jack

"Glenn Cummings says he is just "starting out" on his political journey and would be satisfied with a single vote tonight. Zero votes would be embarrassing."

That's the guy with a skull painted on his face, a rainbow beanie, and green sunglasses. Sadly, he doesn't appear to have any platform, or any other information about himself in any form. But good news, he got 7 votes. He was last.

Second-last was Woke Trump Carrzee.

Third-last was Gerry Smith, who doesn't even have a profile picture, but beat Glenn Cummings and Woke Trump Carrzee.

Fourth-last was the "Everyone is God" party candidate, which was better than I expected.

There's a lot more independents, people standing for personal reasons, etc and some of the weirder novelty candidates.

I think some people dropped out, I don't see the guy dressed up as ending fox hunting, nor the guy advertising a fish and chip shop.

Higher up the last are independents and people standing for unrepresented parties someone might conceivably support (including some probably reasonable ones and some awful ones).

Third place was "Rejoin EU", although only with 1% of the vote. All the non-major-party candidates got 10% of the vote, ~4,0000 votes.

Then Binface got ~10k (27%) and Farage got ~20k (63%).

It looks like Clacton has 20,000 people who'll vote UKIP if possible and Con if not, 5,000 people who'll vote Con-or-else-UKIP, 5,000 people Con-else-nothing, and 10,000 who vote for other parties. Including 10,000 people who usually vote but don't in by-elections. And 40,000 people who can't or don't vote.

I re-read the 1967 story 9 Billion Names of God by Arthur C Clarke, where a Tibetan monastery are calculating all possible names of God, which they think will be some sort of culmination of the universe.

When I first read it I hadn't noticed that it was written when using a computer to print all the possible combinations of something was still quite new.

It does feel like all those permutations make sense in a Buddhist monastery, but AFAIK he must have based that on Kaballah and made up the connection to Buddhism.

He wrote it in a long weekend away. But he added a comment that there was something wrong with the maths and he'd needed to fix it later so I guess he didn't QUITE finish it in one go :)

The numbers be gave were 9 billion names, 15,000 years by hand, 100 days by computer printout. A custom alphabet. 9 letters at most. And a few combinations are forbidden. I'm guessing he chose 9 billion as a good sounding title and a reasonable length of time, but that something^something didn't quite come out at 9 billion, so added the forbidden combinations or custom alphabet to adjust it a bit.

Ultimate edition of Innovation (photo on FB), with tweaked rules and all the expansions. I didn't know there were *any* expansions.

I assumed the expansions would be more variety of base cards, but no, instead they're *all* add ons which add a new sort of card to each age. The cards from each expansion are drawn in a different way, and act differently, but can be melded into the player board somehow like base cards.

So far the extras only come up every so often, but matter when they come up.

I can't believe the new edition added a new age, age 11, prudence, after age 10, the information age. But it *does* seem to fit. More powerful than age 10, but less wildly accelerating. I guess they can add a new age every 15-20 years when real world society has moved on far enough...

This game was with cities. I *again* relied on mathematics to skip through ages, but this time managed to score just enough to get the achievements first rather than second as I went. The game ended when I got computers, internet, and a couple more cards that meld and execute a card from age 10, catapulting my board into three age 10 cards, one age 9, and one age 1.

TIL more about VeggieTales. I had heard they avoided depicting Jesus as a vegetable. But apparently they specifically (a) will not show Jesus as a vegetable and (b) do not show the vegetables as having a redemptive relationship with Christ.

The show shows some vegetables living on a kitchen counter. Those characters then morph into a Christian-friendly story, either an old testament bible story, or a contemporary "someone learns an important lesson about goodness" story. So you have Larry the vegetable transplanted into a Biblical Joseph role. In the story, God exists. But the plain vegetables aren't Christian. Because the creators think that Jesus died for *humanity* and any other intelligent species was not fallen (like Angels) or not been saved (like Demons) or had its own relationship with God (like Narnia).

And even in the story, none of the characters are ever Jesus, because that would seem disrespectful. What does happen in the later series is that the characters portray nativity plays, where a unnamed non-Christian baby vegetable acts as a non-Jesus baby human character, who is pretending to be baby Jesus. Also in the early series there's a couple of nativity stories with a crib, but you only see golden light from the crib. Or sometimes a swaddled form, but not whether it contains a doll, vegetable, human and/or god :)

https://justinkuiper.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the

I made ten levels for the programming puzzle game I wrote in rust!

Play online at the link: https://cartesiandaemon.github.io/rusttilegame/programming_release.html

It's clunky in several places but you can successfully play! Drag the instructions onto the flowchart. Press space to start the crab robot moving. Get them to the exit.

Leave the tab open, there's not yet any save :)

It's currently best played in a browser on a PC. (It works on mobile except that you need a spacebar. You can also build an exe for windows or Linux if you want, repo https://github.com/CartesianDaemon/rusttilegame)

To catch the last possible September afternoon, next weekend we'll be in the garden of the Green Dragon down by the river from about 1pm-5pm.

The pub opens from 12pm including Lebanese street food so some people may arrive earlier.

Everyone is welcome, including partners and children if you think they'd enjoy it. If you're not in Cambridge, you're very welcome but I don't expect you, we'll make time any time you are here! :)

It works! I added a toggle to the running app I use Fitocracy to display paces instead of speeds.

The first time I've done anything on a regular android app, and the first time I've really edited an open source project.

Fitocracy was the only app that could show me current speed, average speed, and average speed for less than the whole run without unrealistic hoops. But i was annoyed the speeds were in speeds, not paces.

Hopefully that is just what I need myself. I will try to get it into the original project too as it seems like a worthwhile improvement.

Swam 2mi downstream from Grantchester to the rollers. That's half a mile further than I did to the canoe club at the Slow Swim.

