Thought Bricks

I was experimenting with the NHL API the other day. It was interesting and I didn’t want to make things really complicated, but something that I did want was to be able to update the sceeen in place without it scrolling for each update. Curses is the obvious solution for this, but it seemed a little complicated for a simple little program. I did some digging and found Blessed which is a nice Python library that wraps up curses functionality in a much easier to use package.

The NHL has an interesting API that can access a wide range of information. It isn’t officially documented but I found some decent informal documentation. For fun, I wrote a Python program to get the live feed for the games going on today. It’s nothing special but was an interesting diversion. The biggest challenge is working with the live feed when I want to watch the game. The code is below:

Tim O’Reilly has a very thoughtful piece on web3. Since he is a guy who got many things right about web 2.0, I’m inclined to give his ideas some weight and I think he gets an essential truth about web3 right now: it’s too tied up in get-rich-quick thinking and not enough on the real value to be delivered. There will be value delivered by some of the new thinking in web3, but it’s really not clear what.

I felt the need to renumber my blog posts file names from a date (e.g., 20211222.md) to a sequence (e.g., 087.md). Hugo does a nice job of putting posts from the same date into a folder labeled for that date, so the date numbering was restrictive if I wanted to create two posts on one day (admittedly, a rarity). A number also is a nice way for me to keep track of how many posts I’ve written since I started doing this again.

The scale of the GPT-3 neural network is stunning. There are some models that are even larger, but GPT-3 is pretty much state of the art. It’s a very interesting thing to play around with. If you sign up and get a free account, you can access the Playground which has some examples of different kinds of problems (e.g., chat, explain to a second grader, translation, etc.). There is also an API that is straightforward.

Matt Stoller has a very interesting article about The World’s Most Profitable Traffic Jam in which he lays out the economic incentives that are causing big problems with the supply chain. The crux of the problem is a very complex intermodal system that gives large transocean shippers an incentive to slow things down once they hit the ports because they collect fees for congestion and don’t bear the costs. We might actually get some real legislation out of Congress to help sort this problem out.

My son is a senior in high school this year and is taking AP Statistics. My daughter also took this course when she was in high school. Overall, it’s a good set of content and being able to understand and reason with statistics is a valuable life skill. An odd thing is that the teacher has assigned problem sets that require using Python. He doesn’t know Python and I don’t know how he would be able to complete the assignments without having someone at home who does.

I’ve been doing some reading about web3 recently to understand what it is and what it might mean. There is plenty of skepticism about web3. The thing that bothers me the most is the premature annointing of these specific technologies as being the 3rd iteration of the web. The first (html) and second (web service, JavaScript, etc.) weren’t named until well after they had demonstrated their usefulness in practice. Maybe this specific assortment of tech will create a new decentralized web that empowers regular users.

I’m not talking about the band, but the switch to eco-friendly lighting in Pittsburg. A switch to lower wattage and less blue bulbs is a great idea. It saves money on energy and provides some real human and non-human benefits. LED lighting is one of those technology advancements that is better than the technology it replaced on almost every reasonable criteria (and yes, I’ve read the arguments about energy savings in cold climates).

Reusing the last argument is something that I frequently do when working in bash. I’ve more or less committed the !$ history expansion to memory. This makes it really easy to do something like touch myfile.txt and then immediately edit it with vim !$. I learned about another way to do this using escape-dot today. It works the same way. It’s nice to learn new stuff but i’ll probably stick with !