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Entries from July 2025

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I got sick, but my computer was fine (31 Jul at 23:24)

Hi,

Dammit! I got sick again. This time it was definitely Covid-2025 and it was pretty rough (I had a very bad sore throat, which I hear is characteristic of this strain) and it knocked me out of commission for a week during which I was expecting to have quiet time to myself to finish off this video! Instead the things that felt right to do were (a) play the new Donkey Claus for Switch II and (b) keep trying to prove that the one shape can't go through the other shape. I have One Last Approach here that I'm currently feeling pretty hopeful about, but also I wrote a lot of that code with Covid brain so who knows. (The real goal would be to produce some machine-checkable proof; no need to worry about virus-induced fallibility!) I'll talk about this in the video with some other results; I've got like 25 minutes finished at this point. On the upside, the computer has been completely healthy this whole time, almost like the problem was simply a bad driver 25 year-old webcam driver and it cannot actually be sympathetically infected when I fall ill.

I probably got Covid-2025 in JFK International Shithole, or maybe the humid undergrounds of New York City's Subterranean "Way" system, or in crowded comedy club, or etc. when I went to hang out with my YouTube buddies and also go to work. It's been 3 years since I got it last, so that's not a bad MTBF I guess.

Speaking of work: Exciting for me is that I am switching to "part time" (4 days a week) for the sole reason that I like my job but I also like having time for my gonzo programming projects and math holes, and would all else equal like to have more time for the latter. So starting this monday I will be 50% more funemployed and 20% less employal!!

I vow not to use my additional "free" time to just play video games, but I did play video games when I was sick especially. I am enjoying the Donkey Kong Bananza more than I expected. It is a very easy game, but also very fun. I am almost done with Tevi, by the same people who made Rabi-Ribi, which I enjoyed many years ago. It's a solid exploration platformer that I would definitely recommend to genre fans who are sick with Covid-25. For observant game design connoisseurs who have played the Metroidvania genre a lot, or too much (e.g., me), there are some subtle and smart mechanics to appreciate. Probably next... DOOM?

(2 comments — a day ago) [ comment ]

Entries from June 2025

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I got sick, and my computer got sick (30 Jun at 23:26)

Ugh! I did make a lot of progress on this darned video (I have about 10 minutes of high quality content baked in now) and was hoping to keep up the momentum this weekend but I got pretty sick. I thought all week I was just suffering headaches from this medium-severe heat wave we've been having, but I think it was also me starting to get ill. It does not appear to be COVID or Flu-A or Flu-B (it is cool that you can get a combo test for all three of these now) but it has kept me with minimal energy. The other, perhaps worse drain on my ability to finish my projects is that my computer also got sick. It has been struggling to install "Windows 11 24H2" for as long as that sounds from the name (24 is 2024, like COVID-19 is 2020), rebooting every week or two (interrupting valuable computational geometry) to give it one more try and then rolling back, which is annoying, so I was rooting for it to one day succeed. Last week it finally decided to stay on my computer, but right away I started to get kernel panics, which on Windows 11 are illustrated as ":(". I spent all weekend trying to improve the situation, upgrading every driver and firmware I could find, deleting everything old I didn't need, and all stuff that I hate. This was a machine that was extremely solid before this update, by the way; like I would regularly running a Premiere encode while compressing a directory full of files and playing Call of Duty Black Ops 6 and 100 Chrome tabs including more than one concurrent instance of gmail and Photoshop has been open since the last windows update reboot as well and 16 cores of computational geometry also happening at idle priority with 100GB of resident allocations. So this is a stark difference. I am reaching the end of my troubleshooting wits (a few steps down the list is I renounce Computing and go live in a cave with my polyhedra) but at least nothing has crashed since the last thing I tried (force remove some drivers I may not need so that I can enable Core Isolation) so I'm going to at least try to go to bed optimistic tonight.

I did make some actual progress on this geometry problem (not covered in paper) so now I'm actually looking forward to talking about that in the video. There's hope yet.

Speaking of idle priority, I actually finished Call of Duty Black Ops 6 for real now (I had done this previously, but then they released new crap, and while I was unlocking that I "decided" that I "should" also unlock the dark matter camo for every item in the game) and I think I've successfully put it behind me. I tried going for the polar opposite, which may be the game Crimson Diamond (it does involve murder but that may be the only thing they have in common). This is a cute old-school (~CGA graphics) text-parser adventure game, which reminds me of my Sierra youth, and may have been directly inspired by the Colonel's Bequest. Not sure how far I am into it, but I do enjoy it and so far it has been possible without any hints. Really for genre fans though. I'm also nearing the end of Stuck In Time (which may have previously been called "Loop Hero"? Something like that; they got cease-and-desisted and had to change it), which is a pretty clever idle/adventure game. The game has "idle" mechanics (lots of permanent upgrades; needs to run for some time in order to complete) but the core mechanism is designing the path that your guy follows through the world, and it's pretty active as a result. I liked that it didn't lean too much into the tower of exponent stuff; it's really mostly about exploration and making a good loop to let idle overnight. Pretty good pixel art and music, too. It is good if you are sick and working on a busted computer but want to be able to switch to another window to forget about that for a few minutes sometimes. Like writing a blog post!

