Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • School readiness (book reviews)

    Last week I read that half the children in Kentucky aren't "school ready" when they begin kindergarten. The state legislature has taken up the cause with a bill to bribe parents with $2,000 to get their kids ready for school.

    Of course I looked up our state's definition of school ready! In conversations with my preschool daughter, my spouse, our roommate, and in private thoughts I reflected on our life since her birth. Most of what we discussed is for us only, but as I learn a lot from books, I resolved to write reviews!

    Reflecting, with these books, on parenthood and my child, makes me nervous, because my friends are so apt to negatively compare their kids to any excell- ence in another. I tell my kid you ain't smarter or dumber than anybody else. You're better at some things, but every minute you was getting better at something, another kid was doing something else. Y'all just different is all.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Linux/Nvidia/Debugging

    Today I tried to make a video call in MS teams on my linux machine, using the teams' PWA using Chromium. This worked last month, but not today. Why o' why did it not work? And to make things more fun, I'm running a 1070 pascal, which is no longer supported by nvidia on Linux and so I'm running the 580xx aur drivers now, oh joy

    Chromium logs sucked, so the first port of call was simplifying `$ yay -S snapshot` and then `$ snapshot` to the rescue. Segfault and a core-dump. Aha, a clue! `$ journalctl` to the rescue, but how to you tail it again? `$ journalctl -r` to the rescue actually then.

  • Prompts are source code

    Yet more proof (in my opinion) that LLM (Large Language Model) prompts are the new source code [1] is this project: [...]

• Programming

  • Chunky Mapgen

    There are probably better and formal terms for this, but where's the fun in that when you can spitball some code to see if it flies? Like in mathematics, the cost of failure is not very high. Instead of a random walk, a queue of potential points is maintained; each of these points is weighted somehow by the "distance" from the previous cell generated. By decreasing the weight by "distance", which is in scare quotes because it's not actually a distance from the nearest seed point, the odds of picking a point closer to a starting point will be weighted higher. A "queue of potential points" might sometimes be called a frontier.

  • Fancy Weapons

    Brogue includes a means to generate items without bounds to the enchant level, but the odds of doing so becomes increasingly rare. For weapons that are neither cursed nor runic the relevant code is

    
    
        if (rand_percent(40)) {
            theItem->enchant1 += rand_range(1, 3);
        ...
            } else {
                while (rand_percent(10)) {
                    theItem->enchant1++;
                }
            }