Recurse Center Week 2: Thu Jan 11

Attended the first presentations of the batch. Learned about a bunch of things I had never heard of!

• Zach Ahn (Safari web extension)
• Quinten (Rust raycaster)
• Roger (How transformers work)
• Pietro (Nim)
• Thomas (XML Chaos to Nix Clarity)
• Jeff (Memory card creator)
• Julian (Owntracks — walking tracker, distance and elevation)

Random interesting things I took away from them:

• Transformer ML architecture led to breakthroughs in language translation. (Roger)
• Really like Roger's inclusion of takeaway lessons, hope to steal sometime.
• Bret Victor was the one who first conceived of Explorable Explanations. (Pietro)
• Jeff's reflections on pixiereport include a list of "learning edges" which is awesome, also hope to steal.
• Elevation tracker: best not to use phone position (too inaccurate), rather use lat and long to lookup on elevation table — lots of cool libraries for this. (Julian)

Worked some more on containerizing Synthia.

• A victory of focus: was tempted to completely overhaul the project's file structure, but I resisted. 💪🏻