Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Sailing Rigs #3193

  • 🔤SpellBinding — CYKLQUI Wordo: TAKES

• Technology and Free Software

  • I don’t want to paint or write

    I don’t want to paint or write long-form fiction in the age of AI.

    This isn’t me going on strike or anything. It’s just a report from my soul-crushed inner landscape of not feeling like making art and not having felt like making art for the past few years.

    Doing everything by hand feels pointless and tedious like writing a desktop app in all assembly without macros would be in the age of compilers. “Kind of like construction work with a toothpick for a tool.” as the lyric goes.

    While combining AI and my own penstrokes into one image is taboo in this age of anti-AI sentiment. Using AI for flatting or backgrounds or art assistance is just as frowned upon as full-on prompt-jockeying and slop-pushing.

  • Summer of upgrades (Part 2 Server host machine)

    These days, most PCs are using Solid State Drives or SSDs. My petrosian Server did not fully use SSDs. The main OS (Proxmox) was installed on a SSD. However the VM data was stored on conventional hard drives. 2 drives using a ZFS mirror. The reason for this was because my motherboard only had space for 1 SSD. But there are ways to make that more. But it's not as simple as it seems. You can buy a Asus Hyper M.2 card. But which port can you install this? It requires a x16 PCIe port and my motherboard had 2 of those. One was already used by my way too overpowered but broken Quadro GPU that I got for free. And the other one was empty. There is a difference between both. The bottom one was connected to my chipset, the upper one to my cpu. The chipset one goes to the CPU at x4 speed which means putting the Hyper M.2 in that one will lower the speed from x16 to x4. That is not good. Additionally The bottom one was also not connected to the full x16 bandwidth so useless anyway. This one I found out pretty easily. Men do read manuals after all /s.

    After some considerations I bought 2 Lexar QLC drives. They were advised by a serious website called tweakers which is a reference in Belgium and The Netherlands. Afterwards I also bought 2 smaller SSDs. Since the Hyper M.2 card could fit 4 ssds I added a slog and cache drive for the ZFS raid. The slog and cache drives added some extra speed however I have to admit that this one is quite overthought. In real life it doesn’t add much beyond nerd points.

  • Individual consumption and the end of the world

    Nice title, isn’t it? Has a nice ring to it.

    With occasion of these festive dates, I bought myself a ten-pair set of socks and a sweater. And from another member of the family, I got a set of boxers. Because I went to a little basketry workshop where my wife and I made a pair of baskets, I went ahead and bought three more baskets from the instructors, and this year’s presents for my family came from non-denominational Mr. Winter inside a nice handmade basket for each of us in the family.

    I think those baskets were the things my wife and I liked the most of all of them, but probably nobody else appreciated them. So it goes these days, right?

    I don’t know if the consumerism of these dates is what started making me think of it, but regardless of how it started, I’ve been thinking about my purchasing habits. And I’ve realized that, in a lot of ways, I’m already behaving, on that front, as if the industrial complex that feeds us with endless crap to buy had already collapsed.

  • Programming

    • Fallen Down

      So the stories here include that folks like to invent stories about what is going on, even if the game in question, BrogueCE, has no system for lava to spill down from one level to the next. This is not Dwarf Fortress. Only the level the player is on is run, with a few minor exceptions such as allies on adjacent levels sometimes pathing back to the player.