Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 31/05/2023: Bayes Filter and Programming Wordle



  • Personal

    • Cranes and rain 🏗️☔

      In Monaco the marshalls are pretty good at getting crashed cars off the track despite the lack of space. Cranes lift wreckage out of the way to be collected later. This year in practice and qualifying we had some clear views of the underneath of a couple of cars, a part that designers would prefer kept secret. Here's a web site with a couple of good photos.

    • Actually going places

      Had a shockingly busy weekend as I actually went places where there were people.

      I had to wear my kf94 the whole time: on public transit, in the open air market because it was crowded, inside the theatre, &c. but community transmission is low enough at the moment that wearing the mask the whole time pretty much means that it was safe.

      So what all did we do?

      Well on friday I actually saw coworkers in person, grabbing food while spread out at an outdoor table and kvetching about internal politics of [college we work for]. Since I almost never talk to any of these people outside the context of a structured meeting, it was nice to feel like I'm recognized as being a person outside what I do for them as the coordinator on this project.

  • Technical

    • My online experience would have been so much less without cURL

      Me too, but with emphasis on his having created a tool I couldn't have lived online nearly so happily without. I'm not at all interested in opinions on Gemini's technical details.

      [...]

      I've found plenty of wonderful writing in Gemini spaces, and rather enjoy that the people writing so often tend to be command line types. I also rather enjoy how aggregation volume such as seen at Antenna these days gives me the sense of something new starting.

    • Bayes Filter

      I'm enjoying just having one class to worry about right now. Gives me more time to focus and digest.

      I just finished a project in which I had to implement a Bayes filter in a virtual robot. I won't delve into the math here, as exciting as that would be, but the gist is that it's a way to estimate unknowns using knowns and probability.

      The robot has a map of the world but doesn't know its location in the world. By following movement commands and detecting walls with its sensors, it can start to get an idea for its location. The fun part is that sometimes it'll randomly ignore movement commands and go a different direction, and its sensor readings are only correct most of the time.

    • Davinci Resolve

      I'm still doing my YouTube experiment [1], but it's slightly paused as I spend time learning Davinci Resolve. Davinci Resolve is a completely free video editing tool for Apple Macs. I've spent the past week watching videos of Davinci Resolve techniques.

    • Programming

      • Programming Wordle

        Inspired by Ravi's program (see my last phlog), I decided to give programming Wordle a try. To make it "more fun", I'm coding in Swift on my Mac. The version I'm writing is just for the command line, but if I get comfortable with Swift, I may just try to implement it as a GUI.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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