Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — EISLMOK Wordo: PLINK

  • Chanting

    Dreams are gentle. Some fear yesterday. But this morning I woke up with a warmth, a sensation of proximity, of being loved. It was quite tender. I really love how my dreams helps me in a transition. Bringing me what is missing in my life.

    I plan to go back to boxing tonight. It felt so good to get back into it. I've also made myself a schedule for self care, taking one hour (at least) for mantra, self massage and yoga.

    I generally practice daily, but not in one sitting. A bit here and there. I lay in the hammock and massage my legs for a while, stretch in the morning with some sun salutations, mantra at night before sleep. But I would like to try to cut the day, and have a more concentrated practice.

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Cost Savings #3197

• Technology and Free Software

  • Why there’s no European Google?

    Google (sorry, Alphabet), Facebook (sorry, Meta), Twitter (sorry, X), Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft. All those giants are part of our daily personal and professional lives. We may even not interact with anything else but them. All are 100% American companies.

    China is not totally forgotten, with Alibaba, TikTok, and some services less popular in Europe yet used by billions worldwide.

    What about European tech champions? Nearly nothing, to the great sadness of politicians who believe that the success of a society is measured by the number of billionaires it creates.

    Despite having few tech-billionaires, Europe is far from ridiculous. In fact, it’s the opposite: Europe is the central place that allowed most of our tech to flourish.

    The Internet, the interconnection of most of the computers in the world, has existed since the late sixties. But no protocol existed to actually exploit that network, to explore and search for information. At the time, you needed to know exactly what you wanted and where to find it. That’s why the USA tried to develop a protocol called "Gopher."

    At the same time, the "World Wide Web," composed of the HTTP protocol and the HTML format, was invented by a British citizen and a Belgian citizen who were working in a European research facility located in Switzerland. But the building was on the border with France, and there’s much historical evidence pointing to the Web and its first server having been invented in France.

  • The Real Tenstorrent Tensix Programming Model (FOSDEM 2026 draft)

    Weird timing. I left Tenstorrent at this point, but I still have a talk at FOSDEM about Tenstorrent and the processor. Because that's fun. Luckily my new employer still allows me to talk about it - so in my tradition, here's the draft!

    The talk is "All in RISC-V, RISC-V All in AI: Solving Real AI Compute Challenges". I'm sharing the stage with DeepComputing because they have some fun ideas, and I had the last time to myself. This year I could use some rest. The title is more of a misnomer. What I actually want to share is what really hides under the hood and how by understanding it performance can be improved. Consider this a "How does a specific aspect of Tenstorrent chip work" talk. And if anyone wants to say "I can learn this by Google, duh" -- I am the reason you can Google this at all.

  • XScreenSaver favorites

    There are a lot of them. So, so many of them. This is an alphabetized list of the ones I like. I tend to like calm, dark screensavers.

    My working definition of “does it save your screen” is:

    * everything is black by default

    * no persistent elements stick around in pretty much the same color

    This may not be a stringent-enough definition if you have an OLED monitor. As I write this, I have no OLED monitors that I run XScreenSaver on for minutes at a time, much less longer, so I can’t say I particularly care enough to do research on what a good OLED-safe screen saver is like.

  • Baby's First Credit Card Fraud?

    Was out grocery shopping yesterday, paid on my credit card (I recently got a one-year promo for a good cashback card, so I'm trying to get in the habit of charging everything to it), and then loaded my groceries into the trunk of my car. Sitting in the driver's seat, watching the light snow fall around me, I took out my phone and checked the day's charges, because ever since I got my first credit card, I've had the habit of immediately transferring money from my chequing account to my card after a purchase. I've never carried a balance; cards' fancy features aren't worth it if you do. And I just stared at my screen, because on the day before, there was a single charge:

  • A Hacker's Guide for Surviving Volatile Careers Financially

    This is a strange post for a blog focused on computers and hacking, but I work in startups, and they are known to fail unexpectedly. Generic advice is not helpful, and paid advisors often have no idea about startup funding cycles or the problems that areise when your income is in a different currency then living expenses -- I had to pay $120 for that lesson. This has forced me to examine my own finances and ensure I will be okay even if my job disappears tomorrow and I have no income for a year or more. It turns out personal finance is a fun optimization problem to solve. I want to share what I have learned, and my time will be well spent if this post helps even one reader.

  • My First Game for the Playdate - FlatCube

    After picking up the PlayDate about 2 months ago, I wanted to build something for it. Well, my first completed project for it is done! This is my annoying 3x3x3 twisty puzzle game "FlatCube"! Have you ever wanted to solve a Rubik's cube but only wanted to ever be able to look at 1 side? Have you ever wanted to solve a Rubik's cube, but you aren't allowed to turn the back side of the cube? Have you ever thought "I totally wish I couldn't rotate the whole cube"? Have you ever wanted your Rubik's cube to assign a random color scheme after every scramble? Well, FlatCube is here for you!