Hack 52 – August 2024

A return to the late Summer dolldrums and cooler climes saw a more popular hackday with participants germinating all kinds of interesting ideas!

Things people did

• Ben got off to a rousing start, showing us all the GitHub Copilot Workspace functionality, which is hashtag amazeballs. We created and reviewed a PR to update the frontend for the in-browser AI functionality for chrome canary, and it was totally automated. You can check it out here (but you’ll need chrome canary, as the error message we introduced via GHCW indicates). He also installed VeilidChat and sent Adam a message.

• Ryan showed up bright and early to listen to Adam rubber-duck on some more product-minded concerns, interwoven with concepts of assessment and general research-based inquiry to learning transfer. Then he left to deal with a shed, and didn’t make pizza in it.

• Adam got some great advice from Ryan about the above, and then decided to work out how much he was paying to host headless veilid nodes across 5 continents and multiple cloud providers and work out which ones to shut down. Probably the first remote hack where he actually reduced cloud costs! He also received a VeilidChat message from Ben and sent a reply. Oh, and Adam was able to just delete all the baselime integration stuff in his personal AWS account, which is what was actually running up the bill on Cloudwatch metric streaming.

• Panda entertained Ben’s tomfoolery, started heating up their Flair coffee maker using a switchbot thing, and installed their old one-node-Raspberry-Pi k8s “cluster”, updating the OS through some major versions and k3s.

• Joe popped in to coin the term “conflict-free data” and propose an anti blood-data campaign against data originating in conflict zones.

• Hugh left no trace in the discord chat (so Adam is relying on memory) but followed the massive guide book he bought on sharpening wood chisels so that he could improve his joinery skills, all in service to eventually making guitars. It was more or less the scene from Malcolm in the Middle with Bryan Cranston changing a light bulb (watch it if you’ve not had the pleasure).