Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • It's a statistic until it happens to you

    God willing I get 8 hours of sleep each night. That's about a third of my life lying horizontal, unaware of anything except whatever bullshit my brain comes up with while asleep. I try not to think about it too much, because if I do, I get nervous, and the nerves make it hard to fall asleep. That's a lot of time, a lot of life. If I'm being honest it's a lot more like 6 hours these days.

    But I can't *not sleep*. Sometimes I think how awesome it'd be if I had an extra 24 hours each day—enough time to do all the things I love, while still having the time to do the things I need to do, that I'm liable to do. To take care of the people I love and myself. I can't do much of anything if I can't keep myself awake long enough to do it.

    If you're 25 you hang out with your friends around once a month, that's about 750 times you'll get to hang out with them ever. Or at least, it's anybody's game for what'll come next. You're probably not going to hang out with your friends exactly once a month for the rest of your life, though. Maybe more, but probably a lot less. Priorities change, people move away. You meet new people and you lose old ones. The only constant is change, as it were.

  • running naked

    running naked
    in the undergrowth 
    
    
    feeling the evergreen needles
    underfoot
    
    
    thighs scratched 
    by wild raspberry thorns
    

  • The Cassini Division

    This is from memory, as I haven’t got a copy to hand, and I read it about 25 years ago, so someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I think a plot point was that the protagonists never turned on their comms systems because some kind of malicious transhuman/AI entity was continually broadcasting malware on all frequencies, and they would surely be hacked/manipulated if they opened any channel, and then they did open a channel, and they were immediately hacked.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Aircraft Lift Force

    In exploring flight modeling on my analog computer, I realized there are some basic things about lift that are still confusing me. So, I started looking for some kind of aerospace engineering or flight math textbook through the library system. One that I found quickly was a 1075 NASA publication from the langley Research Center, "Introduction to the Aerodynamics of Flight". Convenient, it is also available for free download from the Internet. It does not include practice problems, unfortunately, but does include equations, diagrams, and explanations. The two fundamental equations are

  • Editor History

    Someone on the #openbsd IRC channel thought that vi and ex are the same thing, which is true now, but was not true in the past, as the vi part was only bolted on afterwards.

  • Consumer Hardware Stagnation

    PC hardware's development has stagnated for consumer applications. We have not had major tooling level changes in the past twenty years since the widespread adaptation of 64-bit computing. As a result of this, we have come to the inevitable asymptote of limited returns for faster and more efficient hardware. I do not deny that hardware has gotten faster or more efficient or more affordable; rather, there is only so much that can be done with 64-bit computing and we have reached the point at which widely-adopted hardware is no longer in need of upgrading for longer periods.

    I base this conclusion from the axiom that once held true: that hardware power doubles roughly every two years. The axiom had been the case in the past but the past (approximately) five generations of Intel processors are still relevant and entirely useable for the modern computing environment. The same holds true for Apple's M-Series processors: an M1 processor from early 2021 is entirely cromulent for most web applications.