February 26, 2025
- Figured out how the wordhoard library actually works and was able to select
a subset of the sources for grabbing the synonyms. Turns out the Collins dictionary
has a pretty aggressive DDoS setting in their cloudflare setup, so removing that
as a source significantly sped up fetching synonyms.
- Also found a list of the top 20K words in the English language. It’s interesting
that all of these are sourced from various corpuses of text and that so far I
haven’t been able to find a canonical source from a “dictionary.”
- Decided to fetch the synonyms for the top 20K list and store ‘em in a tsv so
we have a reliable data source. The script is gonna take a long time, but I feel
pretty confident it will eventually get there.
- Went to an interesting talk from the folks at Avantos about how they used
go generate
and parsing the application’s AST to figure out which types implement a particular
interface, allowing them to implement union types.
- Recommended watching talks by Bret Victor, particularly Inventing on Principle for thoughts on developer tooling
Also wanted to get set up with the pen plotter, so did some setup steps:
- Install the PL2303 Serial Driver from the App Store
Skipped ahead in the Sunfounder tutorial to learn about how Neopixels / LED strips
work, and started watching Lesson 52.
Important notes about Neopixels:
- The tutorial is powering the strip from the Raspberry Pi, but that has limited power. Attempting to power more than ~8 or so lights is going to burn out the power so likely need to provide a different power source for a larger strip. Look at the specs for what DC power supply is needed for the strip. All the grounds need to be connected. (Rewatch the video for reference when it’s time)