You may have heard that an average human breathes out roughly 1kg of carbon dioxide a day. Gas masses are kind of abstract, and most of the mass is oxygen than you breathe in, but that is still 273 grams of carbon that your metabolism draws out of your body every day, even if you are fasting. Much more for a large person laboring heavily. Weighed out, that is a surprisingly large pile! (thinking about space habitats)

I can’t pass a bookstore without picking something up, but mainstream book publishing is dominated by what I consider “female authorial voice” (sometimes even from the remaining male authors), and my tastes are a little out of step with it. Robert E. Howard’s pulp fiction of a century ago is quite a palate cleanser. Everyone knows Conan, and I have read some Solomon Kane, but I was completely unfamiliar with his westerns, a genre that I have read very little of. I enjoyed them more than I expected – “American Violence" is a vibe from a mostly lost culture. The stories are all in the public domain now, so you can find them free online or in very cheap editions, but this Passage Publishing collection is Folio Society level nice.

While noting some compression artifacts in a water scene on TV, I started thinking— for a given set of compression parameters, what is “the most cursed macroblock”. Not the worst looking, which is a squishy perceptual metric, but the set of pixels that takes the most bits to encode. With all the non-linearity in pixel quantization and entropy encoding, finding that is actually non-trivial.

I had several phrases highlighted in bold on a post that I saved to drafts, but when I returned to post it, the formatting was gone.

I pitched this idea to Meta for @BeatSaber , but there are other games it could also work for. The Global Frequency The fuzzy abstract vision of the Metaverse, and cinematic visions like Ready Player One, almost always involve crowds of people having a great time. While I remain “the champion of the power of isolation”, I acknowledge that there is real value there, and VR has so far failed to deliver it. For a lot of reasons, it isn’t going to happen inside Horizon Worlds. I propose a concrete, focused experience built on Beat Saber. Playing with friends is great, but the random online servers are tough to match paid music packs on, and the current players tend to converge on Camillia songs, which is offputting for casual players. My suggestion: In addition to the current online play modes, offer a “global frequency” that plays a schedule of songs that an arbitrary number of people can join at once. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Actually, two frequencies: one with just the free tracks, and one with all the paid music packs. The schedule should be viewable in game and on the web, so you could decide to join when your favorite music pack is playing. The nature of Beat Saber offers a unique capability for multiplayer – you can switch difficulty or modifiers between songs at will, and still be playing with the same crowd. The song is forced, but it doesn’t matter how you play. This is key for the Global Frequency, but I would also suggest it as an option for regular multiplayer. In the 60 second intermission between songs, everyone is in “the club”. If you sit out a song, or fail out (and don’t have no-fail enabled), you also drop into the club. Music is always playing in the club, either the current song, or the hook from the song just completed, so everyone has something to move to. Beat Saber avatars are very lightweight, and it should be possible to render hundreds of them, giving a good palette to render the optimally cool crowd scene, which would be the core design question. It would be a fun tech challenge to represent the entire set of thousands of players, but just intelligently picking a hundred good neighbors would still look amazing. Any explicit friends you have that are also playing should be near you, and some effort should be made to allow you to “recognize regulars” that you have played together with before. You should probably be able to walk around and even fly up in the air like Walkabout Mini Golf so you can appreciate the crowd. There are leaderboards up in the sky, with spotlights and other effects highlighting players in the crowd. Someone “wins” the song on each difficulty level, and is celebrated, but everyone has the opportunity to achieve first-completions, personal bests, and full-combo perfection, which result in visible effects for all to see. Every intermission manifests joy for some of the players, which is contagious. The play field should default to the multi player field, with the giant avatar hologram of the global lead player (for your difficulty level), and the other players that were closest to you in score on the last song surrounding you, automatically giving you a competitive field and ephemeral rivalries, but there should be an option to let people play with the single player environments if they want. I would play the hell out of that, and I suspect potentially millions of others would too.

Are modern recommendation systems treated like a reinforcement learning problem, with a sum of discounted future rewards, or as strictly single step transactions? Many products do significant offline data analysis on actions taken to inform changes, but it seems under appreciated how much more powerful making policy changes on a live, massively parallel set of independent environments/users is. Offline RL is fundamentally harder than online RL — you have to guard against bootstrapping into an optimistic fantasy untested by reality.

I find it surprising when decisions about things like the number of runs with different random seeds wind up with “round numbers” like 10 or 50 instead of system friendly powers of two like 8 or 32. You know something about the background of a programmer by their constants!

I like em dashes, and I hate that some people now take them as evidence of text being AI generated.

A chunk of this is just @Project2501_117 dressing me in tighter shirts, but I did put on several pounds of muscle this year after switching my random grab bag of vitamins and supplements over to @bryan_johnson ‘s Blueprint system. I was probably not getting enough protein to take advantage of the exercise I was doing. I have always been roughly “upper quintile” for fitness — regular exercise, but not at the level of the serious athletes that most offices tend to have a few of.

This is interesting — a compiler/runtime that makes almost all standard C/C++ code completely memory safe. The performance overhead is not negligible, but there are plenty of cases where “rewrite it in rust” still isn’t a practical solution.