Recently, I stumbled upon the idea of 'now' pages on personal websites. I was looking for things to add to mine because I was (and still am!) pretty motivated to work on something related to this site. The idea of a now page is to tell visitors about what you're currently doing – what you're working on, what music or literature you're enjoying or what's otherwise happening in your life.

I just finished reading the excellent Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy¹ (perhaps more commonly known by the name of its first entry, The Three-Body Problem), a series of science-fiction novels about humanity's reaction to an alien civilisation's plan to invade Earth. In it, the author, Liu Cixin, tells an incredibely rich, nuanced and imaginative story about the future of humankind, in a way that I have never seen in science-fiction before. I was particularly impressed with his creative and unique inspirations drawn from real-world physics and astronomy, which rarely felt arbitrary or pseudo-scientific and made it apparent that he has a good amount of actual knowledge in these fields. One of the physical concepts that play an important role throughout the entire series stuck with me: quantum teleportation.

About 2-3 weeks ago, the Fediverse (the federated social network based on the ActivityPub protocol) was in quite a stir: one of its users announced that soon, it would be possible to follow and interact with BlueSky users and their posts from the Fediverse. This would be made possible using a third-party application, a bridge, that would automatically relay (public) posts back and forth. The kicker: you wouldn't have to move a muscle to be recognised by the bridge, your Mastodon account would be available on BlueSky as soon as anyone there would try to follow you. If you didn't want your posts to be shared on BlueSky, you would have to opt out. Needless to say, this caused a major backlash among the largely privacy-minded, tech-oriented fedi crowd.

There's a certain obsession on social media with "student food", which is frequently used as a term for food that essentially fulfills three criteria: any idiot can make it, you can afford it if you're broke and it doesn't taste like crap. Bonus points if it's healthy. This popularity makes sense: a lot of young people (who are the main audience for these videos) don't have much experience cooking, grocery prices keep rising¹ and good food can be a distraction from the perpetual misery in which we Zoomers tend to find ourselves these days.

A few days ago, I saw a post from Arne Brasseur sharing a concurrency problem and asking people how to solve it in Clojure (given an erroneous solution as the basis).