Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: DEGSOPH Wordo: SLEWS

  • An interesting take on a Christmas Song

    From Kirk Israel [1] comes this … less problematic version of [2] of “Baby It's Cold Outside [3].” It's a fun take on the song.

  • 25 November 2024 - Westworld

    I cannot comment on Doha as a city -- or Qatar as a nation -- from 9 hours and 45 minutes spent in their international hub airport. But I've spent a bit of time in quite a number of international airports and I can thusly draw some comparisons.

    [...]

    There is another thing here that stands out, and it is not a comfortable thing. This place feels like a surreal parallel-universe fetish instance of Westworld. Not the 1970s movie, but the contemporary(ish) TV confection. This place seems to be staffed almost exclusively with model-perfect, beautiful, statuesque (black) African people. The security scanner people? African. The cleaning staff? African. The sales associates in the duty free shops? African. The Info desk staff? African. Purfume purveyors? African. Cooks in the food courts? African. I am surrounded by a forest of imported ebony. Please excuse me while I board my flight to Johannesburg to go somewhere that feels slightly more removed from the spectre of colonialism and the slave trade. (Of course that can't be what's happening here; they have videos on repeat on the many, many, many screens here, proclaiming that they are vigilantly and diligently working to detect and stomp on any instance of human trafficing). All staff here are clearly living their best lives...

  • My home

    The move has begun. I bought a whole bunch of cleaning supplies, and vacuumed and mopped the new place, and got some towels and lights (and soda to the fridge) to establish some basic functionality into the place.

    My old apartment is a mess. Boxes are strewn around the place. Dust bunnies emerge from every nook and cranny. Cupboards stand with open doors, items wait to be packed.

    I have the fortune to have overlapping contracts on these apartments for two weeks, so I don't have to move in a panic. In a few days, a moving firm will arrive to carry all my furniture and boxes. They'll help a lot, and I'll get this place emptied so I can clean it much faster in turn.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Bloat Comfort Zone

    If you do not know your Bloat Comfort Zone (BCZ) you probably should determine that; try out ed, try out something with all the bells and whistles, and probably also the stuff in between. And maybe retry things over time—who knows, you might enjoy the CPU fan noise as the IDE does the whatever. Maybe if you're being paid by the hour so the IDE IDEing is money to your ears? One downside is that trying out software takes time, and the learning curve on some editors can be pretty long, and maybe you picked the wrong IDE at the wrong time, the one that was forever beachballing itself.

  • wallet-sized calendar

    A while back I read a post (which I'm pretty sure was on Gemini) about a person who created a wallet-sized calendar. The card functioned similarly to a perpetual calendar: it had 31 numbered days on the top half, and the bottom half indicated which days of the week lined up with the numbers based on month. I'd like to save my own copy of the calendar, but now I can't find the post. Does anyone have a link?

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I think I'm resigned to always get email from other Sean Conners because I seem to be the only Sean Conner who cares about their email address

      So I check my Gmail account and guess what? No only is there yet another Sean Conner out there, but he lost the password to his account. How do I know this? Because my account was set as his backup account!

      [...]

      I'm sorry Sean Conner #50, but I've remove my account from your “recovery email” list. Good luck getting your account reset.

  • Programming

    • Advent of Code 2024, Day 18

      You can do part 1 with a simple breadth-first search. I solved it with Dijsktra’s algorithm, which is more general, because I still had it in mind from day 16.

      I solved part 2 with a linear search at first, which took a few seconds. But because this is a classic use case for binary search (an integer interval on which a condition holds at first and then no longer holds after some point), I rewrote it with a binary search, and now it terminates almost instantly.

    • Advent of Code 2024, Day 17

      Part 1 was easy enough: just write an interpreter. Part 2 was tough.

      I first tried counting up the A’s by brute force, but after about half an hour or so, I was still at around 0.00014% of the actual answer.

      So I manually disassembled the program. I noticed that the program consumes A from the right in steps of 3 bits, like an input tape. When I tried to construct A by hand, starting from the end of the execution, I got confused about left and right of the program and of A.

      So I hard-coded a program to automate my steps: begin from the end of the execution and construct A in steps of 3 bits. I had a bug where I had wrongly interpreted “xor a 3-bit value with 4” as “add a 1 bit to the left” instead of “flip the leftmost bit”. But even after my fix, the helper program didn’t terminate successfully and the intermediate values gave wrong outputs.