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Me, driving on an endless Slowroads road

Slowroads is an entertaining and relaxing (to a certain point) browser game where you drive through endless roads choosing from several, customizable landscapes and seasons. You can drive a car, a coach or a bike, and driving is supposed to give you a zen experience, although you can still go as fast as you want, because, according to the author, anslo, the idea of a slow road is about taking the longer scenic route instead of the highway, not about how fast you drive.

NAS Daily has published a short, less than four minute video on Jimmy Wales, and how he started Wikipedia, the world’s 6th most accessed website, and the only one among the top 10 that is non-commercial. It was meant to be subscription based and to display ads like many others currently do, but Jimmy decided to abandon the idea and open access to the whole site for free — on an endless mission to offer all the knowledge in the world for free.

I’ve been following Brazilian YouTube influencers couple Leon and Nilce for many years now, along with my children. On April 15th they’ve posted a video recollecting the trip they took to the Nintendo Park in Los Angeles on March, 10, 2023 (a.k.a MAR1O Day). This is one of the places I’d like to know and visit, and seeing their video only contributed to increasing this desire.

Two Boeing engineers, Dillon Ruble and Garrett Jensen, with the help of Nathaniel Erickson, won the Guinness World Record for “the farthest flight by a paper aircraft” last December, after making one that flew approximately 88.31 meters — almost the entire length of a football field. To beat the previous record (77 meters), achieved by a trio from Malaysia and South Korea in April 2022, they studied origami and aerodynamics, spending 400 to 500 hours building and testing prototypes.

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The women who coined the expression “Surfing the Internet”. I’ve been surfing the internet since 1996, when I first got access to the online world I’ve been using since then. Just never thought about who created the expression, so it was nice to know.

From Quora comes the story of Russian surgeon Dr. Leonid I. Rogosov, the team medic of the 6th Soviet Antarctica Expedition who, in April 1961, along with other 11 members of the group, after being isolated from the external world by a strong winter storm, felt sudden appendicitis symptoms and need to perform surgery… on himself.

Haruki Murakami’s new novel hits bookstores in Japan, 1st in 6 yrs. Although “1Q84”, his trilogy, gave me mixed feelings, I have to admit Murakami’s writing style appeals to me. So I’ll probably check “The City, and Its Uncertain Walls” once it becomes available.

Phind: AI search engine is, as suggested, a search engine based on artificial intelligence. I do believe one of the better applications to LLMs is to provide answers users are normally used to ask via search engine queries. Phind works a lot like Bing AI, but is less mainstream and competent to the extent I could test it.

After every 20 to 50 questions it answers, ChatGPT servers need to “drink” the equivalent of a 500ml water bottle. Microsoft was estimated to have used 700,000 liters of fresh water to cool down its servers while training ChatGPT-3, the same amount needed to fill a nuclear reactor’s cooling tower and to produce 370 BMW cars. The consumption can be even bigger for its successor, ChatGPT-4.

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For sometime already, now, I’ve been pondering the possibility of creating a linklog and making it available to my site visitors. I’ve even recently mentioned it in one of my weeknotes. I use Raindrop.io to store all the links I find worth visiting later, but that’s different, because much of what I keep there is kept for very personal and/ or professional reasons.

What I do want is to share what I find serendipitously: an interesting story, a good looking website, a very promising software tool or a video that meant something nice for me, among other treasures that are hidden, buried deep inside the four corners of this enormous sea that is internet.

That’s why I’ve decided to experiment: I’ll stop saying I want to do that and start doing it. I’m going to create posts named Links, because that’s what they’re supposed to contain. There, every once and then, I’ll share these interesting pieces with you, in the hope they’ll enrich your web surfing experience and, also, be like messages for my future self once I decide to take a trip down what I’ve collected. I hope it’s something enjoyable, for me and for you.