The Goldpanners baseball season opened up a few weeks ago, and I have been trying to go to one game a week. I find baseball appealing because of the geometric and mathematical nature of the game, the pleasant look of the field, and the subtleties of the game play, which aren't obvious until you do some research on the game.
I like the taste of meat but like a lot people I try to keep my meat consumption at a reduced level for environmental reasons. Aside from mostly cooking vegetarian meals, this means making cuts of meat go as far as possible. I save the fat that renders out when cooking e.g. from bacon, I make stock from the bones, and most of all I properly brown my meat. To properly extract as much flavour from the meat as possible it should be a dark brown, almost black, not grey. Whether its a steak, diced beef for pasta sauce, or a roasted chicken. I'm not talking about cooking your steak so well done that its just a charred lump -- you can still have a rare steak with this method -- but really get that outside dark.
Those city lights are just too bright sometimes, aren't they? Can't remember exactly how I got here, but I'm here. Actually, I do remember getting a note about this place while ago... but, better late than never, as they say. My name is spikeinthepunch, which is a pseudonym of mine that I felt would be nice to dust off for a new place like this. That being said I won't hide my outside name- its morrysillusion, if you need to know.
Life's been a little wack! A bit out of sorts but not bad. Its been hard to focus, so I'm not entirely sure how much I'll be able to get here... But this place seems nice, and I was eager to check it out. The creative energy and the smaller community- its nice, and I have been trying to push myself to those kinds of places instead of... the bigger, overwhelming sea of social media spaces. It exhausts me, and annoyingly feel tied to such spaces due to the whole uh, need to have a presence in order to have an online audience, in order to have an online career of some sort. All that. It's frustrating that I have to balance these two ends of my internet experience.
Every now and then I just cannot keep up with myself. I just cannot.
Whiskey, please. And make it double. It's one of these days. I just cannot figure out where I want to go with my life.
Last weekend I made an experiment. For just half a day, I noted every idea that popped in my head that I deemed worthwhile. In just half a day, I filled the whole page of my journal, and that included bunch ideas in small print that I squeezed between lines. And these were all good concepts, things that would definitely improve my life, the life of people around me, this corner of the world in general.
Yesterday I just crashed. My head stopped working. I could not figure out what to do next. I spent the whole day just frozen, unable to put down everything my brain was holding so that I could pick up one path and act upon it.
I love Axxuy's story, too often one finds themself with the destination in mind that they overlook the beauty of the journey.
This afternoon I took a bike ride while my little one slept. It's something I've been finding myself doing more and more lately, as our new home has a number of bike paths.
About 6 miles in my legs were getting uncomfortable. I had taken my wife's bike (mine is out of order at the moment), and her seat was way too low for me. I stopped at a repair station along the path to loosen the bolt and adjust the seat.
A friend recently asked me for a list of anime to watch. This made me realize that I have not watched a new anime series in nearly a year. Back in January I did watch the second season of one that I had started, but none other than that. Even then I felt like I only watched said new season because I "had to", and did not really enjoy it. I wonder why. Perhaps my brain associates anime with learning Japanese, as almost all of my anime viewing was done during my "learning" phase in Japanese. Before I started learning Japanese, I had only seen bits of JoJo. Now that I have reached fluency, maybe my brain thinks that I no longer need to watch anime, even if it comes from a series I enjoy.
I love the way text blends when allowing one's eyes to relax in a way that they're focused on different parts of the same line of text.
It's funny how quickly writing this feels a waste of time just a couple days away from regularity, as though persisting herein requires a serious battening down of the illusion hatches.
I've no wisdom to share unless you happen to have done similar preparatory work cognized with reasonably similar meanings of words as I.
Before going further, if you're a programmer, try to remember whether % is the remainder or the modulo in the programming languages you know (obviously, only the ones that use %). No cheating! Don't check online or try it in a REPL before answering mentally!
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggested that language influences how the world is interacted with. The strong version of this, that language determines thought, is generally held to be false, though there are various weak effects that have been observed in experiments. Research is ongoing.
It has been a long time since the venerable GCE O-Level courses were retired in 1988, and with it the idea that more than 40% of 16-year-olds will fail any particular exam by design. Since 1975, when grading was standardised, A to E grades were passes, with a failing U for the remainder.
From 1988 these courses were replaced with the GCSE, the General Certificate for Secondary Educations, aimed at allowing education which allowed almost every child to receive a grade, and the concept of pass and fail were largely retired as educationally unhelpful. The grade range was increased at first to A to G, with a U still technically available but in practice mostly unused unless exam papers were not submitted. Later an A* was added to increase discrimination at the top. A to G were all passes, and typically one to two percent were graded U, ungraded.