I was out of practice, muscles were v tired but it was v nice to do. I could have gone farther with another little sit down.

I'd been interested to see if I could do that last stretch into town. It's not really good swimming, more punts and more concrete edges, but it was easy to do. I hadn't realised it was only half a mile.

I have previously swum down from Hauxton Mill to Byron's Pool, and Byron's pool to Grantchester. I guess that adds up to 4.5mi of Granta and Cam, compared to ~20mi length of the Cam (excluding the Great Ouse below the Little Ouse and the Granta above Hauxton Mill)

But when they arrive in the jungle near Lucy's family's village, they immediately meet Lucy's sister, one of the young elders of the tribe, who implores their help. Her sweetheart and babydaddy (but not coparent) Maku has disappeared on a recent hunt, can they find him?

Challenges

The jungle has many dangers from poisonous plants, roving dinosaurs, and capricious spirits. The village have a traditional song, recorded in knotted-cord writing often carried like rosaries, recounting the main survival prohibitions. Lucy tries to drill the song into Ludari and Slide, but Scunt takes the "remember the warnings" challenge and runs with it, coining the punk power ballard version "♫ DO NOT EAT THE BERRIES ♫" which becomes a complete hit amongst the party and later the village.

The party lament the absence of their ranger friend who has the only survival skill above 2 and knows the village members well, but they lean on their social skills, common sense, and physically restraining Scunt from provoking village members, spirits and dinosaurs from attacking her to successfully navigate deeper into village territory, avoiding threats more serious than a pile of sleeping rainbow feathered foot-tall cute therapods (their similarly-sized cousins amplify the cuteness with a mesmerising gaze, as do their larger cousins).

The Plot Complications

The party unravel the story of Maku Guphin. He led an important hunt to try to alleviate the last few years' lean hunting, which was ruined by a young overearger hunter called Twinnech. Maku and Twinnech were hunt-lovers and Maku offered himself for judgement to the village's protector spirit the Spindlebeast, to save Twinnech from doing the same.

The party explore options, considering alternative sacrifices, and have a horrific realisation. The Spindlebeast likes sacrifices with meat but also magical reagents. They're familiar with the rainbow mesmerising dinosaurs. They have a familiar for scouting, they have detect magic, they have a variety of skills which complement the local hunters and could make a significant addition to the village's hunt, with more than enough to offer as sacrifice.

But neither the GM nor the players had expected the session to bring in "the party need to kill the cute animals", so that's a new experience for us all! I would never have made them do that on purpose, but when the players found the proposal it seemed inevitable, and we all agreed, the dinosaurs are hunted anyway, it's silly to pretend they're not, and better to save the human.

The Finale

The players rush through a frantic day of hunting, expedited by rapid-resolving a lot of attempts with one or two summary rolls without playing out the "So we have a big sack, the prey are over there, is this going to work...?" They sneak back to the shrine just before dusk when the hunters have left and supplicate the Spindlebeast for Maku's return.

Ludari leads the braveness charge in putting himself forward for judgement for the proposal. The Spindlebeast expresses its frustration at the lean hunting and Maku's stubbornness, but accepts their offering. There is much partying and singing back in the village, and new songs and clues to bring to future sessions.

Stupid tech questions.

At work the source tree has a bunch of different components. A couple are "big" like the FPGA image, and the whole device image which includes that, plus a linux distro which includes some of the other components as well. The other components are mostly "small", small individual C/C++ programs or python packages.

The small components are mostly managed by conan package manager. This is ever so useful for assuring that each explicitly lists its dependencies and doesn't just depend on lots of header and source files from elsewhere in the source tree. But we are not using most of the functionality of a package manager -- everything in the source tree is assumed to be compatible, nothing depends on an earlier version of anything else or anything.

In effect the package management (a) is an easy way to install the latest thing on a different computer, as is done during the automated tests which interface with real hardware and (b) a convenient way of caching results between different builds. This doesn't matter that much for most of the components which use the package manager, but does matter for the FPGA image which takes 40 minutes to build, and is usually downloaded from jenkins rather than built fresh.

What I don't like is that there's no way to say "build everything necessary". You need to know all the individual components to build, or the sequence of jenkins jobs to trigger. And as there have been more added, I think it's got less convenient to build all the ones which could have been affected by a change, and to make sure you haven't missed any.

The other concern is that at the moment, "packages" built locally or from main are usually identified by a "release" number, but that is not always different. Whereas other builds identify packages by a git hash, which we would like to use in more places, but doesn't make it clear which is "the latest".

This is not all how we want it to be! It was put together for valid reasons but not planned in advance.

What I want is... a way of building all the different components that need to be built. With some (but not necessarily conmplete) ability to figure out prerequisites, or "which things have changed". Which is effectively... a build system. It feels like it should be obvious what build system to use, but I'm not finding it obvious yet!

Like, that could be make. But one requirement is that it's easy to say "the linux/windows version of this python package depends on the linux/windows version of this C++ package" and "the fragle configuration of the device image depends on the blah configuration of the fpga" and Make doesn't easily support that sort of parameterised target. I think?

I could write a simple script to "build everything". I quite like that. But... surely writing a NEW build system isn't correct?

We could use one of the systems we have, like conan. But conan seems optimised to be a package manager installing prerequisites, not "rebuilding these directories". Bitbake seems very well designed for this but is designed for building embedded linux systems and is probably more heavyweight than we want. And atm each component is built from some command line, we don't really want conan build system invoking other conan build systems.

It might be simpler if we moved away from the packaging and used an old school "The outputs are HERE in the source tree. You use the ones in the source tree and build them if necessary." But I'm not sure.

There's a bunch of ways which would be fine but maybe not great. It feels like there must be some standard answer but I'm not sure what it is. Thoughts?