Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ACULPSK Wordo: IDYLL

• Science

  • God hates old growth

    This week, in my forests class, we started talking about what my professor calls disturbance ecology.

    My "forests" class is in fact "forest ecology and management." The semester starts out with a discussion on forest ecology and ends on silvicultural systems and different strategies for managing forests to serve specific ends. I think my professor has handled the complicated subject of what the "purpose" of a forest ought to be well, with a continued insistence that Indigenous voices are deeply and dangerously undervalued in the forestry industry, and that while silviculture as a discipline is historically and currently a lot more concerned with things like maximizing forest "yield," forests do indeed serve other important social roles. But as it stands, I live in a resource extraction economy. Sustainability is a long term target. What we need today is yield.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Tenstorrent first thoughts

    I've looked into alternative AI accelerators to continue my saga of running GGML on lower power-consumption hardware. The most promising - and the only one that ever replied to my emails - was Tenstorrent. This post is me deeply thinking about if buying their hardware for development is a good investment.

  • Hardware MIDI Mangling

    So you have a synthesizer, and you have a computer, and a cable connecting the two. What to do?

    MIDI is a rather simple protocol, so you can get by by sending bytes to a file descriptor. Portability varies here; the following is for OpenBSD, though in theory the code should work if there's a descriptor you can send bytes to.

  • Looks like it's time for distro hoping! [sic]

    So my hard drive failed, and I can't boot my distro anymore. Looks like a good time to try out something new.

    I started with Mandrake, when it first came out, and I have used Ubuntu and Mint for many years now. I also tried Arch for some time, and also Puppy linux.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Getting Started

      I've had this domain and VPS for a while now and I've been meaning to start a gemlog with it, but I keep running into a problem: I'm not sure how to get started. But I might as well just go for it and see what happens.

  • Programming

    • Playing Around With Go

      I do a lot of programming for fun, but my breadth isn't very wide. I have what I joking call my "lifelong project", which is only sort of a lie - this July, I'll have been at it for thirteen years. At work, I use whatever my work stack is (right now: Python and some C#; in the past, Java, XSLT, C++, JavaScript), and at home, I work on my big project. It's written in C++ and Lua. I enjoy working with both, especially since I've found a subset of C++ that's manageable and fairly safe. I don't blow off my foot, like I always used to with C. RAII, it turns out, is very good.

      So while I'm currently using C++, Lua, Python, and C# to various degrees, I haven't had a chance to look at other languages for a while. And in the last 10, 15 years, there's been a resurgence of interest in high-level systems languages. Maybe this isn't the best term for it, but think of C or C++. They're technically high-level languages, but sort of expect you to think of things in certain ways: there's no garbage collection, types are limited, and you're expected to not make mistakes, which, good luck.