It’s been a little over a year since my last post. Since you’re reading my personal blog you might be interested to know what I have been diving into in the meantime. Here’s a short list:

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning. I really think that AI systems need to be free to learn in order to become really useful. I was excited by Jeff Clune’s work on open-ended learning. I heard about his work through the TWIML podcast. Jeff Clune worked on this amazing project called POET where the AI system created obstacle courses and used them to train its parkour skills. I also got into Neural Operators which are a class of neural networks that map between functions instead of between vectors like normal neural nets. The sound like they are great for physics simulations.
• Personal knowledge graphs. I switched from Evernote to Obsidian and Joplin. I adapted my task management workflow using this post, by Ruben Berenguel, as inspiration. There was a lot of fiddling and learning involved, but I like how all my notes are in markdown text files now. I feel more free.
• Joined Mastodon social network. I’ve been really enjoying it. If you haven’t heard of it, it is a decentralized social network kind of like Twitter. It is part of the Fediverse which is a collection of different decentralized social networks that all interoperate together. Here’s my Mastodon profile, https://raphus.social/@davidruffner. Come check out the Fediverse!
• Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). I did a deep dive into it. I learned a lot from the Libre Lounge podcast, hosted by Serge Wroclawski, and the FOSS and Crafts podcast, hosted by Morgan Lemmer-Webber and Christine Lemmer-Webber. I’ve been slowly transitioning my apps to open source alternatives.
• I’ve been dabbling in the Elixir and Scheme programming languages. I took the Hands-On Guile Scheme for Beginners class and enjoyed it. I’m still looking to get better at the Actor Model, but have definitely gotten some exposure to functional programming.
• I did a dive into Category Theory. I think someone shared about it on Mastodon, and I was blown away by this series of lectures by Bartosz Milewski.
• I’m did a deep dive into Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication. It has helped me to grapple with what is going on between Israel and Gaza, and closer to home as helped with interpersonal conflicts. I’m taking the Bigbie Method intro course and enjoying it so far.
• FOSS video games. I’ve been having a lot of fun finding free and open source video games to play myself and to share with my two sons (5 and 2). Here are some of the top games so far:
  • SuperTuxKart. We all love it! I got some xBox360 controllers so we can play on the computer as if it is a gaming console. It’s fun finding fan-made tracks and cars too.
  • Sonic Robo Blast 2 a fun retro 3D Sonic game.
  • 0 A.D. An excellent real time strategy game like Age of Empires