Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Composition is an invitation

    In the earlier article, I explained that a lot of my writing isn't meant to be persuasive, but rather to just expose certain ideas and to give them names. In the later article, I mentioned that I don't do so many back-references to older articles because it's a good way to explain complicated ideas, but rather because it's a good way to tell stories.

    I think both of these things may be separately true, but I don't want these ideas to be separate. I think they're deeply intertwined.

  • J Mascis

    I have been a Dinosaur Jr. fan since the 90s (even then, a little late to the party). However, I never really listened to any of J Mascis' solo stuff. I've been listening through a bunch of it over the past few days, starting with the newer album "What Do We Do Now". However, the album "Elastic Days" has really been the one I've connected with. It does most of the things I like about the full band experience, but with a bit mellower vibe (largely acoustic guitar instead of the wall of fuzz. I do miss the Lou songs from Dinosaur Jr., but I am really impressed with the solo stuff.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ACDJUTN Wordo: KELPY

  • Soon to NY

    Sitting in the 24/7 library on campus. There is a great quote from some financial benefactor, who no doubt gave a pretty penny to help get this place built, about the synergy between a person and a book, the person and the light, the person and the chair, etc. I'm sure they were aghast when the university built a monstrosity that looks more like the Apple Store instead of a library. All of the chairs look like Ikea stock that has been rolling around loose in the back of a truck. Theanine and caffeine is such a good combination.

  • Naps, VoIP, blog

    Had quite a few unplanned naps lately: staying up late, sometimes having trouble falling asleep, then not sleeping enough, accidentally falling asleep, then having to catch up on the daily routine and work, finding myself more stressed and tired, which is not a great combination for a sleep schedule maintenance. But attempting to sort it out.

    [...]

    Then decided to setup something for voice conferences as well, something akin to Jitsi Meet: usable via a web browser, since it is a common requirement.

  • Well Paying Jobs That Don’t Suck

    Sometimes I wonder if I’m in the right profession. Or even in the right field. I can get into all of that another time; this isn’t about that.

    A few days ago I did a web search for the query ”well paying jobs that don’t suck”. Yes, this is one of those stories about how web search sucks and the web is garbage nowadays.

  • Stargazing: Orion, Cephus: Fairbanks, AK, USA: 2024-02-14 (publ. 2024-02-15)

    Not too much to report this time. I went out to the boat launch Wednesday morning, based on a NWS forecast of clear skies, which turned out to be overcast. Then I went out again in the evening, based on a forecast of mostly clear skies, which turned out to be partly cloudy growing towards mostly cloudy. It was a nice reminder, anyway, that God controls the weather, not the NWS!

• Politics and World Events

  • If they look like my enemy, walk like my enemy, talk like my enemy, that still doesn’t make them my enemy

    Yes, and how many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died?

    In some weird way I have empathy for people who have been brainwashed into this kind of cruelty.

    On a lot of levels I’m not fully onboard with Sartre’s messages about human choice and responsibility and still see us all as being at least partially influenced by our memetic environments, and I’m not sure I’m wrong about that since we see it happening to people in our own lives, too. Folks heading down a right-wing path from YouTube or chan sites, or turning rightwards because of talk radio or “news” TV.

    [...]

    Even killing the right person won’t make things better, and neither will killing a couple of million wrong people.

  • Shoot first, ask questions later

    A lot of what we'll call threatened social groups adopt what we could call the "shoot first, ask questions later" policy when dealing with threatening people. This makes a lot of people feel upset, at least in part because the policy necessarily treats threatening people as threats, and few threatening people actually realize the consequences of what they're doing.

    I've been thinking a lot about this model. I find myself using it all the time in life. A bit less than I used to, but it's still there, surely. It has problems, and I'd rarely admit it in the heat of the moment, but I want to take some time to explore them, giving myself and others the benefit of the doubt and see where it takes us.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Benchmarking RK3588 NPU matrix multiplication performance EP3

    Today is the last day of CNY and being honest, I have nothing to do. Out of nowhere, I decided to look deeper into RK3588's NPU performance characteristics. To figure out what it actually needs to be performant. Like how batch size and native/normal layout affects the performance. I haven't done any of these before, as llama.cpp only supports one configuration, the normal layout with batch size of 1. But knowing more could unlock more potential right?

  • oh sod off google

    how we all feeling about Google rebranding their AI to "Gemini"? definitely going to make it SO much harder to find Gemini resources now, yaaaaaaaay

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I tried Mastodon

      I tried Mastodon. Well it's garbage. I mean I don't know what I expected, these people were using Twitter before.

      Basically it's people spreading hate at different people while making sure no one can hate very similar people.

      It's always amazing to see communities composed of precisely one type of person claiming to be fighting for diversity. It's clearly not working, maybe change something at some point? How long have this been running? Oh.