robie

today, i quit my job to do rocket science

Unofficial Official Counter-Strike League in Toronto x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

If I get even a single headshot, a single 1 tap, you should be fucking embarrassed, do you know how busy I am? Do you understand how many responsibilities I have? How many projects I’m working on simultaneously? How many contexts I have to balance? The only time I play is on LAN, think about that. The only time I play is in tournaments. A single 1 tap, man, you should rethink your entire life.

They look at me and see an underdog. Someone still trying to figure it out. But they don’t know me. They don’t know the countless nights at Gigabytes. The gambling. The nights at Invictus. The times I had nothing but pressure, adrenaline, and blind belief keeping me going. People underestimate me because they don't understand pressure is a privilege. They have no idea what I’m capable of when my back’s against the wall.

introducing team brampton

oh my fucking god @internetvin

Matthias Wandel on how he pranked his residence floor at the University of Waterloo, instilling a rumour that he had a master key for all rooms. "The master key at some point had gotten out of hand and a lot of people copied it. The university knew these had gotten out of hand, so anything that was important was secured with Medeco locks. The first time I saw a Medeco lock I thought, 'Wow, this is made for picking because it's got such a wide slot for your lockpicks'. But I never got a Medeco lock open." "At some point in third year, there's three of us who liked it more quiet and a bunch of rowdy people on the floor. They're out partying for Oktoberfest and my friend Keith says, 'Let's go in and grab something from each of their rooms'." "We knew we couldn't pick those locks, but I had a Delta device to open those doors anyways, which worked on all but one of those guys's doors." "Wait, so you robbed them? No, we took a personal item out of each of their rooms and put them in the lounge, so they knew that we'd been in there. Which made them believe that we had a master key, which we did not. But we didn't do anything to try to dispel that rumour. So they were freaked out."

I’m canada down

A clip from New Stadium in Toronto. Chris Samra (@crsamra) shares the story of how his father found, negotiated, and purchased a Sony DCR-TRV730. He shares the technical documentation that the camera came with and contrasts it with how modern devices get designed, sold, and distributed today. "You really have to appreciate how much effort these companies used to put into documenting their products. You're not getting this with an iPhone. They're not going to have all of these diagrams on what buttons to press anymore." "Simple design has taken over consumer electronics, and that's generally for the better... but sometimes you want to have all the knobs, buttons, and whistles."

After all the socializing during tech week, the city needs to catalyze its evolution, starting from YOU. 2 weeks, 20 people, unbounded ambition. At New Stadium. June 1-12. Apply below

Matthias Wandel on the night he picked his way into the service tunnels under the University of Waterloo, a system that, until then, only existed in rumour. "These service tunnels only existed in myth because there was no web yet at the time. I had thought of this technique for picking locks, so I tried it in the V1 residence, which was connected to the tunnel system. We get to this grid, and I was just like, holy crap. It just goes on and on and on. But there's a locked door, and it felt like forever. My friends are watching me, and I was like, just open, damn it, open up. And eventually I got it open. I had been planning to spend the entire night in the tunnels. At some point we panicked and exited through one of the engineering buildings. So then we're wearing T-shirts in the middle of winter, standing outside, and we had to walk back to our residence."

this is my izakaya

Matthias Wandel on watching September 11 unfold through Mobitext base station logs. "I built this thing. A 700MHz rackmount server with four Mobitext modems attached, so I could listen to the base stations surrounding it. Plotting traffic density, just to see what's going on. Up until the planes hit, the traffic was mostly downlink. People receiving their emails. As soon as the planes hit, it flipped. A lot of people sent their last message on it. The cell phones became useless on 9/11. If you're sending a message like honey, I'm okay, you're not tying up the channel. It wasn't that the system was so superior. It's just in this scenario, it was the right system."

A clip from New Stadium in Toronto, an event where individuals were sharing their thoughts on meaningful vintage electronics and tools. When early MP3 players only held about 32 megabytes, Nate Chiu (@original_nc88) needed a way to listen to long electronic music sets, his solution was a Sony NetMD MiniDisc Player. "This enabled me to consume the content that I wanted to consume at the time and at a format and quality that I wanted to blast my ears with."

Matthias Wandel shares a story of how Jim Balsillie of RIM planned to buy Waterloo Maple. "Jim had this plan of buying Waterloo Maple. The guys that made the Maple math software. They could do like, symbolic math. And I was like, why would we want to do that? We already pushed all the good people out of that company. I'm going to talk to Jim about this, and it was rather poorly timed. I said, 'this buying Waterloo Maple thing, you know, it's a stupid idea because it sounds like one.' Those are the words I used, and he exploded at me."

A clip from New Stadium in Toronto. When Abel Abraham was 18, he bought what he thought was a flask at a thrift store. It turned out to be an antique folding opera glass named "Princess". Now it goes everywhere with him, from hiking in Vancouver to watching Mama Mia. "Honestly, if it didn't have a name, I would have felt very different. I felt like I found a fun little trinket. And I'm from Vancouver, so every time I hike, I would just go and see things slightly bigger."

Matthias Wandel shares the story of how he started working at Research in Motion (RIM). "I was graduating and looking for a job, and there was this little company, and they were looking for somebody who had experience at either Microsoft or Borland and some experience with lasers. Those were the two bullet points. It's like, oh, I'm going to get that one. It was the most interesting job ad that I looked at. And so I did not wear a suit for that interview because I'm just going to go in there and nail it, and I did."

Creative writing, photography deep-dive, a poetry workshop, and Counter-Strike. Don't Quit Your Day Job #8, a collective study on Nadine Ijewere, Play With Poetry, and the return of the Official Unofficial Toronto Counterstrike League. Open house Wednesday. Links below.

internetVin (@internetvin) asks Yacine (@yacineMTB) and Matthias Wandel how they are using LLMs. "For programming a lot. It's just made it more fun. It's just, you're still thinking computationally. And that's the fun part is still thinking about how to solve the problem." "Just in the past year, it used to be you get an LLM to do something and you could only get so far because now it's starting to forget what I told it in the first place. I'm losing context. But the LLMs have gotten, in the past year, so much better about essentially distilling past context so it remembers the important bits." "It's taken a lot of discipline for me to make sure that every single thing it does I understand, because I feel like if I lose the understanding of what is actually happening, I lose the ability to figure out what the next step is."