(7 comments — 6 days ago) [ comment ]

Entries from May 2025

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Technically it is on a stovetop (31 May at 23:15)

Heya,

Earlier this month I spoke at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science's PhD hooding ceremony! The "distinguished" "speaker." I feel that that was quite an honor, and hopefully I did it justice. I'm certainly comfortable giving a talk but usually it's because I have something I want to talk about. These students are very talented and privileged and will do okay, but it's also a really precarious time to be starting your career (in the US especially). I don't just mean the chronic problems (out of control climate change, growing economic inequality, unenlightenment, and too many Star Wars movies) but acute problems like the US "government" trashing our research institutions, and technological monsters of our own creation. So I tried to give them some advice about how to maybe survive and maybe save the world. Alas, I don't believe it was recorded, and I just now tried to find any photos of it online and instead got sidetracked for an hour into reading old chess articles, so you'll just have to take my word that it happened. (If you happen to have photos, please send them; my mom would be happy!)

That was a proper distraction from putting together this darned video that I'm still working on. I finished my "big math" cloud analysis, and then running it again when I came to discover that I had incorrectly written "min" instead of "max" when trying to interpret the results. So that was an expensive cube. But the fixed results do look cool and I figured out how to render it in Blender (which information I'm very confident I will not retain). I really just need to sit down and narrate this thing with a screen recording at this point, but I keep procrastinating that for some reason.

A less justifiable form of procrastination: My 3D printer's site for sharing models is currently running a coffee-themed contest, and I noticed a conspicuous lack of coffee makers among the entries. So I made one. It looks like this:

Technically it is on a stovetop

You can see the project page for "instructions" (which abruptly end before any flame). It has all the internal parts and would work except for the fact that it's made from plastic; this is satire! Some people have tried to argue with me that you could boil water in it (referring to some possibly real demonstrations where you boil water through a paper cup), but keep in mind: A proper moka pot would need to generate steam pressure to force steam through the grinds; the walls here are a mesh filled with air bubbles and so they are a good insulator; although the melting point of PLA is higher than water's boiling point, its glass transition temperature is only like 65°C, so it would quickly deform. Also I turned the flame on to make a short video and it immediately scorched the bottom. I used glow-in-the-dark PLA for bonus points in the contest!

Also this month I started and finished Tunic, which was an excellent Zelda game. I think probably they could have done a little more with the combat (or just make you not have to do it so much), but everything else about it was great. The instruction manual thing is just a brilliant way to do the "Metroidvania" progression, and I was extremely impressed with the art/design work in the manual itself (from the half-width forms to the halftone screens). I definitely recommend this one if you like an adventure Zeldoidvania.

(7 comments — a month ago) [ comment ]

Entries from April 2025

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May the 7th be with you (30 Apr at 23:59)

When the beginning of May came around, I seem to have forgotten that a new month was occurring, and then I was putting off this blog post (which would have been -1,000 points), and then I thought it would be funny (but really it was just procrastination) to try to lose a record number of points. Let's call it -7,777 points; this post was backdated a full week, from May the 7th! Anyway, I am all right, at least as much as anybody is all right these days.

After submitting my paper to SIGBOVIK (you can read it) I have been working on a video, but actually I have been continuing to work on the problem (but really it was just procrastination). Right after writing the paper I had some good ideas that I wanted to test out and show in the video, and it seemed wrong to not give them a fair shake before presenting them. I think the story is converging and I just need to do a modest-sized expensive computation, so tonight I'm struggling with Cloud Infrastructure. It's so boring, but not as boring as waiting for my computer to run it for ~60 days. And only related because it sucks and is boring in the same way, I have made some of the first steps towards trying to get this server to support https. I like cryptography and don't hate https, but I also do not see the need for the complexity and downsides of https on a website like this and so I resent this very much, but: Chrome has finally "succeeded" in making http too annoying and scary for regular people now. (There is still no https on my site. I'm just saying that I'm working on it again.)

I am itching to get back to other projects! I upgraded my 3D printer so that it can dry spools of filament, so now I can use some exotic materials. I printed a replacement door handle out of carbon fiber ASA (which supposedly has good outdoor durability):

Right parenthesis

The old one was made of metal but it just broke off! So even though this one is plastic, I think it may compete with the quality of the previous. Very satisfying to pull on that big guy.

Category: sigbovik

(7 comments — 2 months ago) [ comment ]

Entries from March 2025

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SIGBOVIK deadline makes the doppler noise as it rushes past me (31 Mar at 22:38)

Hi! Bad deadline timing here: I'm going to stay up late finishing my SIGBOVIK paper for the real extended deadline, but this uses exactly the same minutes and the brain sugars that I would use to write a blog post. So I'm going to conserve those for the paper-finishing.

I will, however, preview that I will put the paper here: tom7.org/ruperts when I submit the conference version. Spoiler alert: This is not some epic hack; I tried to solve an already known math problem (but one that is appealing and upsetting) and (surprise) didn't succeed. Since it's a geometry problem, the visuals are fairly important and the video will probably be the best way to consume it.

(8 comments — 3 months ago) [ comment ]

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