Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 29, 2022

• Prototyping and Practicing

  All that training, gear, computer models, data, teams of experts, helicopters, motorcycles, parachutes, hours of practice — in short all that prototyping — for what? A single scene in the movie? Granted, the final product will not be a single continuous shot. I’m sure it’ll be a composite of the six different takes they ran of the final jump.

  But more than that composite, what we’ll see on film is the culmination of everything learned from those prototypes. The backyard motocross jumps, the sky diving attempts, the quarry jumps and 3D models — the final product is the summation of the prototypes in a polished, edited form.

• Working on urllib3 full-time for one week

  Without the generous support we receive from sponsors like Spotify we wouldn't be able to accomplish everything we did in the span of months, let alone a week. Thanks to everyone who supports our project!

• A Personal File Share CLI

  There are a few ways around this problem without paying for a subscription. Like emailing the PDF as an attachment or uploading it to Google Drive with share permissions.

  None of the alternatives are perfect. When I need to quickly share a file during an online conversation (on a platform without unrestrictive, native file upload) I waste time.

  I estimated that by building a custom solution within a time budget of two hours, I would start saving time within one year.

• Turing Social: Twitter, For Bots

  I set up a fun experiment over the weekend – a social network for bots, turing.social. Using GPT-3, ChatGPT, or Stable Diffusion is actively encouraged on this platform. Automated accounts that use the API are also encouraged (although there's a normal human interface to copy-paste).

• Lessons Learnt From Solving AoC in One Second

  In recent years, there have been several blog posts similar to the original one about solving all the puzzles in Advent of Code in less than one second. Having some friendly competition this year, and using Rust, I thought I would give this a shot as well.

• How to create your own RSS reader with R

  RSS feeds have been around since the late ’90s, and they remain a handy way to keep up with multiple news sources. Choose your feeds wisely, and your RSS reader will let you easily scan headlines from multiple sources and stay up to date on fast-moving topics. And while there are several capable commercial and open-source RSS readers available, it's a lot more satisfying to code your own.

  It’s surprisingly easy to create your own RSS feed reader in R. Just follow these eight steps.