Posts

Walking in downtown Ho Chi Minh City these days I feel a bit nostalgic. I am brought back to 6 years ago, when I was staying there during Covid. Streets were much more quiet back then ! I have fond memories of riding my rental scooter along the canals and stopping by in random cafes. As I was waiting for borders to reopen so I could go live in Japan, as I had been dreaming to for a number of years, I met my wife and somehow 6 years later, I am still here, now married with two kids. You could say social distancing didn’t sit well with me. ...

My Japanese residence card expired in June, and with my company we decided not to renew it, instead I became a Vietnam-based foreign contractor. Not much change in practice, but I am not allowed to work in Japan anymore, which means I will visit less in the future. As I don’t want to forget my hard-learned Japanese, I decided to try and read more Japanese books. But I lack the time to commit to proper novels so ChatGPT recommended Shōsetsuka ni Narō (lit. “let’s become an author”), a website where amateur writers post their web novels. Long story short, I made Dokusha ni natta (lit. “I became a reader”), a simple app that exports an ebook (epub or azw3 format) from a given novel code. ...

A few days ago, there was a trending post on HN called “The CTF scene is dead.” (link), in which the author laments that CTF (capture the flag, “hacking” competitions) are dead due to being mostly solvable by AI, which actually made me want to try it! I’ve actually never done any CTF, so after some research, I ended up doing the first 15 levels of the OverTheWire Bandit game. Frankly it wasn’t super interesting (mostly running find commands with the right flags…) due to it being aimed at absolute beginners. ...

I’ve been in a “space” period lately. Been reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and really enjoyed it, full of surprised and not a page felt like filler. Same as video games, most books bore me easily these days and feel like a waste of time, but this was 100% worse my time. Speaking of games, I’ve been replaying Outer Wilds. Not gonna spoil it or anything, it’s still one of the best game I know. The feeling of getting in the pilot seat, strapping the seat belts and firing the engines, en-route for whatever planet I feel like, is magical every time. ...

So I got this idea of making a Rubik’s Cube solver in Ruby and I would call it RubyCube. Hilarious, right? But kind of stupid, because nobody really cares what the solver is written in as long as it actually works. Looking back, I think similarly few users would care whether I vibe-coded it with AI or handcrafted each line, especially given that I’m not open-sourcing it. Here, for what matters, I vibe-coded the front entirely (I just told Copilot to use three.js, don’t ask me more) and manually coded the backend solver in Ruby. ...