andrewconl.in is tinkering

I’ve been pretty busy this week, so a little shorter than usual (although I still found plenty of time for some Cory Doctorow.

• First up, with no exaggeration, the Greatest Blog Post of All Time (so far). This is a full and thorough breakdown of the inner workings of a mechanical watch; something I had a vague interest in before this, but am now fully and whole-heartedly invested in. The content alone is enough to get me to recommend it, but it is paired with countless interactive animations and diagrams, which take this thing to another level. And that’s before you realise that they were all written, by hand, in OpenGL. Amazing stuff.

• Next up, something amazing in a different way: the Perseverance rover has now been active for 1000 days!

• Apologies for the YouTube link: here we have a great talk from Bryan Cantrill about so-called “AI doomers”, who genuinely believe that Chat-GPT is going to kill us all. Bryan breaks down this idea and why we should take it seriously, as well as repudiating some of the main “doomer” talking points (but in like, a fun way).

• This man has just completed 365 marathons in 365 days. An absolutely incredible achievement, and I hope he breaks the record. It is all for charity and he seems like a good guy.

Last up, a couple of links from Cory Doctorow (I told you I’d been reading him!):

• “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”. This is a great breakdown of the problems that now seems to be present in every software medium: the idea that you don’t own your games/music/films, you are merely renting them.

• It all started with a mouse. On January 1st 2024, Steamboat Willie (the first Mickey Mouse cartoon) finally enters the public domain. As Cory talks about, it is high time that Disney contributes back to the public domain space after benefitting from it for so long. I can’t wait for all the legally-prtoecte memes.

And that’s all for this week.

Thanks for reading!
A.