Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Create Opportunities for Good Things to Happen

    It fits nicely with one of my life philosophies, best summarized as "create opportunities for good things to happen". To me, that means shifting your focus away from outcomes, and towards the actions that make desired outcomes more likely.

    For example, I hope to be healthy in the future, but nothing can guarantee that result. All I can do is eat healthy, exercise, practice good personal hygiene, do what the doctors tell me, and hope for the best. That way, even if I have very bad health in the future, I'll know that I did everything I could on my end to increase my chances of a good outcome.

    Many people want to change their lives for the better, but they're not creating the possibility for those changes to happen. They're not "taking the shots". They want a different job, but they're not even applying. They want a life partner, but they're not putting themselves out there. They complain about the state of the world, but they're not doing anything to make it better. They're just sort of hoping life gives them what they want. And they'll be waiting until the day they die.

  • last

    hello again.

    it's been a while since I last wrote here. life's been..what life usually is. it's messy, hectic, and quite unpredictable. my bachelor degree is coming to an end, so most of my days have been filled with daydreaming about what's to come next. I've also written a few yearbook entries for a few friends! it all makes me feel the finality of this semester.

    this feeling started around almost last august. I got punched in the face with the finality of this year. of course, I won't delay my graduation to keep living this life, that would be stupid. besides, my friends would be gone so there wouldn't be the reason to stay anyway. what I'm trying to say here I guess is that I'll miss this life. the dream of living with my friends, the perpetual sleepover, is almost over. every day, at some point, I'm reminded of this. every "good night" makes this more apparent. we have only so many of them left before we, more or less permanently, finish this era of our lives.

• Technology and Free Software

  • DOSbook proposal

    I'm sharing my proposal here in hopes gopher-readers will email me comments to help me achieve the goal of five DOSbooks with minimal pain.

    Preschool math club members used the excellent FUZOMA [^1] educational suite on my 17-year-old lap- top with an external keyboard to explore chess, arithmetic, topology, and other topics. It's boot- able from a single floppy, CD, or USB (or probably SD card or hard drive). It can run on a 386 with 8MB of ram.

  • Bitcoin

    I’m writing this a few years before Bitcoin’s twentieth anniversary as one of humanity’s biggest mistakes.

    Bitcoin is three things:

    1. The ledger (perhaps useful)

    2. The tokens (artificial scarcity)

    3. The mining (an unprecedented environmental disaster making Chernobyl, Deepwater Horizon, or Exxon Valdez look like jokes by comparison)

    I’ll try to be brief on why the token thing is bad.

    Y’all know I think a post-scarcity, pay-it-forward mindset can be explosively productive in the digital world. Sharing is caring. Introducing a limited, scarce resource—whether it’s an artificially created one or not—into that mix does a lot more harm than good.

    The blockchain ledger exists just to enforce the contracts that emulate those money-like tokens. That is why the ledger was invented and the tokens named the project.