Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • show up for once

    The math never adds up the way I want it to. I keep running the same numbers in my head, different currencies, different cities, different versions of a life I haven't lived yet, and every time the spreadsheet in my brain spits out the same verdict: not quite. Not quite enough to justify leaving what's easy for what's uncertain.

  • after adventure

    be gentle, I say
    but you know my body is sore 
    after adventure
    your hands map every knot
    tension releasing 
    heartbeat slowing
    until your mouth
    finds the side of my neck
    

  • That's why I get up at 4AM

    For a long time I've been the kind of person who gets up at five. In recent years, I've justified this to myself by saying that I'm a morning person, that I do a lot of things in the morning. But I think more than anything it's just another one of those things I've done for so long that it starts to justify itself.

    When I was in high school I remember watching a motivational video with some of my friends one evening, which we did, for some reason. At one point in it the speaker said "That's why I get up at 4 AM", and we all burst out laughing. Their reason being something to the effect of staying ahead of the competition. Envisioning a world in which you are in a sort of cosmic footrace with everyone who lives in the same timezone as you, and that by waking up early you're getting a head start on… your emails, or something. Something being a morning person at that age where you can kind of just like, not sleep, and somehow still function as a person, taught me was that you can sleep less only to a point. The less you sleep, the less you're able to do. When you wake up earlier, you aren't really "reclaiming" an hour of your day, you're just moving it around.

  • Big year! Probably didn't...

    Big year! Probably didn't thin enough to prevent a bust next year but we'll see. Meanwhile, I've got a lot of processing to do...

  • Making friends as an adult

    I recently had an interesting conversation in an unexpected context.

    I was at a work happy hour of sorts, attempting to mingle and chat in the best way that a slightly introverted person can manage. I found myself in a conversation with one of the higher-ups in my department. Nice guy, easy to talk to. Not someone I interact with every day, or even every week, but we had clearly built up some kind of a rapport nevertheless.

    He shared a problem that he was having: making new friends as an adult. Indeed, this certainly can be a tricky one. I felt empathy for his experience, and verbally sympathized. This was clearly a "vent and listen" conversation. He wasn't really looking for advice.

    Driving home, I kept thinking: "Is this something I struggle with? I don't think so, and I wonder why that is."

• Technology and Free Software

  • Makerfabs Promises a Three-Minute Path to High-Accuracy Positioning with the MaTouch ESP32-S3 MaUWB

    Hobbyist hardware specialist Makerfabs has launched an all-in-one gadget, powered by an Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller, designed for high-precision indoor positioning via Ultra-Wideband (UWB) signaling: the MaTouch ESP32-S3 MaUWB SPI TFT Touch 3.95" ST7796, a name only an engineer could love.

    "Combining display, capacitive touch, UWB positioning, battery management, and expandable interfaces in one compact platform," Makerfabs says of its latest product launch, "the MaTouch 3.95 MaUWB is suitable for education, indoor positioning projects, embedded product development, and rapid prototyping. This board integrate[s an Espressif] ESP32 controller/touch display and Makerfabs MaUWB solution that make it possible to display the UWB ranging/positioning result directly on the display, to help the UWB positioning application development. With this module, you can direct start a UWB positioning project in 3 minutes with all results displayed directly."

  • Whining.

    What started with google intentionally crippling their traditional web search, to force users to rely on the LLM output instead, has escalated to "AI" companies now intentionally destroying all sources of content. For instance, Anthrophic's project panama is intending to destroy all of the world's physical books (1). Unfortunately, in hindsight, it seems that avoiding feeding the machine, is playing into their hand, as they /want/ all sources of information that are not LLM-based (under corporate, controlled, control) to be eliminated.

  • WTAF - I heard the most ridiculous comment about developers today

    So, I was scheduled (voluntold) to attend a meeting today, basically to see if there was any way a partnership could be created. Now, don't get me wrong, hearing buzzword hype soup instantly put me off of the convo, yet I continued to listen. The ideas of the start-up we were listening to were somewhat cool and my attention was repiqued. Without divulging too many details, one of the more interesting "problems" they are trying to solve basically boiled down to intercepting CUDA system calls and translating them, on the fly, to another framework such as ROCm; basically, instead of being subjected to just one vendor's hardware (looking at NVIDIA here), they could use AMD as well. I honestly think that's a good problem to solve, especially if you look at it like different CPU architectures - nobody wants to be tied to a single vendor for obvious reasons.

    Anyways, after the more technical discussion was ending, one of the sales engineers basically said that "today's developers don't need to worry about how much RAM they use, or how to take advantage of specific hardware for performance", and that is a thing of the past. Instead, that responsibility should be shifted to the personnel running the infrastructure. Yeah, read this again.

• Programming

  • Bulk IMAP sync with imapsync

    A simple shell script to call imapsync for client mailboxes