Portland Rose Festival America 250 Fireworks
Not a bad little display in downtown over the last weekend.
A case against backpacking it
A decade of backpacking through countries like Laos, Armenia, and El Salvador has taught me that travel makes poor therapy, finding yourself abroad won’t solve the problems waiting for you back at home, and focusing on the journey rather than the destination isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.
I thought this article by a seasoned backpacker tells the other half of the story that is never really told by the influencer, digital nomad, and travel industry.
Backpacking it had its roots in things like the Grand Tour and hippie culture of the 60’s and 70’s – but now has morphed into therapy and a personal journey. And as he points out, it’s pretty poor means of therapy. That self-centered focus may not actually be healthy for you – and probably even less helpful for the communities you are traveling through.
He talks about how many are actually just running from reality – something I saw a lot of. You find people looking to grab life by the tail and take lots of pictures, others going through mid/quarter life crisis, others recovering from burnout, others on sabbaticals from work they hate, others trying to figure out what is next, and people who simply haven’t found a path in life.
Backpack for too long, and you’ll forget who you were prior to leaving home. Backpack too often, and you’ll start to feel like you’re in a constant state of passing through, even when you aren’t on the road.
I backpacked around Europe in my early 20’s on several trips. It was an economical and very fast way to see and experience a lot of things in a short time. I made bucket lists of exotic places and experience I wanted to go see – and did at least 75% of them. But now in my 50’s – I stopped making that list. It was after I took a package from my job and really pulled back on my running around that I realized how much time I was wasting chasing something I was never going to find ‘out there’. I learned this from hiking every weekend. You keep chasing more and more exciting places and longer adventures to fill the same hole that you’ll still feel when it’s done.
As a person of faith, I should have known this. But sometimes you have to re-learn the hard way. Travel absolutely enriches our lived experience and helps us realize that the world doesn’t have to work the same ways. Hiking was a great way to stay in shape.
But you’re not going find answers out there. You’re going to find them ‘in here’ – in your soul – wherever you are. Yes, there are circumstances that will make that harder and maybe environments you should leave. But some of the deepest happy days of my life were not spent traveling to an exotic location or some exciting show or trying an exotic dish – it was sitting in a quiet chapel praying to a God who loves me and who’s relationship with me was completely fulfilling. Without words. Without doing. Without moving. Simply sitting in endless peace and being loved.
Try it. Instead of a big trip – take a big sit. Go sit somewhere quietly and ask God to come into your heart and open your eyes. Give yourself to Him, and ask Him to give Himself to you.
Epic npm mini Shai-Halud attack is astounding
This hack resulted in literally 100’s of packages to be compromised, signed, and shipped via NPM. It then infected end-users systems, stealing credentials and then wiping hard drives if someone tries to remove it. It then tried used those permissions to submit even more infected packages.
It did this via a clever permissions exploit via a github action. Give this a watch.
Tron Electroluminescent (El) Tape
Want to create your own clothes that have lighted tape/lines like recent Tron movies? Want to create unique lighting at your next event or home? Want to wrap your car in illuminated panels?
Look no further than Ellumiglow. They sell a wide variety of wearable electroluminescent solutions for home and clothing.
The original Tron costume lighting solution supposedly was created by a company called Oryon Technologies Inc and the product was Elastolite EL Panels – but they don’t seem to exist or have a web presence anymore.
There are hobbyist selling complete Tron cosplay kits, and others that show you how to screen-print your own El clothing:
Links:
DeepSWE rates your LLM
Rating exactly how well an AI does on tasks has been an open field. There are benchmarks, but there have been lots of arguments these current early benchmarks are too limited or biased. A new player is on the field and they seem to have discovered that some benchmarks are actually evaluating incorrectly a shocking amount of times.
A startup called Datacurve released a benchmark it says does a much better job. DeepSWE, a 113-task evaluation spanning 91 open-source repositories and five programming languages, produces a dramatically wider spread among the same frontier models.
It’s biggest shock is that it claims many benchmarks aren’t even correct. Their tests cover a pretty impressive and wider range of characteristics such as bigger, more representative tasks. They avoid what they call ‘contamination’ that results from benchmarks that rely on simple Github coding samples that some models simply regugitate vs truely generate. And most damning – they found that some benchmarks verifiers (the part of the code that verifies what the AI built is correct) gives false positive/negative rates from 8-24% of the time.
More benchmarks and more testing is valuable for evaluating models – so hopefully these guys will help push the industry to more scrutiny and reproducible real-world results.
You can even go download it and try it on your own models.
Links:
Ache
When you were at home growing up, each day felt so long. Now that you’re grown and on your own, it feels like it never lasted long enough.
Sutekh the voice actor
Gabriel Woolf was re-united with the prop Sutekh mask he wore in the 1975 episodes of Pyramids of Mars. He puts the mask on and re-creates the voice perfectly. Not bad after 50 years.
Buying Ethanol free gas
Ethanol gas proports to reduce air pollution; but it’s not without side effects. Gas mileage goes down by about 3-4%. Ethanol is hygroscopic which means it attracts water and can lead to corrosion and water-fuel phase separation over time can damage rubber seals or create gum deposits.
Therefore, it’s recommended that equipment with small engines, motorcycles, classic cars, and especially watercraft should use non-ethanol gas. But where to find it?
Pure-gas.com lets you look up stations in just about any state that sells ethanol free gas. Be ready to pay for it though – usually $0.20-$1 more per gallon.
Hiking an intense Italian Dolomite Via Ferrata
Eric Hanson decided to hike for 6 days across the Brenta Dolomites using an intense via ferrata trail between mountain huts. You can see some of the trails such as the Via Ferrata Castiglioni and Bocchette Centrali while staying at the XII Apostoli and other amazing mountain huts.
World’s smallest hard drive
Before flash memory became ubiquitous, hard drives were the only means of bulk storage. The Nokia N91 cell phone had a tiny Toshiba (MK4001MTD) 4GB hard drive in it. You can even still buy some of these old phones if you want a working version.