Weeknotes 270

Don’t be a Meat Proxy

A meat proxy is a human who forwards questions to an AI and forwards the answers back — adding nothing but latency.

The memory I bought off eBay at inflated prices has now been received and installed. The server into which the memory was being installed was a “situation” dust-wise. That is a job for another day; I have plans.

I now have 32GB of RAM and nothing in my life has changed except my bank balance.

Microduck

A 25 cm open-source biped you train yourself with reinforcement learning. Playable out of the box.

I finally bought the UniFi network gear I’ve been planning since before we even decided to move and buy a house, and why not do so when you’re least financially able?

Of course, the system is over-specified in the name of “future proofing” but we all really know that it’s actually because flashing lights are pretty cool. More on that another time perhaps.

And so, my attention turned to running network cables. “Why Ethernet?” I hear you cry. Cables are always better and you cannot convince me otherwise. Of course, we will continue to rely heavily on WiFi, as we have done without incident for over 2 years, but I do need cables for some things, in particular, a PoE doorbell. “Why a PoE doorbell?”, again, I hear you cry. Look, I like to do everything on hard mode for maximum disappointment and frustration, but also because latency and reliability matters for something like a doorbell. I don’t care for your WiFi doorbell related anecdata.

I’ve been thinking about running these cables off and on since we moved in over 2 years ago but when it came to do it I was still no closer to working out the where they should go and how they should be routed. Running network cables around an old three story terrace house is, to be frank, an absolute nightmare. There are some positives though. The house isn’t in good decorative order anyway, so drilling a few holes here and there isn’t much of a problem. The main thing is getting over the fear of drilling holes in my house. We’ve also got exposed floorboards almost exclusively throughout so lifting those gives good access, and they too, are in bad condition, so again superficial damage isn’t the end of the world.

Part of this process started this week. I ran a Cat 5e Ethernet cable from the bedroom on the 1st floor to the hallway on the ground floor, and to the outside where the doorbell is now mounted and installed. But not working. To complete the installation I need to find a route from the 1st floor bedroom to the top floor where the networking equipment is to be installed. That is still on-going, but I have ideas. I’m also planning a Cat 6 run of cable following the same route, and some sort of switch downstairs at a later date.

There will be a full write up (with photos!) at some point which you are, no doubt, looking forward to.

Neovim now has a built-in :restart command

Many users want :restart to restore their session and window layout, so they need to implement a custom command or mapping.

Nice quality of life improvement. Upgrade to 12.5 to take advantage.