In this edition of Interesting Things we're covering the technology of the Metaverse.
I've been reading Matthew Ball's The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything.
Whether or not you believe the Metaverse is a thing that will exist, or should even exist, the technological challenges that need to be overcome are interesting.
Git stash allows you to quickly push local changes to a stack-based storage area, thereby giving you a clean working state without creating commits or branches.
It is useful when manipulating previous commits, or prototyping with different changesets. Git stash only happens on your local machine and cannot be pushed to a remote server.
An Amazon Resource Name (ARN) uniquely identifies a thing in AWS. This is a quick recap on how they are structured.
Depth First Search (DFS) and Breadth First Search (BFS) are two searching algorithms that traverse tree or graph data structures.
They are very similar in implementation and only differ in the choice of which node to visit next.
Quick reviews of three books I've recently read.
I have previously written about using FFmpeg to convert H264 into MP4, running in a Docker container.
Running desktop applications in Docker negates the need to install anything, and isolates processes more effectively than something like Brew would. I needed to use FFmpeg again this week, and so spent a little bit of time setting it up properly - using Docker. Jessie Frazelle wrote a post in 2015 named Containers on the Desktop that was the inspiration for doing this.
Everything has a cost. Some costs are obvious. Money costs, time costs, overhead costs. Most, but not all, apply to writing tests for your software.
I recently read Rebooting AI, as book discussing how the recent focus on Deep Learning as the path towards Artificial General Intelligence is flawed. It was a good read, and made many interesting points. It left me wanting to learn more about other areas of AI, and luckily there was a 'Suggested Reading' list at the end.
I like Ansible, but it has flaws. I'm going to assume you know what Ansible is, and that you have used it before.
Basic Ansible is amazing, compared to the alternatives. When the alternative is half-baked bash scripts that rely on special environmental state, and obscure notation that is used infrequently, it is not hard to better it. I've used other automation tools too. Puppet is the other automation tooling that I've spent considerable time with. Puppet and I did not agree with each other as it required me to learn hundreds of special syntax rules almost immediately.
I use LiveReloadX to automatically reload the browser as I work on my Hakyll-generated blog. LiveReloadX, and most other automatic reloading utilities work by watching the file system and notifying something in the browser to refresh the page.