Thing number 1 – Glitch!  It is like a mash up of geocities and heroku and git and animated gifs and unicorns.   I just learned about it. Apparently it used to be Fog Creek – which made debugging software.  I know about Fog Creek because I worked with a guy who was obsessed with Joel on Software – and rightly so – the guy has done some amazing things.

I then spent some time working in rust on cryptopals, which has replaced kundalini yoga as my meditative and spiritual practice and  then continued my research in borrowing and other things rustifarian.

Grin mining went live this week, or maybe last week. It’s a blur really, but I watch their github repo. Grin is written in rust and like monero is forked every 6 months to avoid ASIC mining.  It implements the MimbleWimble protocol.  Here is an article on how to mine grin, which I may implement if I spend more than an hour in the car this weekend.

Amy helped me with my fastai paperspace (a digital cloud for gpus)  issues namely

print(filename) cv2.imread(filename).astype(np.float32)/255

fastai claims filename is not an image. But it IS an image and it renders an image with other fastai tools. Amy thinks I have the wrong version of the fastai lib. So tonight I am trying to install this on the RC heap. But my ssh is not working because of IPv6 things.  I may try plaidml.

Amy and I reviewed how to use a model with a web app. I am really excited about this and plan to implement it once I finish training my model.  We then talked briefly about the decentralized web and web rings and scuttlebutt and mastodon . I mentioned blockstack. I have been working a bit with mastodon this week on my Haskell music transduction project so it was interesting to view it from the perspective of decentralization and open source (I was just using it because it was easy to create bots!)

Today Michelle and Terry demoed Kudos.  I think it is a really nice sample app for writing zulip bots. We deployed on now, which took a little bit of work but worked out fine.  In now 2.0 we can schedule tasks, but for now we use cron jobs (thanks Alan).  Michelle introduced me to the fanatic git tool – git flow,  and **/*.py (wildcard for this directory and children directories).

Alan walked me through some typescript, which I really appreciated, and it looks much less painful than using javascript.  Javascript offends my aesthetic sensibilities as I have mentioned on this blog before.

Finally,  here is some nyc housing data that someone shared on zulip. I am just going to stash it here because it may come in handy one day for a ML project. I am a digital hoarder.

 

View at Medium.com

Today was an internal RC Hackathon. Tenor and I were going to do some dev ops on the internal cluster, but that did not pan out. Instead I worked, sort of answering python questions, on a zulip chat bot spearheaded by Michelle and Terry.

At first we created a bot as part of the zulip bot architecture only to realize we did not have access to the zulip server. Then we moved over our app to use the rest api framework.  I wanted to deploy it with now, a sort of heroku for serverless apps, but the app was running as a statemachine.  Really what I need is iron.io. Do people still use that? I did some googling and could not figure out how to schedule now.  One bogus thing I could do would be to deploy the chat bot to now and then ping it with a cron job.

I made some head way building out the PrayerCoin contract and a contract for reifying non fungible tokens. These are up in github.  I am going to continue to clean them up.  I got integration working with haskell and mastodon. The more I work with Rust the less patience I have for Haskell, but something about the language seems very beautiful and I would like to stick with it. I had to do some pruning of my code base but that too is now up on github. I still need to write up my dapp ripple tutorial. But I feel like I am in a good groove with contract development in truffle and I have some ideas for creating automated dapp deployments.

There was a great discussion of consciousness in the consciousness reading group.  Why are we interested in the brain? What if consciousness is not located in the brain? DEEP THOUGHTS. Next week we are going to read about complex systems, mycelium, and the microbiome (my personal favorite for seat of consciousness) .

Now I am going to curl up with some green nettle tea and some James Hillman,