§ I started playing The Last of Us Part II and have been enjoying it much more than part I. One of my critiques of part I was that the story ultimately comes down to a variation of “help the hero protagonist save the world”. The story in part II, though, is much more real, nuanced, and heart wrenching.
Throughout my playthrough of the first game I would always find myself wishing for an “open world” Last of Us game. Part II is, unfortunately, not that but we do get a small glimpse of what that type of game might look like during an extended mission where our character is tasked with exploring downtown Seattle; it was definitely my favorite part of the game (at least, so far).
§ There are now less than 100 days left until the end of the school year. It is too early to say whether it will feel like a breezy home stretch or a never ending slog.
§ I finally finished building a cold frame for the garden. I ended up repurposing a window that I had set aside for my (long overdue) greenhouse project. Now I need to decide what to grow in it. Maybe cabbage? Lettuce?
It also occurred to me that I should be able to easily repurpose the frame in the summer to use as a small solar dehydrator or a wind-proof cyanotype exposure box. Exciting!
§ Links
- Tinkering with hyperlinks
- ChatGPT for Robotics
- ControlNet
- Related: Scribble Diffusion and a HuggingFace demo
- Toolformer
- “In this paper, we show that LMs can teach themselves to use external tools via simple APIs”
§ Recipes
- Gluten free paczki
- These were admittedly more dense than normal paczki but still surprisingly passable
- Vegetarian Tikka Masala
- I used around half a cup of both coconut milk and heavy cream. This was really good. I’ll certainly make it again soon.
- Lemony chicken with Brussels sprouts
- I added potatoes which I think was a good choice. I have still not successfully gotten crispy chicken skin with any of these oven recipes. Not sure what I am doing wrong. Everything was still pretty tasty, though.