Consider a regression model for (x,y) in which the regression function f(x) = E[y | x] depends only on a low dimensional projection of x: f(x) = g(B'x) for some matrix B (say, with fewer columns than rows). The goal is to find the range of B.
The Hessian of f at x is H(x) = B M(B'x) B', where M(B'x) is the Hessian of g at B'x. So the range of H(x) is contained in the range of B. The same is then true for the expected value of H(x). However, it is not obvious how to directly obtain an estimate of E[H(x)] using only an iid sample of (x,y).
I'm not going to go deeply into the “why”, just know that this is part of my getting-off-the-clouds journey and I've grown more and more uncomfortable with the direction Microsoft is taking github as a whole and that they do with the data in there. I encourage you to do your own digging if you haven't heard of it yet, it won't be too difficult to find a few of the more controversial events surrounding github in the last few years.
Anyway, my journey… In the end this was much easier than expected.
Having worked with software for a while, in different contexts but more importantly in different stages of the "life cycle" (as if the end was somehow connected to the start), I, like many before me, have noticed that changes are easier to make in the beginning than later. This is of course nothing new revolutionary with that. Barry Boehm wrote in his 1981 book Software Engineering Economics about how changes are many times more expensive later in a project than early on [1]. Preferably all design changes should be thought of and included already in the design phase.
[...]
For the sake of keeping this text somewhat short and making a point that is applicable to the real world, I will narrow down the type of software development to the kind I have been doing the most. The kind that is never finished, be it a product that is sold externally or an internal system that is only used by coworkers.
I finally got the OrangePi 5 Plus board I ordered. I was going to mess around with the NPU with the rknn2 SDK. However, their matrix multiplcation is broken, segfaulting, and the core SDK is closed source. Nothing I can do becides reporting a bug and wait for them to fix it. In the mean time I decide to mess around with OpenCL. Previously I've tried OpenCL on the same RK3588 on the Mixtile Blade 3 demo system. It worked fine. However, the Ubuntu image I used on the OrangePi 5 Plus board doesn't have OpenCL installed. Some googling turned up the solution. But I do need extra troubleshooting to get it working. Hence this post.
Continuing the topic: how much privacy can we expect on Gemini, and could capsules ever track users and serve ads?
Paragraph support in vi(1) is weird, like much else. For one, formfeed characters in the first column delimit paragraphs. This was documented but not implemented historically, and a version of vi that ended up in OpenBSD went with the documentation over the implementation.
Mixtile Blade 3[1] is an intresting dev board. It runs on a RK 3855 SoC, the successor of the RK3399. Which a whole lot of other boards uses. Including QuartzPro64[2], ITX-3588J[3] and Rock Pi 5[4]. The 16GB model Blade 3 is priced at $369, much more expensive then the Rock Pi 5 at 189$ and the expected price of QuartzPro64 at ~$300.
For me the issue is path of least resistance. Gemini AND http are both quite good TCP based protocols for serving miscellaneous media. While they both have their bundled media type they're really really good at just serving any content while having a fairly robust protocol.
So when you're designing a backend internet service or a user facing program - why bother with TCP sockets when you can just use good ol HTTP and get all the protocol design for free. And that isn't even to mention the fact that they also come with this great GUI program and its own markup language to make custom displays. And they can execute arbitrary code (web browsers). It's just starting to look more and more appealing.
I've released a significant update to the GmCapsule server. This version includes a couple of improvements I've been planning to implement for a while.
I recently added a daily visitors count to this Capsule and wanted to share how I did it! The count updates every 15 minutes, and displays unique Gemini and HTTP visitors to my server.
Cosmos has been up and running since the start of 2022, collecting gemlog posts and other feed entries around Geminispace. I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at the data.
I have finally updated my blog look and feel. In fact, I completely switched my static site generator from Jekyll[1] to Zola[2]!
I've set up this capsule just a few days ago and already I am dealing with first technological absurdity. One would (naively) expect that with protocol as simple Gemini, compatibility between clients and servers would be a given. A non-issue!
The bug has hit me again, I'm building a world in a C++ CLI program.
Every now and then this happens. I feel the urge to build a world and watch its inhabitants interact. Sometimes I'm happy to implement cellular automata, sometimes it is the foundation to a roguelike.
This time it is a game that would resemble the “Space Trader” game of old, or the more modern “”Endless Sky” or “X3”. A generated universe in which the player takes the role of a trader, pirate, or empire builder.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.