Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Their halving vs our sharing

    What in the hecktual heck?! Bitcoin is already set up so that no matter how much energy is flushed straight down the waste drain, one block is completed every ten minutes and the reward for each block is awarded in a lottery where the more you waste, the more entry tickets you get, in a race to the bottom unprecedentedly dumb by the measure of any other economic structure humanity has ever haspled forth in stupor.

    But there’s also the backwardly named “Halving”, designed to double the resources spent on mining each bitcoin every four years!

    In other words, the “waste the most” lottery runs at a little over three minutes for each bitcoin now which will, by sadistic design apparently, increase to six and a half minutes after the next “halving” in three years. It’s still one block per ten minutes but it takes increasingly more blocks per bitcoin; currently 0.32 which will double to 0.64 in three years just like it doubled in ’24, ’20, ’16, and ’12. Scarcity becoming artificialler by the minute.

  • LIVING WRONG

    I must be living the wrong way somehow or other. I have no passion for dealing with customers, whether they're happy or angry, though the latter has increasingly potent negative affects on me. I try to achieve projects to sustain or improve my lifestyle and I stuff everything up. The solution to one problem is the cause of the other. Ask on the internet and get a mound of advice that doesn't work. Who wants to spend the time on it anyway? Everyone else makes so much money per hour that only an idiot would try doing things like that himself instead of just buying a new one. Can't buy a new one that fits on your old machine? Buy a new machine. Can't afford it? Borrow the money, you've just got to keep that hateful job that you can't really do properly either paying for the next lifetime and a half and you'll be fine. Heck you might die first anyway and then you've got away with much of it for free, you lucky bugger.

    I had lots of projects planned for the Easter long weekend, and the one I succeeded at was improving how I had Firefox set up. Software that I don't want to use in the first place, for which I've already wasted enormous amounts of time 'improving' things because it's from such an awkward and unusable base to begin with. With any other such software I wouldn't use it to begin with, but it's that or Chrome which is even worse, or the lightweight browsers which I use most of the time anyway but won't tell me whether the store I'm going near today has a product in stock unless I run the Google Maps Javascript so I can enter my postcode and find out my nearest stores which I already knew by heart (the relevent one depends on which town I'm travelling to anyway since no store is actually 'near' by website standards, sometimes I have to fake my postcode to get any results at all!). The one in the town I'm going to today didn't stock welding gas anyway as it turns out. A Web search turned up a welding supplies store, though in Dillo their store page didn't show any products. Back to Firefox again, enable scripts, oh still no products in any sub-category. Oh that script was from "Squarespace", a mob I remember advertising on TV about making websites for small businesses. Obviously it's just a template where the Squarespace guy didn't actually bother filling more than a handful of their products in (if they really do even sell those products). Still I bet that guy earns shitloads more than me. I bet he doesn't need to teach himself how to weld up his rusty car himself because he can't afford to pay a panel beater and wouldn't really trust them even if he could because they're probably just another half-arsed fool ripping people off because unlike me they don't give a stuff if an angry customer mouths of at them. They all make lots of money that way, like everyone except me.

  • A Study in Scarlet & Sign of the Four

    Mormons like to make a big fuss about how AC Doyle apologized for the way he treated them in his books. Given I know a bunch, it seems like he nailed it. Anyways, fun if predictable read. Really enjoy Victorian stories.

  • this has been A Day

    Bartender, your finest sleep meds please.

    I got to work today (high school library) to learn that we lost a student over the weekend. Apparently they died in a car accident. We're having a crisis team in this week, along with therapy dogs in the library.

    This is the fourth death this school community has faced in the past four years. We're fortunate that none of them has been a mass shooting (yet), but dang. This is already a high-poverty district; the last thing my students need is more trauma, yet the universe seems hell-bent on giving us just that.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: FOPSTYU Wordo: RIDES

• Technology and Free Software

  • Fracturing of computing

    For many decades, there wasn't a huge unbridgeable gulf between the different computing systems people used. The home computers from the 1980s onward and the mini-computer in the back office, the games console, the fondleslab, the mobile phone, and so on, were all recognisably in a continuous space with one another. In whole or in part, they were scaled up or scaled down versions of the same thing.

    A possible exception is mainframes.

    What I am now noticing is that for a long time there has been a gradual fragmentation of the computing continuum, which will lead to a situation where individuals and small groups can no longer really operate their own versions of the systems large organisations do.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • HamsterCMS - updates

      https://old.net.eu.org/

      https://github.com/turboblack/HamsterCMS

      completely redesigned and supplemented editor, compatible with IE 5.5 or 6, which means it works fine in Windows 95 or 10 or... watever )))

  • Programming

    • Programming Tenstorrent processors

      The Tenstorrent architecture is a different kind of AI processor. Unlike GPUs where you get a massive core count and parallelize across thousands of cores (not really, SIMT is a lie that the compiler told you). Tenstorrent chips are a grid of different nodes. Most are compute elements called a Tensix core ("core" is overloaded in computer architecture, bear with me) sprinkled with some memory, chip management and Ethernet nodes to facilitate the computation.