Wrapping Up

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5 minutes

This week has been about wrapping things up. I’m going away on holiday on Tuesday, we booked a trip to Malta months ago to get some sun and swimming pool in before the deep dark of the winter. I’m really really looking forward to it. Can’t wait.

As I’ve mentioned before I’ve been messing about with Unreal Engine for a while. But I’ve been running into my gaming laptop stuttering and hanging unexpectedly and VR has always suffered from screen tearing and slow downs. I got paid for a thing, so last weekend I bought new RAM and a 1TB m.2 drive.

I installed it all, and living with a Mac I had forgotten just how amazing it is to have user serviceable devices.

I took laptop from 8Gbs of RAM to 32Gbs, it’s now fully maxed out and the upgrade has been worth every penny.

The first thing I did was load an environment that I’ve been working on into my VR sculpting tool. Previously I’ve only been able to open it at 20% resolution and that would take about 10mins to load in.

Peak Performance

Yes it took 28Gbs of RAM, but the whole thing loaded in 2mins at 100% resolution. Amazing.

This extra headroom has also transformed working with 1080p video, and will certainly be enough for all the AI computer vision experiments I want to get at some point.


Had band practice again this week. Our drummer was off as he had run the London Marathon so we worked on relearning some of our older songs but also focused on their harmonic arrangements. Playing together without drums reveals a lot of detail that gets lost when the drum are making loads of noise.

Paul messing with a bunch of pedals he borrowed

As I mentioned above. I’m really looking forward to heading off on holiday for a week next week. I’m going to try and not look at the internet for the whole time I’m away!

So no Weeknotes next week.


Permanently Moved

Recommendations

In no particular order, here’s some recommendations of things from friends and acquaintances that I think you should check out. 

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

  • Great call with Third Wave Berlin
  • Messed about with various super resolution AI/GAN tools for a talk I’m giving at a venue with an insane multi-panel display screen. Working out at 150MBs a slide in the native resolution! :S
  • Delivered final report to a client. I have no work planned after I get back from holiday on the 20th. I’m now left to my own devices!
  • Had an idea for this years NaNoWriMo, and a bunch of related potential spin off things I’ll probably never do.
  • Sorting shit out for holiday

Dipping the Stacks

Popular South Korean influencer who’s landed over 100 sponsorships is not actually a real person

AI-powered social media star: The influencer, who now has over 58,000 Instagram followers, is actually a virtual human created by South Korean content-creation group Sidus Studio X. She is the first of her kind in Korea to be based on artificial intelligence, reported Korea.net

Xi Jinping’s War on Spontaneous Order – The Scholar’s Stage

That is the thread that ties all of these crackdowns together. Each targets an industry that seems to strip people of their agency and rob them of their dignity. Each seems to hijack healthy behavior with a set of short term incentives whose end results are self destructive and degrading.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger: The radical loser (01/12/2005) – signandsight

The social sciences have failed in their analyses of amok killers, frenzied murderers and the terrorist mind. And yet one look is enough to identify the culprit: the radical loser

Verifiable Localization in Decentralized Systems (PDF)

We tackle the challenge of reliably determining the geolocation of nodes in decentralized networks, considering adversarial settings and without depending on any trusted landmarks. In particular, we consider active adversaries that control a subset of nodes, announce false locations and strategically manipulate measurements. To address this problem we propose, implement and evaluate VerLoc, a system that allows verifying the claimed geo-locations of network nodes in a fully decentralized manner.

Jimmy Carter’s UFO Sighting And The Real Story Behind It

In 1973, Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter filed a report in which he claimed to have seen a UFO hovering above the town of Leary in 1969.

Reading

I finished re-reading Blockchain Chicken Farm by Xiaowei Wang.

Finished re-reading Spark Joy

Now I’m reading Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown.

I’m about half way though, and I said to a friend the other day that I feel like every page is berating me for not applying things in my life that I already know I should be doing! AND they are things I tell other people to do all the time!

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Stick In The Wheel – Tonebeds for Poetry

It’s been a minute since I mentioned Stick In The Wheel. Their new album ‘Tonebeds for Poetry came out in August.

I chatted with Paul from Resonance.fm show Sonic Darts (and singer in my band) about it for more than a minute since. We mainly talked about their rendition of classic folk song the Cuckoo. Notable as being a Irish Trad that went to the new world, was reimagined there and then came back to the old world as a new standard.

On their new album, Stick in the Wheel re-imagine it as a synth and sub heavy track recasting the cuckoo into a world of east end gangsters. It’s amazing.

I think that Stick In The Wheel are one of, if not THE most important folk artists in England right now. Firmly embedded in their London working class heritage, they are re-imagining what it means to engage with traditional folk music and art in the 21stC.

Love ’em.

Related, Sonic Dart’s semi recent show on Folklore and landscape is a MUST LISTEN

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