Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🎧 BRASILIAN SKIES - masayoshi takanaka (8/10↺): mar 17, 2025

    as the tropical hot summer heat starts to roll by, i can't help but think of masayoshi takanaka's BRASILIAN SKIES, and how it captures everything fun about the season. just from the opening track, beleza pula, you are greeted with the scenery of a perfect sunny day. a carefree breeze blowing away whatever you were worrying about minutes prior, as you step outside into the sparkly seaside. this is a song that makes you want to dance—a song that makes you want to smile and move along without worrying if you look a bit silly while doing it!! words can't describe how much this song has picked me up on a particularly sad or uneventful day. i pop this on, hear the man go "BELEZA PURA!" and feel pulled into very good vibes.

  • [08] masayoshi takanaka's live 2025 performance of "YOU CAN NEVER COME TO THIS PLACE" is one of my new favorite things now.

    documenting this really quick in the middle of work, because it means a lot to me. did you know masayoshi takanaka still performs in 2025? and he performed in the US for the first time in 40 years just recently this month?? wow!! that is so insane to me that this guy is out performing at 71 YEARS OLD. what a legend.

  • Steven universe: vCJD edition chapter 5/ Entry for side E of vCJD

  • dream diary: mar 17, 2025

    i had two dreams, but forgot the second one. my sleep hasn't been the best lately... my condition makes it so that i can't sleep continuously without having to wake up in the middle of the night :(

    anyway, dreams! barely remembered this one too. here's what i groggily wrote in my notepad at 5:24 AM today!

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BFGLURO Wordo: BURGS

  • Employers hate extrinsic motivation

    One of the most important parts of productivity is finding your motivation, getting crystal clear about why you’re doing things. In this brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness (probably better known as our existence) we might not get around to doing all that we want so it’s a good idea to know which things we most want to do, and knowing the why is pretty clutch for sorting that out.

    So when it comes to work for hire, the “for hire” part is not to be skipped over there. Knowing that the job pays for a roof over my head, a bed to sleep in, food to eat, that can fire me up to apply my full creativity and wit if it’s a problem-solving job, or care and attention if it’s a more tedious type of job.

  • What do I want to do before that?

    One of my favorite habits is to, first thing, when I know what I want to do today, like today I wanted to stay in bed and watch Inuyasha, it’s to grab my planner and think “Okay, what do I want to do before that?” If nothing, great! I’ll enjoy the show so much more. This makes such a huge difference to the quality of my day.

    And if something, that’s also good! It’s a great catch knowing that I won’t have forgotten them or had them gnaw on me. Like today, I had projects that were even more worthwhile to work on so I was so grateful to my past self for having written them up (and I was also cursing my past self for writing some of them so illegibly that I have no idea what it's supposed to say).

  • Noise positivity

    If 40000 people have a problem it’s not very helpful that a thousand people are loudly and repeatedly clamoring that they don’t have that problem. That’s true whether that’s 40000 out of 50000 or it’s 40000 out of 1000000. ​ Maybe it’d be slightly less true if it were 40000 out of 1000​000​000​000​000​000​000​000​000​000​000​000 but there aren’t that many people in known space so maybe be a li’l more respectful when reporting how you think all’s well and there’s no issue and the problem absolutely does not exist.

• Politics and World Events

  • March 2020 part 1 of 3

    It's been five years since the coronavirus 19 pandemic arrived in my country. I embargoed these journal entries, but now all parties have retired. I lightly edited for length, clarity, redaction.

    [...]

    As far as I know, no standing pandemic flu response plan or disaster communication plan guided the decision and initial response phase. My boss is director of Risk Management, and was intimately involved in the college's response to the 2009-2010 pandemic H1N1 flu. She thinks the college's sudden decision may have been a copycat of Vanderbilt University's decision to close. She wasn't consulted, she was informed concurrently with everybody else.

    It makes sense the Ivy League colleges all closed. They're on spring break. Their students travel liberally, internationally. It's highly likely their students are partying in China, South Korea, Italy, France, Spain, and Germany. A returning cluster won't be automatically quarantined at customs (their parents'd make a stink). They'll only report travel on an honor system. Their risk profile is high. We have no means to restrain risky behavior by the rich in this country. Close their schools.

  • How forced labor became the “liberal” agenda

    I’ve advocated for universal basic income, at least as a stepping stone towards figuring out how we can better distribute tasks and resources amongst ourselves in better ways; ways that might be geared towards post-scarcity or to be less beholden to a constant plundering of the future in the name of infinite “growth”.

    Ergo, I oppose UBI’s polar opposite, “arbetslinjen”, a cruel Swedish policy designed to police and enforce labor through undercutting all other ways of life.

• Technology and Free Software

  • That time when I ordered a watch but got something more

    As you might already know, JDM watches are something on a different level of both quality and the story they can tell. Up until this moment though, the Japanese domestic models I got, like Casio OCW-T200S or Citizen PMD56-2951, were just their "stock", out-of-factory versions. Not even to mention the Seiko SBDC091 that doesn't seem to bear absolutely any difference from the "global" SPB121 except the packaging. This time, however... oh man, does this watch tell a story. And yes, it is a Seiko too.

    It all began when I wanted to buy a completely different model, SBTM213, from a local online retailer offering JDM watches (mainly Seikos and sometimes Citizens) who had a particularly fair choice of the models made of titanium (which is quite rare here). I had contemplated the purchase for several days before finally placing the order and finding out that the model had been out of stock and they hadn't updated its product page status field by mistake.

  • init

    Over the past few months, I've been slowly wiping my old presence from traditional online spaces- my social media, Google, and other accounts are completely gone.

    I'm not doing this for the sake of anonymity, but instead for the sake of separation. I think that something that made the early internet (and places like Geminispace or Neocities) special was not only that the internet was a special PLACE you had to go to, that you weren't constantly connected to, but also the identity you had online was one entirely separate from your identity in real life.

  • Memory on Tenstorrent

    When I first started programming Metalium. Memory was a "you do this and that then it works" kind of thing. Which doesn't sit well with me - at that point I understand each Tensix core only has direct access to it's own SRAM. But never figured out how all the magic parameters in DRAM allocation works.

    [...]

    I only fully understood what's going on after reading several tech reports followed by me completely rewriting their memory allocator for speed needs. I also recommend Corsix's FOSDEM talk as a very good complementary material, which I truly wish I had while writing the allocator. This post woule be a summary and aims to help people understand how exactly memory works on Tenstorrent. Especially focusing on it's use in TTNN as that's the primary consumer of Metalium.