Reading

I’m about 30% into Caliban’s War and I’m starting to think it’s even more of a page turner than the first book, Leviathan Wakes. I’m reading along with the same group I read Leviathan Wakes with, and it’s still fun sharing thoughts and progress as we go. I’m really looking forward to seeing where the rest of the book and series go.

Games

I finished my playthrough of Half-Life 2 with the new developer commentary a few days ago. It’s awesome to see Valve so engaged with the community these days, especially the Half-Life community of all things. There were actually multiple points in the commentary where they teased the possibility of a new game in the series. For me it’s not hard to remember a time when that would have been unheard of. Between that and the community learning from datamining that a new Half-Life project has seemingly been in development for the past 4-5 years, I think the next year or so will be a really exciting time to be a fan.

I’m also making slow and steady progress again in Metro 2033. Looking forward to finishing it and seeing what the rest of the series has to offer.

Cybersecurity

This is something I got into this week on a total whim. I’ve been working my way through the “starting point” labs on Hack The Box where they give you different challenges to hack into a virtual server that’s been set up for you. The ones I’m going through are still pretty guided and do a good job of walking you through the various tools and approaches you can use to get a foothold on a machine. It’s been a lot of fun to learn about a tech field I’m not as familiar with and I’m looking forward to giving some of the more puzzle-y challenges a try later on.

I obviously haven’t been at it for very long, but going through these kinds of exercises are something that I’d recommend to anyone who self-hosts. You learn a lot about common security mistakes and it gets you thinking about how someone might try to break into one of your machines if they wanted to.

Programming

I tested out Bluesky briefly the other week. I won’t bore you with my poorly informed take on it, but long story short I don’t really think it’s for me. At least right now. I may check it out again later.

One of my annoyances with it was the algorithm, but something really cool is that it supports custom algorithms called feeds. I spent some time this week looking into how to make my own.

It was fun figuring out how to subscribe to the firehose feed and do something interesting with the data coming in, but I quickly realized that a project like this one would take more resources than I was willing to put into it.

I’m thinking that my ideal algorithm would be one that prioritizes accounts which have a roughly proportionate ratio between followers and followings, but other than that it would largely be similar to your typical trending post algorithm. Unfortunately there’s no way to leverage work that has already been put into existing feeds. I’d have to reimplement basic functionality by putting every new post network-wide into my own database, identifying the popular ones, pruning the unpopular ones, and only then could I start doing something interesting with it. It just seems a bit wasteful when much of that work is already being done by the default feed and anyone else making a similar custom feed, especially when I’m not even really committed to Bluesky right now.

It’s still pretty early days for Bluesky though, so I expect a lot of the tooling will improve, and probably on the sooner rather than later side of things. So like the rest of Bluesky, this is something I may keep an eye on and try again in the future.

— JP