§ No work next Monday for Martin Luther King Day and then a “work from home” faculty work day on Tuesday. Great. On Wednesday, students will rotate classes for their third quarter which means I’ll be teaching a group of kids I haven’t seen in eight-ish weeks. I expect it will be a nice change of pace.

§ I started watching Three Pines which honestly hasn’t hooked me yet and mostly had the effect of making me want to re-watch Twin Peaks.

I also saw The Devil’s Hour. I thought it was pretty good and I was super happy to see that it’s a limited series. It turns out, stories are often better when they have a pre-planned beginning, middle, and end. Perhaps the accelerated rate that streaming services are canceling show renewals will encourage this trend to continue.

Finally, I saw Pearl, Ti West’s prequel to X. I thought it had a fantastic atmosphere. The music was great, the set design had a fascinating quality of period authenticity while at the same time being unsettlingly plastic, even the colors were interesting in a way I can’t exactly place.

§ I swear, at some point in the past ten years autumn disappeared. The Midwest seemingly now transitions from 85 °F to 35 °F overnight. The season must have been more distinct before; whenever asked I would always list it as my favorite! Anyway, there were a few days in the 50s this week which was nice. Although, on balance, we also had like four inches of snow on Friday.

I’ve noticed that the days getting longer is giving me an unexpected optimism. I am already starting to think about which vegetables I would like to try growing in the spring.

§ Links

  • Analog chess
    • “This is a version of chess where the pieces are not constrained to an 8x8 grid, and instead can move to any position on the board.”
    • See also: Really Bad Chess
  • Giffusion — Create GIFs using Stable Diffusion
    • I tried it out on Google Collab. It was a bunch of fun but the results weren’t especially impressive. I am still super excited for a true generative model for animation.
  • GLM-130B is an open source large language model. However, you should proceed with caution.
  • Q&A against documentation with GPT3 + OpenAI embeddings
    • A method of prompt engineering to easily “fine tune” GPT3 on your own data

§ Recipes

  • Gamja-tang — Korean pork and potato stew
    • Hmm… this recipe was good but 1) it tastes surprisingly similar to Kapusniak while 2) requiring a significantly more involved process to cook. I will probably make it again sometime though!
  • Chana masala
    • One of my favorites. Plus this used a bunch of frozen tomatoes from the garden, freeing up space in the freezer.
  • Not a recipe but I ate a pomelo — the largest citrus fruit — for the first time. I am tempted to say that I think it might be better than grapefruit. Much less bitter and possibly slightly sweater.