From skiplists to intergalactic probes.
DuckDB 1.5.2: SQL database that runs on laptop, server, in the browser
Later I discovered that a skiptree is closely related to a real data structure called a skip graph, a distributed data structure based on skiplists. Which just goes to show that there is nothing new under the sun. Whatever crazy idea you have, there’s a good chance some other crazy person has already done it. Moral of the story: you never know when an exotic data structure will save you a lot of time and money.
Three constraints before I build anything : I’m a big believer in that constraints are essential for innovation. This post is very well articulated, better than I could have expressed.
Website streamed live directly from a model : Ridiculously useful. I would love to see their system prompt. I guess whatever you type in search box is passed to one model to do lookup and generate detailed prompt for image generation model with their distinct “style”. You can type almost anything: Revelation Space Lighthugger, Raspberry PI 4, La Sagrada Familia, Harry Potter’s Room, it does a very competent job. Me and Lin Lin are having a lot of fun with this.
Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game
Perhaps my favorite pause method involves devs freezing time and then taking a screenshot of the game which the game then uses as the background behind the pause menu UI, letting them get up to all sorts of nasty business behind that image, like not rendering enemies or even moving the player to an empty room.
Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)
It would be ruinously difficult to send over a large colonisation fleet; a much more efficient idea is to send over a small payload that then builds what is required in situ. This is the concept of von Neumann probes: entities capable of constructing copies of themselves from the resources they find [15, 7]. More specifically, we would want them to be universal constructors: capable of constructing many things, including other universal constructors (which need not be identical).