Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ADHILNY Wordo: FINIF

  • Reality Bites

    I was having a fun philosophical discussion with a friend the other day, because I like fun philosophical discussions. He was bemoaning the fact that "kids these days" are always escaping reality. Escaping into drugs, into video games, into whacking it to porn, into whatever. I kept trying to lead him to a conclusion. Why are they trying to escape reality? We went 'round and 'round in circles with this, and I never really got the answer I'd hoped to get: because reality fucking bites. If we'd been able to arrive at that one basic premise, we could have explored some deeper topics: why is it this way, has it always been thus, and can we make it better? I can't answer the first question. I can sorta answer the third, and I'd argue to some extent that it is getting better in dribs and drabs, in a 1.99 steps forward, 0.98 steps back kind of way. The only question I can answer is the second. Yes, it has always been thus. At least, during recorded history.

    [...]

    We don't even have to go too far back in time to find people engaging in some deeply shitty forms of entertainment. A hundred years ago, you didn't have TV to watch, but you could spy on the neighbors and poke your meddlesome little nose where it doesn't belong. Or maybe you could find some nerds, some outsiders, some freaks to pick on. That's a perennial source of jolly good times, even today, when there are much healthier pursuits like playing video games and jerking off to porn on the net.

    We can blame people for this unending pageant of cruelty called history, and moan about "kids these days", because that always works out well. Or we can instead try and figure out what the fuck is wrong and how the fuck we're going to fix it.

  • Love

    Thank you for the email Delyan. Thank you everyone who emailed this year: Sotiris, Robert, Solderpunk, Sebastian, Ian, Mike, Ben, Candide. Thanks Cat for writing in your log about being a bored parent. Thanks Defanor for updates from Russia and Freet for trips to Oz's dams. It's good to write, read, and be a small society with y'all.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Systemd journald cheatsheet

  • Systemd journald cheatsheet

    This blog post is part of a series that will be about Systemd ecosystem, today's focus is on journaling.

    Systemd got a regrettable reputation since its arrival mid 2010. I think this is due to Systemd being radically different than traditional tooling, and people got lost without a chance to be noticed beforehand they would have to deal with it. The transition was maybe rushed a bit with a half-baked product, in addition to the fact users had to learn new paradigms and tooling to operate their computer.

    Nowadays, Systemd is working well, and there are serious non-Systemd alternatives, so everyone should be happy. :)

  • Programming

    • Advent of Code 2024, Day 24

      I then wrote some code with a lot of code duplication to populate and print dictionaries based on these assumptions. I noticed that 3 of the populated z values were no z wires at all; they were the first 3 (of the 4) swap pairs, and the easiest to find. For the last pair, I noticed that some of the intermediate and carry values were missing in my output. It took me some grepping and drawing and thinking to trace back which wire should go in which place in the problematic area. Only after finding and submitting the last pair did I notice that they were the input_xor and input_and values for the same n.

      The code I give below for part 2 is an attempt to automate (and somewhat generalize) what I did semi-automatically; I think it should work for other inputs as well, assuming that the swaps are either swaps between a z wire and some other wire, or between input_xor and input_and wires for the same n, and all of them for different n that are not right at the border.

    • Advent of Code 2024, Day 25

      For the read-in, I used a trick from previous days: instead of keeping state in separate variables and changing it when encountering an empty line or the end of the file, I make the state depend on the modulus of the line number.