May 21st, 2025
Automated Archives for May, 21st 2025
This post was automatically generated.
Articles To Read
The following are articles that I saved today. Substance and quality will vary drastically.
Chess For the Day
Record: 5-0-4
Net Elo Change: +9
Games Played
- RobbOO - WIN
- novato060 - WIN
- Mr_Quinlan - WIN
- DTH117 - LOSS
- gilmarat - LOSS
- echec12345 - WIN
- mohamed_eljackal - LOSS
- pesarehamsayeh - LOSS
- Mixasia - WIN
Blog Posts On This Day
- May 21, 2024 (1 post)
- May 21, 2023 (3 posts)
- May 21, 2022 (7 posts)
Obsidian adding tables
I've bounced between Notion, Obsidian and Google Docs for various means of controlling and organizing my digital stuff. I left Notion because it wasn't a format that enabled easy migration. And I am a fan of Markdown (the backend of this blog utilizes markdown), so the idea of this integration with Obsidian is very interesting and I'll definitely be checking it out.
My favorite Beatboxer
Granted, I am far from an expert. But Vahtang jumped up the list when I started seeing his videos on social media.
I really need to sleep more, but at least I woke up early enough to get to do some programming this morning.
May 20th, 2025
Adding Search
Tonight I started work on writing code to add a search function to this blog. However, not just posts on the blog, also posts I make on social media. So I wrote code for importing posts from Bluesky and Mastodon, the latter mainly for completeness as I don't post there much anymore. It imported my backlog and then I modified the same code to be usable for a nightly cron job.
The search itself is still something I'm wrestling with. Aside from the added sources of content, I am trying to figure out how to best do this.
It's no secret that search is complicated. Which makes this a fun mental challenge.
So I have the most basic parts done, and now it is the gritty details of adding logic for ordering these posts, as well as adding things like spam protection, caching, XSS protection, etc. And then it will be writing the client side code and display functionality.
I'd guess I'm like 30% done.... famous last words. We'll see.
May 19th, 2025
Windows has its own 'Vim' (sort of)
It's definitely not vim. I'm just being snarky. But interesting to see how it does as it rolls out.
A visualization of the translation of Japanese, and part of why it is so difficult for English speakers. It looks like this came from a Reddit post, but I came across it somewhere completely else so I'm not sure on the origins.
1800 once again
Broke 1800 rating in chess on lichess again this morning, for the first time in over a year, and the second time ever! I hover in the 1700s usually but this past week I've been super sharp in my play and it has been nice.
We'll see how long I stay in this rating this time around, last time only lasted a day and then I dropped back down. But I have beaten several 1800s in the past week so I am feeling very good about it.
The following is the chart of my ratings in 2025. The solid blue line is my play tracking for blitz, the dashed line is for puzzle solving.
May 18th, 2025
Chef (2014)
Still a fantastic movie. Makes me realize I really need to get a panini press.
"Benign Violation Theory"
Discovered courtesy of my friend Lucas, here's the quote from the website about what this is:
In collaboration with Caleb Warren, McGraw has been developing and testing a general theory of humor called the benign violation theory. The theory builds on work by a linguist, Tom Veatch, and integrates existing humor theories to propose that humor occurs when and only when three conditions are satisfied: (1) a situation is a violation, (2) the situation is benign, and (3) both perceptions occur simultaneously. For example, play fighting and tickling, which produce laughter in humans (and other primates), are benign violations because they are physically threatening but harmless attacks.
A strength of the theory is that it also explains when things are not funny: a situation can fail to be funny because it depicts a violation that does not simultaneously seem benign, or because it depicts a benign situation that has no violation. For example, play fighting and tickling cease to elicit laughter either when the attack stops (strictly benign) or becomes too aggressive (malign violation). Jokes similarly fail to be funny when either they are too tame or too risqué.
Man builds his dream 1990s IBM clone PC as authentically as he can in 2025
This is a series of posts that provide a stunning level of detail and attention to a man's dream PC from his childhood. A major bit of nostalgia for me having grown up around the same sort of machines and worked on computers in that era with my father.
May 15th, 2025
Artifacts of the Internet
I learned things from this! I did not know about the first spam email, I found that very interesting.
