Hack 55 – November 2024

Picking up steam at the end of the year, this was a very fast and furious hackday with new revelations, deployments, attention to cost optimisation, and even some Irish Gaelic!

Needed way more ski suggestions, though!

Things people did

• Adam got the hackday off to a sterling start, crafting a delicious prompt to get Claude to implement a feature in JQ Pilot that the only ever user asked for about a year and a half ago. This was done while sipping morning coffee completely on the phone. He also fully moved both jkew.party and jayq.party to run on cloudrun, and boasts a cold-start time from zero containers of about 500ms for the full initial request. And later Adam was so enamoured with Hugh’s descriptions of how awesome the ranked-choice voting in Ireland is that he immediately memorised the entirety of Oro Se Do Bheatha ‘Bhaile.

• Jacob continued hacking on the Pokemon game and made tremendous progress, despite Ben’s fake news on how to initialise an Array. He fixed his format insertion problems with some single bendy quotes, and did get some good advice from Ben to DevOps his local dev flow and run a local python http server for hot reloads. Ryan gave a rad assist with some RegEx knowledge and the finished project is available at: https://jacobrussell-eng.github.io/Pokedexle/

• Ben added more cameras and microphones to his multiple camera multiple mic multipledictaphone, which is a bit like the whispermaphone, but if it were made by the Twiceler! He also did a bunch of offline audio processing. It is available at: https://remotehack.space/audiovis/ …and Adam is desperately trying to avoid starting a side-project off of it…

• Ryan successfully helped Jacob out with the RegEx, but did not successfully dissuade Ben from joining a separate channel to talk about Ski holiday planning. As if we hadn’t made a whole chatbot to obviate the need to even discuss this stuff! We found out after the fact that he was using a desk treadmill the whole time!!!

• Hugh worked on election simulation code and made discoveries: the alacritty config migration is annoying and their error messages don’t say where the error is, using lazyvim requires learning plugins (and it too doesn’t show you where errors are), the counting in real life of the Irish election is long because it turns out it’s quite a complicated and maybe non-deterministic algorithm (which seems like a potential issue), and in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty four ts-node still requires a huge amount of wrangling to just run a normal typescript file (but an extremely confusingly named module called tsx (THAT ALREADY WAS SOMETHING ELSES NAME!!!) can do it.