Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

New algorithm looks like the best approach I've tried yet, though there's still some room for improvement that I'd like to explore before attempting to upstream my changes. I'm also tempted to do a thorough refactoring, but the program is still <1kLOC so *shrug*

I'll see how that does with today's roasting.

The stupid simple optimizations turned out to be effective and I confirmed another bottleneck in the original code that caught my eye when I first saw it (I didn't change it then because I was less familiar with the code and performance wasn't yet a problem) which is letting the latest version of the code run a lot faster than it used to even with a heavier weight algorithm running alongside the original.

Phone calculators should have an easy and obvious undo so when you hit C instead of 7 you don't have to start over. (or a good RPN mode)

Looking at some performance optimizations but resisting the urge to over-complicate things until I've had a solid chance to try the dumb simple thing and see if that's good enough.

While running errands, the radio was doing that thing where it's mostly playing one station, but then it briefly cuts over to a different station for just a single word like, "confusion" or "radar". I think whatever the other program may have been something like a very slow paced word based game show.

Cat time

Was not fast enough to photograph the cat sticking her tongue out at the neighbors setting off firecrackers.

The cat was hiding behind the front door when I got home today so I opened the door, failed to see the cat, looked on the couch, still no cat, and then I asked, "where's the cat?" which let me see her. Then she meowed.

That might be long term motivation to port the whole codebase over to something that can run on my laptop.

Part of the performance surprise is that I'm prototyping the algorithms on my laptop which granted is a few years old, but was pretty high end when I got it and the math library in use sees what I'm doing and says, okay, I'll just offload all that to the GPU and I get my result instantly, then I try it on the hardware it needs to run on and all of that gets pushed back to a much slower CPU.

First test batch on the new algorithm ran into performance issues that makes it kind of painful to use, but it slashed the error in half compared to the original code. With a sample size of 1 it's not as if that's meaningful, but I've made some adjustments aimed at improving performance and I'll see how that does after staff lunches are finished.

It looks like my home Internet bill got a few dollars cheaper. I wonder how that happened.

Spent some time working on another new approach for generating measurements from the roaster cam. Results on some previously gathered test data look a lot better (25% error reduction, but I suspect I can push that farther by cranking up a parameter that I just didn't have enough data to push farther). I'll take my best guess at an implementation based on last night's exploration and work on getting a larger set of testing data for work on future refinements.

Their mascot is a reasonably cool looking fish.

The credit union just sent me an email about what I think is a sports team branded debit card that I could get, but it has no mention of which sport that team plays and I don't have prior knowledge of the team, so I guess I'm not in the target demographic for that product.