Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Understand elves

    Elves (I am thinking of the post-Tolkien category of beings similar to humans, but more spiritual in nature and, importantly for this entry, living much longer than us) always seemed to me to be too abstract in their longevity, too unimaginable for me to be able to identify with them in any way, to find within myself an understanding of the essence of their existence.

    The manifestations of their weaknesses, their unresolved internal conflicts, untamed evil, and imperfect choices, despite their many years of life, seemed to me to be the result of ill-conceived construction, a mistake on the part of the author. Yes, I am talking about Tolkien, despite all my love for his prose. However, that was when I was younger. I no longer think that way.

    I find three arguments that seem to suggest that this is an even more realistic portrayal of such long-lived beings.

  • All's Well That Runs Well

    While synchronized panes is nifty, and will work when everything goes well, a major problem is when things are not running well: one of the hosts crashes, or there is a network glitch, and depending on how much automation you had in flight, you may then need to spend quite a lot of time figuring out what state all the systems are in and manually cleaning things up. If it's only a lost keystroke or two and you notice the stall, that's probably fine. If there was a whole bunch of automation in flight and a database upgrade on one of the hosts is sideways, whoops?

  • Greed

    A better plan for Mr. Manticore would have been to cloak up, maybe bookmark the wreck, but the wreck was in an asteroid belt so finding it again would have been trivial, so here simply to cloak up and warp off. It was a Pioneer so probably not much worth looting. Fancier ships you may want to try to ninja loot them, especially if you suspect or know that it is bling fit. Another method is to cloak up and move somewhere else, then maybe slowboat over to the wreck after you've looked up who is in the system and what zkillboard says about them (95% dangerous? Hmm...). Another method would be to bookmark the wreck, warp in while burning off your re-cloak timer, loot wreck, hit warp right away on some readily available something, possibly setting your warp-to-distance to 42km or whatever (while on the warp-in) so you probably won't be where someone else is at the warp-to point, if it's a moon or whatever. This way you're ready to warp somewhere and you are able to cloak up (provided you can get off the wreck) right away. Using a different ship for the looting may also work, something with a big enough cargo and a very low align time, but then you need to stage that ship somewhere, etc.

  • This was supposed to be the future

• Technology and Free Software

  • Are you ready for more anti-LLM rhetoric? Because I'm ready for more anti-LLM rhetoric

    I'm still clearing out some links I collected last month about LLM (Large Language Model) usage. Scott Smitelli's [1] blog entry “You don’t have to if you don’t want to [2]” (via Lobsters [3]) explains my position on LLMs better than I could. This bit goes into a bit more about those who value the destination vs. those who value the journey: [...]