02 july 2024
Today did NOT start well. I modified the notification settings of my phone (went from "full silent mode" to "do not disturb with exceptions"), which threw me into a bad "things are changing and maybe i didn't configure things correctly and everything breaks and and and", which was not great. On top of that, Pierre's computer's PSU died last night - which sucked, obviously, but which sucked doubly because our beloved Mastodon client was hosted on it too. So, that was the second thing that fucked up my morning habits... and that was before coffee. Follows: overwhelm about the things to do (breakfast, dishes, shower, fetching a parcel downstairs) and its order, and... well, brain full of bees.
THANKFULLY, somehow I managed to remember the existence of my weighted blanket, so I put myself under it, and instantly things got... better. That was unexpectedly magical, tbh. After a few minutes, I went from "screeching mode" to "talking myself into an order to do things", and then I executed the plan, and I was able to reboot my morning. Phew.
I went into a large rabbit hole at work today, started wanting to find the origins of a bug, ended up exploring (and putting breakpoints) in 4 code repositories in 2 languages. I think I know what's happening, and it should be fixable with relatively little effort and side effects, but that was kind of exhausting. Maybe (:thinking_face:) I should have taken a bit more breaks, especially considering the start of the day!
My favorite duo of romance authors, collectively known as Kit Rocha, are currently running their "Romancing the Vote" auction, benefiting voting orgs in the US (with options for non-US folks buying stuff too!)
There's a lot of stuff - signed and annotated copies of books, jewelry, stickers, hand-crafted stuff, video consults, various editing services - a wealth of stuff, really. The collective effort that goes behind the scene of this thing absolutely warms my heart.
Writever
Writever for today is "Collective".
Esteemed gaggle of colleagues, the incorporation of our planet to the Federation gives us the unique opportunity to discuss collective names for our new associates. The Greys are delighted with "a grisaille of Greys"; the Mantids prefer "a vigil of Mantids" over "a congregation of Mantids" and that's fine for us; however the Blue Avians are afraid that "a murder of Blue Avians" would be somewhat derogatory. Does anyone have a better suggestion?
A very neat article about busy beavers - Turing machines with a small number of rules that run for a long time (while still halting) - apparently a group just proved the finding of the 5th busy beaver (longest execution of a Turing machine with 5 rules): https://www.quantamagazine.org/amateur-mathematicians-find-fifth-busy-beaver-turing-machine-20240702/