This page is inspired by Karlicoss’s exobrain
I want to make a better record of who I am, and the content I am interacting with. Eventually want to consolidate my bookmarks to make something like Nikiv.dev’s Wiki
Over the next few weeks I’ll start revamping this part of the site in accordance with Diving into the Dark Forest
Want to learn
Different tech and concepts I find interesting and cool links I want to look at more.
Game Dev
I just think games and their development are the coolest things. I find myself watching a lot of Extra Credits and Game Maker’s Toolkit videos.
Below are a few different tutorials and concepts I’ve been meaning to dive into
- Box2D tutorial — Struggled to find a good tutorial on this and really understand how to make a good feeling platformer
- libtcod — Roguelike dev engine
- Game Programming Design Patterns
- How to make a .io game
- Machinations — Tool to prototype game systems and economies
- How to make an RPG
- BYTEPATH Tutorial — A really nice all encompassing tutorial for a Love2D game
Petal Stack
I’m getting pretty tired of the NodeJS ecosystem and have been reading a lot about rails and why people really liked it back in the day. After working on a couple of projects where I had to figure out a ton of stuff like auth myself along with issues between client side vs server side code the opiniated all inclusive stack seems really appealing. Elxir + Pheonix + Liveview seems to be the modern successor in a lot of ways to rails.
Additionally, I’ve been reading a lot of the fly.io blog posts, and they talk about elixir a lot, which fly being a great platform for running it. As a fan of fly, and it being the place where I want to host a lot of projects in the future I want to dive more into it.
Massively concurrrent dataflow programming languages
What even are these, why they stopped being used.
Emulators and Hardware
Just interested in old hardware and why we need to emulate hardware to play ROMs
- Fabien Sanglard — Really cool posts on games and hardware
- Rodrigro Copetti Architecture of Consoles
- MiSTer FPGA
Compilers and Tree Parsers
Mainly stemming from a interest in neovim and how text editors work
- Crafting Interpreters
- How to write a tree-sitter grammar in an afternoon
- Let’s Build a Compiler
- From Source Code to Machine Code
Game AI
Interface Description Languages
Protocol Engineering
This comes from looking at a lot of different blockchain projects and noticing that the base for many of them aren’t a coin but rather a common protocol. I think my interest in this started back when I discovered IPFS before I found Filecoin. Then after learning a bit about how a DAO works through sart contracts I was wondering what else you could do by design domain specific protocols.
- Could you maybe design an entire set of laws and decision making using a DAO
protocol
- For example could you codify Robert’s Rules of Order into a protocol that you could then deploy as an instance of a “deliberative assembly”
- Also interested in this domain from the space of networking protocols. For the most part, the different protocols I’ve seen are fundamentally based on TCP and UDP. So how can you go about designing your own protocol for specific needs?
Thermodynamic Computing
Since I’ve gotten more active on Twitter over the last year I’ve become a bit familiarized with Extropic, and keep struggling to understand what the heck they are talking about.
I can’t tell if it’s a grift, if it’s real, or even really what the value of what they are talking about is. That said Normal Computing is apparently working on similar stuff I usually find their posts delightful and well written. So I want to spend some time diving into that and understanding what it really is and how it works.
- Thermodynamic Computing Beyond Moore’s Law and the von Neumann Bottleneck
- Probablistic Computing with P-bits
- A First Demonstration of Thermodynamic Matrix Inversion
- Thermodynamic Linear Algebra
- Thermodynamic AI: intelligence from nature
- Extropic Litepaper
Questions I want to explore
Financial Infrastructure
These questions stem from some the work I was doing with plain-text-accounting and trying to understand why it’s so hard to get my own financial data, and it’s a bit two-pronged in terms of what I want to know. First, I want to understand a bit more of creating my own personal finance stack. This includes the budgeting work I’ve done, but also stuff such as owning my own bank and investments. Some related platforms I was looking at.
- Column Developer Bank
- Composer no-code investment workflows
- Alpaca algotrading
- Bare Metal Bank Increase
The other idea I was thinking about is what is the actual technology that is at the backbones of the US or current world financial system. How does the stock exchange work? I know how a lot of decentralized or centralized exchanges in the web3 world work, but I don’t fully understand the current stock exchange. If it’s an exchange why I can trade on it directly? Wanted to frame this as if I was starting a new country how would I build a financial system.
Climate
How is technology being leveraged to help with climate change. I’ve seen a lot of different projects around tokenizing carbon credits, carbon sink technology, advocacy, but want to get more of an understanding of the landscape, and the current impact it is having.
Some links I’m looking at
- Climatebase — list of companies and jobs in the climate space
- Crypto Climate Accord — A sorta manifesto about how web3 companies can help with the climate crisis
- Climate Collective — Another (rival?) group of web3 organizations trying to help curtail the climate crisis.