Six Papers and Four Toys

Midsems. Six papers. Somehow also the week I shipped the most small things.

The one that actually matteredCopied!

A stranger bought me a coffee on Ko-fi for an Obsidian plugin I made.

Someone on the other side of the world used a thing I built, liked it enough to send real money, and left a note. I just sat there smiling at it for a while. Nothing else this week comes close.

/goalsCopied!

Put up an unlisted page tracking what I'm saving for, one thing at a time. Every dollar fills the first goal before the next one sees anything.

First up is a MacBook Air M5. $240 of $1,560, so 15% of the way there. The page works out what I need per day, per week, per month, and projects a date from the current rate.

After that, an iPhone 17 and a PS5 Pro. Then a Porsche 911 Turbo S Cabriolet at $379,970, marked someday, which is doing a lot of work as a label.

Prices are the India sticker with GST, not the US list, because the US number quietly understates everything by a few hundred dollars.

Shared it in the server and it's live.

Four toysCopied!

Every one of these is a single HTML file with no libraries, built in the gaps between papers.

• url-is-the-site: a webpage that lives entirely inside its own link. There's no server. The URL is the site. You can write your own HTML and it hands you back a link that carries the whole page.
• collatz-coral: trace any number through the Collatz conjecture, hunt for champions, and watch the paths grow into something that looks like coral. A maths problem nobody can solve, rendered as a plant.
• mandelbrot-forever: the Mandelbrot set you can zoom into forever. GPU perturbation rendering down to 1e20x, double-double precision so panning still works when you're that deep, six palettes, live colour shifting, share links. Spent a while on torn stripes across the render before working out the putImageData origin was being doubled.
• art: shipped an art page with the first seven pieces, and a separate public repo holding the full-resolution originals, because they run 25 to 55MB each.

There's also crazy-ideas (private, not ready to be released yet), which started as a list in my notes and turned into a site I can edit from the browser behind my authenticator. It's at 463 ideas now. Four of the things above came off it.

I've been thinking about streaming myself building from that list on YouTube. Researching, learning, getting it wrong live. Partly because it'd be fun, partly because I'd like to be better in front of a camera.

BreakscaleCopied!

1,163 stars, 114 forks. Three more PRs merged from other people: kaihere14 twice, rebuilding note editing on a real WYSIWYG textarea and swapping share links to a compact wire format instead of compressed JSON, and csy20 documenting that cache hit rates are independent per hop.

The restCopied!

Also published on Medium for the first time, about six Claude Code setups that replaced things I used to do by hand. And got my first paid promo posts, two of them, which still feels strange to type.

Then today I rebuilt the homepage so it can be read in about thirty seconds, added a highlights marquee, and fixed star counts to use GitHub's actual yellow rather than my approximation of it.

What I found interestingCopied!

• playmusictheory : a visual instrument. You draw, and it plays. Genuinely a golden find.
• Whisky : video to ASCII art converter, written in C.
• bg0 : private, unlimited background removal that runs entirely in your browser.
• plexo : speeds up downloads by combining multiple network connections in parallel.
• create-better-t-stack : CLI for scaffolding end-to-end type-safe TypeScript projects.
• nermal-ide : a lightweight editor for, and I quote, programmers who vibe code.
• collie : a PWA for managing herdr on the go, Tailnet accessible.

RandomCopied!

The uptime counter on my laptop this week tells the whole story.

Six papers: DBMS, PoPL, Sociology, DAA, CoA and OS. The AC broke in the middle of it and my health was not great either. Two all-nighters that I can actually remember. They went well, though.

I'm also buying shoes. First pair in over four years, and the first thing I've bought with money I earned myself.

My Matiks streak is at 125 days, which has survived every exam week so far.

Discord reminded me what I was playing right before exams started, which is its own kind of accusation.

I also got a bot to run a speed test on its own machine, purely to see what it would say. 2 Gbps. Must be nice.

And this exists.

Exams are done. Something big might be coming, too. Not saying anything yet.

Let him cook.