August 2024

2024-08-03

📖 Wuthering Heights

I tried listening to Bronte's classic on Libby
I really tried, I did, I made it 30% of the way through. I am so lost. I can't follow the characters or story, Heathcliff has reappeared and is a rogue of some sort.
I'm returning the book early and reading the beginning of the plot on Wikipedia, maybe I'll give it another go someday.
(ok based on a quick read of the beginning of the article on wikipedia, in which I think I've avoided spoilers, I think I should try again, but in text vs audio)

🐎 Si vs Bio FLOPs

The s.o.t.a. H100
- FP64: ~34 TFLOPs (80GB, 3TB/s mem bandwidth)
- FP64 with tensor core: ~64 TFLOPs
- FP8/int8 with tensor core: ~4000 TFLOPs (!)
- bfloat16: ~1000 TFLOPs estimated
- one H100 node is about $3/hr
comparing gates from a very cool 2011 Science paper by Qian and Winfree "Scaling Up Digital Circuit Computation with DNA Strand Displacement Cascades"
- AND gate: 5hrs
- OR gate: 12hrs

📖 Atlas Six

Olivie Blake's novel, I listened to a good chunk of it via Libby, but I couldn't finish -- I just found it hokey when the swat team came to fight, and honestly, in the audiobook production, I didn't like that each character had their own reader.
the plot is sort of a Harry Potter-type world + competition, but it's all closer to R/PG-13
it was originally self-published via Kindle, how cool

💧 Swiss Munitions

NYT story of a $58k prize to develop ideas for removing (or encapsulating?) discarded munitions left hundreds of feet below the surface in various Swiss lakes
We saw one of these lakes about a year ago -- Lake Thun, beautiful!

It would be a fun challenge -- there's no word on the size of what's down there or, like, what containers they expect to find.
The question posed in the article is whether the munitions can be removed without disturbing more sediment or further breaking apart things as you take em out

📖 Berlin Game

I'm listening to Len Deighton's 1983 novel via Audible, fantastic!
James Lailey with a really great narration, he's adding a ton to the characters -- there is extensive dialog
Deighton is right up my alley and the book already has a lot of parallels to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which I loved. I heard about the author from a profile on the unapologetic Palantir CEO Alex Karp.

😬 Lunarvim pains

The disadvantages of this pre-baked neovim setup are showing..
I was attempting to setup ruff alongside pyright and things still don't work to my satisfaction, e.g. linting errors not clearing after they've been corrected or plugins failing to load if the py file, when it opens, has a syntax error (!?)
I find it tough to locate and change defaults or even to correctly clear various caches if I want to install/reinstall things
I'm uninstalling/re-installing the binary, using LvimCacheReset, MasonUpdate, LvimSyncCorePlugins and manual LspInstall
for now I'm surrendering back to the defaults sans ruff