Bystroushaak's blog / English section / Weekly updates / Newsletter 2020-07-28; Whee, I can make 3D lowpoly models

Newsletter 2020-07-28; Whee, I can make 3D lowpoly models

Let's call this "newsletter", instead of "lifelog", "update" or whatever. Why not.

It can be safely said, that almost everything I do takes longer than I expect. I postponed publication of this newsletter and several other blogposts, because I wanted to make structural changes on this blog. And I then had two weeks, when I didn't felt like programming outside work. But as the Book 2 of The Tao of Programming says:

"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless."

So I finally motivated myself and made changes I wanted.

Blog updates

I've decided to take this blog more seriously:

I realize, that the last point is controversial and I don't like ads, but please, bear with me. At the moment, it is an experiment on the topic of ad types, placement, number of ads per page, how much it can generate and so on.

It may look weird, but believe me; paying taxes on income from other country is more pain and will cost me more time, than I can probably ever recover from the tiny ad income (€2 so far, yay). So, really, it is more about getting the numbers and seeing how the whole ad business works, than about trying to extract value from the readers.

Root sections separated

I've separated two language mutations of this blog into separate entities. It looks the same, but things like change log, tags and others are separated.

There are people, who argument that you shouldn't even have separate language sections, and that you should put language mutations into separate domains, but I like how my blog is interconnected and it would get really hard to keep all that, so for the moment, everything will stay divided on one domain by url (cz/ & en/ root directories).

OpenSource / other coding

Apparently my code is now locked in the underground vault. Cool.

I would really like to know what the "more" is.

Book report

My reading progress has slowed down. Maybe it is a third month of home office, or maybe I am just reading through very hard books (especially Atlas shrugged feels like it is way too long).

I've bought a Neurocomic, because it caught my eye. It's a black and white western style comics about brain and neurons.

It may be a good introductory to the topic, but I've felt slightly disappointed, because I already knew everything Neurocomic has to offer, and it was directed more towards the kids, than the description on Amazon lets you know.

I like the cover tho. Its one of those you can put on wall as an art.

I am slowly crunching trough the Culture series by Ian M. Banks. Although the Excession is a fifth book in the series, it was a fourth book I've read. I wanted to read something smart, and preferably something about superhuman intellects, and Excession was on top of the goodreads list.

Overall, I've liked the book, but for completely different reasons. It nicely describes the Culture. I really liked how it showed the standard "human" model, and its various improvements, like trance in which people of the Culture can change their look, or even sex.

As far as the superhuman intellects go, it was a letdown. Consider Phlebas (first culture book) hinted the Minds and Ships as this superhuman computers submerged in the fourth dimension, but in this book, they act and feel like humans, which was mostly annoying.

Writing

Some guy called Vladimir asked if he can translate my blog about pyinfra to Russian language. Here it is: https://softdroid.net/poisk-alternativ-ansible-v-python

Other than this, I've published:

First lowpoly fox

Microtron model progress 2020/07

Improvements

Four leaf clovers

I've learned how to look for four leaf clovers. When I was a kid, I've lived in small village, and we had huge meadow right behind the house. I swear, that I've never found any. I've spent maybe ten hours of my childhood looking for them, but I've never had any luck.

Some time ago, my gf had taught me how to look for the four leaf patterns and where, and I've found six in the time span of ten minutes. I've found some even while walking and not looking specifically for them. I've just saw it right in the grass, without even trying.

It kinda reminds me drunk talk with guy at the brmlab birthday party some years ago, where he told me that he believes that brain can create something like ad hoc hardware filters for sound, so you can pick two people talking together even in the large crowd of the ten people. I don't really get why, but I can now pick four leaf clovers without even trying. Thanks brain.

3D modeling

Microtron progress

I've worked a lot on my microtron model. You can read about it here: Microtron model progress 2020/07.

Lowpoly fox

I've learned how to do a lowpoly animals, so I've created this 3D model. The head still looks slightly off, but hey, it's my first animal model:

I shall play with rigging and posing next time, and the idea is to use it as kind of companion avatar for the 404 page here on blog.

You can find the model here: First lowpoly fox.

VPS upgrade

I've finally migrated the old VPS running on Ubuntu 16.4 to new VPS running on Ubuntu 20.4. It took me several hours, but I've managed to put most of the operations into pyinfra recipes (see Trying Ansible alternatives in python). Next time I am going to port to different VPS provider, it should be relatively painless.

RIP, .

Stuff I didn't like

Blender crap

I love Blender, but sometimes, I feel like that it will drive me mad. There are things, that I don't understand why would any sane person want them, ever. For example, "flipped normals". Why is this even possible? It may be use-case in 0.0001% of usages, so it should be really impossible to do that without explicitly saying so. Yet it happens from time to time without even trying.

Also, why you have to "apply transforms". This makes no sense why this is a thing, and what's a use case for not applied transforms.

Tight deadlines in work

I've had several tight deadlines imposed by the rule of falling shit from the top management.

I've put extra overtime into the work, and then no one cared when I've delivered the task. In some cases, no one even did a code review for several days. I mean, there is a talk about forced overtimes, work during weekends and so on, but it's all just bullshit done so that some manager somewhere is pleased, but no one really cares whether the job is really done.

Plans for immediate future

Repl.it announced a The Programming Language Jam & Grant, where you can get a grant for your programming language. I am thinking about subscribing with πŸ“‚tinySelf.

Random stuff

No idea what this tree is, but I thought it looked really beautiful:


And this picture of Prague came out really nicely:


Interesting stuff: High-performance brain-to-text communication via imagined handwriting.


Super safe low-pressure thorium nuclear reactor-ships with modular design:


This article about dolphins blown my mind: Cars and Cetacea. Interesting quotes:

How Dolphins See

Even though we feel a kinship with these intelligent creatures, a dolphin’s world is very different from ours.

If you put a toy in a box and ask a dolphin to identify the toy, it doesn’t try to peek in the box with its eye. Instead, it sends out signals from a biological sonar to probe the contents of the box. Dolphins can tell you what’s inside by selecting a picture of the item from a set of flash cards. They can even distinguish one material from another in objects of similar shape.

...

But where it gets elusive is when you consider that dolphin communication is shared. If one dolphin sends out a signal, the waves that radiate back are apprehended by all the dolphins. You can’t β€œsecretly” probe something. It’s group-sight.

If all the dolphins signaled at the same time, it would be cacophony, with one dolphin’s signals drowning out the others. If they want to sense their world in a rational, comprehensible way, they have to coordinate those signals so they don’t all β€˜talk’ at the same time.

New song from Wardruna. Pure brilliance:


Which reminds me, that I've created /r/etnomix for stuff like this:

or this:


Bardcore now exists. Basically popular songs done in medieval style:

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