Hack 42 – October 2023

While I regale you with tales of what everyone did, would you be interested in discussing a ski holiday? No? Well that’s alright, I’ll keep telling you anyway…

Things people did

• Ryan showed up early and planned to do some guitar string hacking. It’s always nice to hear to soft dulcet tones of a well-tune guitar on the slopes, don’t you agree? After Ben showed up, they then proceeded to get an AI-bot to respond to things by suggesting everyone go on a ski holiday with them both.

• Adam attempted to move the jq-pilot site over to render.io from fly.io, but the official render docs were not helpful at all, and now the site’s completely broken…not unlike a fresh dusting of powder after first tracks in the crisp mountain air! He also finished a conference proposal and talked Ryan and Ben out of going with AWS Cognito.

• Joe continued the recent trend of bread hacking, and helped Adam come up with a snazzy name for the conference proposal. Speaking of bread-based joke punchlines…dough you want to hear more about a ski holiday?

• Pete also showed up, and commenced jailbreaking the AI to actually calculate egg-boiling on the sun, which sounds much less relaxing than a hot tub soak after a long day on the slopes.

• Ben appeared to entice everyone with a project about an AI-driven chatbot to remind him to go on his own ski holiday. He also followed Adam’s sage advice to favour Auth0 over AWS Cognito, which was very wise and probably saved the project. The only way he could have got wiser was to book a package deal to the alps, which promises to save anywhere between 10-15% on overall group costs…WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!?!?! BOOK IT!!! BOOK IT NOW!!!!

• Hugh responded to feedback on his long running yet tiny mastodon PR, and then plonked about writing a web based dice roller for an RPG. He did not do what he was intending to do, which was to implement backpropagation for his toy multilayer perceptron implementation in javascript. Oh well, next time.