Photon Ships and Elden Ring

Quieter week than usual, most of it went into wrapping up PHOTON properly and the rest into Elden Ring. Not much else to report, honestly.

What I worked onCopied!

• PHOTON: merged PR #1, the lithium-matcher-integration branch, into main. Along with that I did a full docs pass: rewrote the README around features, benchmarks and honest scope, added architecture and benchmark notes, a proper contributing guide structured around bug reports and hot-path rules, a code of conduct, security policy, issue forms and a PR template. Also wired up CI to build, test, and lint on every push with a sanitizer job, added dependabot for GitHub Actions, and an editorconfig. Basically took it from "cool project I built" to something that looks like it could take outside contributors.
• Also pushed a small fix earlier in the week: inlined calibrate_tsc_ghz, moved consumer/receiver threads to use core pinning, and bumped buffer size in the ITCH replayer.
• thy-xev (this site): added a friends.json + CoolPeople component in the footer, small feature just to shout out people. Also converted project preview images to webp for a perf win, and dropped a couple of blog posts.

What I found interestingCopied!

• bitcoin/bitcoin : went down a rabbit hole reading through the actual Bitcoin Core source, humbling codebase.
• KittenTTS : a state-of-the-art TTS model under 25MB, kind of insane that it's that small and still usable.
• fancy-cat : a PDF reader for the terminal using the Kitty image protocol, going to try this out on my setup.
• ponytail : "makes your AI agent think like the laziest senior dev in the room, the best code is the code you never wrote." funny premise, kind of true.

RandomCopied!

Didn't do much else this week if I'm honest, mostly just PHOTON docs and chores. Played a lot of Elden Ring though, first real playthrough, and it's consuming me the way everyone said it would.

Also fought a Crucible Knight at night which was genuinely terrifying the first time.

Still very early in, level 19 and 2 and a half hours in, barely scratched the surface. No spoilers please.