining too many, and often conflicting, ideas with the goal of creating an all-encompassing solution. Connected thinking is great. Generalists are great. Too much of a good thing - integrative garbage.

    โ†’ Tuesday January 30, 2024
  • Casual

    ๐Ÿ““ Wikipedia: Petrichor

    Petrichor (/หˆpษ›trษชหŒkษ”หr/) is the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil.

    TIL ๐Ÿค“ I thought the smell of rain is the smell of ozone. Itโ€™s a bit more complex because - life.

    โ†’ Monday January 29, 2024
  • Technology

    ๐Ÿ’พ Iโ€™m using Proton VPN and Iโ€™ve noticed a lot more often sites just donโ€™t work. And itโ€™s not Protonโ€™s fault. Simply everyone everywhere wants to track the cr*p out of visitors. Just today couldnโ€™t access the city library and a movie festival sites. Come oon! ๐Ÿ˜ก

    โ†’ Monday January 29, 2024
  • Gaming

    ๐ŸŽฎ When I left the Xbox behind in favor of PC, I also lost a couple of games (and saves). Just had the urge to jump into Disco Elysium again but turns out I don’t have it in my PC library. I find this particularly frustrating with the Xbox/MS store as it’s supposed to be an ecosystem.

    โ†’ Saturday January 27, 2024
  • Management

    ๐Ÿ’ป James A. Whittaker, Jason Arbon, Jeff Carollo, How Google Tests Software

    “If the feedback takes more than a few minutes, add more machines. CPU hours are cheaper than developer context switches and idle time.”

    Those were the times. Now we live in a culture of cost efficiency that sacrifices developer experience without batting an eye. Cloud bills are much more tangible cost than loss of productivity to the average exec. This trend also tells an unpalatable story about the amount of work without impact.

    โ†’ Friday January 26, 2024
  • Technology

    ๐Ÿ’พ Once upon a time, I was interested in writing reliable and efficient shell scripts. Using shell builtins was an eye-opener. Today I remembered about parameter expansion:

    mystr="$(uname -o)"
    
    # If we find "Linux", we get an empty string
    [ ! -n "${mystr##*Linux*}" ] && printf "We are on Linux.\n"
    
    โ†’ Sunday January 21, 2024
  • Technology

    ๐Ÿ’พ Kudos to @mikehaynes for the excellent Outpost theme! Just the refresh I was looking for, and it was so easy to customize based on my previous theme.

    โ†’ Saturday January 20, 2024
  • Technology

    ๐Ÿ’พ How I miss Things. It’s truly a usability masterpiece. Decided to drop it for 2 reasons - not cleared at work (especially the cloud bit); too separate from my notes and writing. Imagine if they entered the editor space and integrated the tasks alongside notes seamlessly. One can dream.

    โ†’ Friday January 19, 2024
  • Casual

    ๐Ÿ““๐Ÿ“ท Together we are safe (from the vacuum cleaner)!

    Two dogs resting on a cozy couch surrounded by patterned cushions.
    โ†’ Sunday January 14, 2024
  • Technology

    ๐Ÿ’พ Streaks is an amazing app. Every NY I return to it (for obvious reasons ๐Ÿ˜…). Its super power is simplicity. Super impressed with the team who manage to add more continuously, while keeping complexity in check. Iโ€™ve now slotted Streaks snuggly in my daily workflow.

    โ†’ Sunday January 14, 2024
  • Casual

    ๐Ÿ““ After a week of temperatures closer to -20C, walking the dogs at -5C feels like spring is coming. ๐Ÿ˜… Snapshot from the wintery city landscape in Helsinki from last weekend. ๐Ÿ“ท Alt text courtesy of Bing chat ๐Ÿคท๐Ÿปโ€โ™‚๏ธ

    A snow-covered city with buildings and construction cranes silhouetted against a blue and orange sunset sky.
    โ†’ Tuesday January 9, 2024
  • Management

    ๐Ÿ’ป Flow Metrics for Scrum Teams (PDF)

    The dirty little secret of MCS [Monte Carlo Simulation] is that we are assuming that the future we are modeling roughly looks like the past we have data for. The beauty of using professional Scrum is that in most contexts this is a safe assumption.

    You call it a “dirty little secret”, I call it a major stink ๐Ÿคท๐Ÿปโ€โ™‚๏ธ Anyway, still keeping an open mind, this book is a very good resource if you find yourself in the midst of an agile transformation (especially one that puts emphasis on estimates). Like we all do every few years. Ha. ha. ha. ๐Ÿฅ

    โ†’ Sunday January 7, 2024
  • Casual

    ๐Ÿ““ Home-made chai latte, incense stick, headphones on - it’s going to be a particularly zen weekly review. ๐Ÿง˜โ€โ™‚๏ธ

    โ†’ Sunday January 7, 2024
  • ๐Ÿฟ The Boy and the Heron (2023) - โ˜…โ˜…โ˜…โ˜…โ˜…

    Oh wow, what an adventure! And so many layers to it.

    The Boy and the Heron poster

    โ†’ Thursday December 28, 2023