Gemini Links 25/01/2024: Political Tipping Point and Guix REPL in Emacs
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Number Go Up
"Number go up" is not exclusive to Homo Economicus; one might also find it in the hopefully antiquated notion "tie the programmer's bonus to the number of lines of code written" where more lines is better. Various computer games and sportsballs tend towards number go up (* -1 golf). Buddhism has the notion that spreading the good word accrues merit, so therefore one might find folks aiming to write the longest sūtra or have the most scrolls in their monastery. Whether or not such are read or even readable may be besides the point.
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Flashes of life
We drove daughter to her Memaw's house and napped til it was time to drive to the Amtrak train. The station is beautiful and clean, historic and elegant. Parking free. Ticket agents helpful.
Our first conductor in his hat and tails, beard and bowlegged stance was a fairytale of a 19th-century sea captian. He fixed our ticket, saved us money. He makes over $60 per hour, twice what I make as a registered nurse.
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Planning for next term already
Unsurprisingly I'm already figuring out what next term has in store for me. I'm teaching my intro logic class again, so that'll be easier now that I've already done like 12k words of note writing for it.
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New Year, Same Us
It's the new year and I'm ready to start a new term. I spent new year's eve at the coast here in oregon. It was a lovely time, walking for miles and miles and miles on the cold beach as the ocean kept us company. We walked ten-ish miles a day every day we were there.
I love the ocean. I venerate the ocean. The ocean is like a god. No, maybe don't say "like". I think the ocean is a god, or rather it has all the characteristics of what we would call "god": it creates and destroys, it is a vast substrate of life, it breathes and moves by its own rhythms. Do I think it is "alive"? No, not in the sense of being conscious. But it is vital. It is dynamic. I've long believed that if anything is worthy of being called "god" it probably is too big and too vast to be a thing with thought and will. So, yes, the oceans and forests and planets themselves are gods in the only way that matters, I think.
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Beautiful rain
The term is going well. I mean, it's obviously still a lot of work, but it's easier than last term for sure. I'm a lot steadier on my feet. I'm feeling bolder in running my classes the way I want rather than trying to make myself fit into someone else's curriculum.
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January 02
This was the first new years celebration for us as a real family... and it was great! We first feared that the fireworks would scare junior, but - surprisingly - he seemed to really enjoy it. Well, all things considered, i am quiet happy.
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🔤SpellBinding — ACHRTYU Wordo: SUPES
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Politics and World Events
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Political tipping points
One of my fears that we’ll commit politically to a course that’ll head us over a climate tipping point. For example, if we vote climate delayists or outright denialists into office, the next change to vote them out again might be years down the line.
And representation is just one aspect where this can happen; budget proposals is another big one (the Inflation Reduction Act comes to mind) as is other legislation. Pipeline projects, gas deals…
Biden has been the worst president of all time and now Trump and Haley are both pledging to be even worse with their drill crazy policies.
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Science
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From the project management triangle to the seesaw
Many people involved in projects have heard of something that goes by many names, including the "project triangle", "iron triangle", and "triple constraints", which takes different forms, including the following: [...]
[...]
So, the original triangle and the current version of the seesaw suggest that we can't change one constraint without changing another; e.g., we can't reduce time without changing scope, quality, or cost. Is this always true? Well... sometimes we can do it by improving our efficiency. After all, that's why we want to have better project management! Another form of efficiency is that sometimes we can find a different approach to work, which creates the same output much faster and easier.
To make Archimedes happy, I'll show it as the potential to move the pivot point to the left or right. Are we allowed to mix physics with project management? ;)
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Technology and Free Software
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The amalgamated spectre of the Anti-Weird Nose Action Front and its autonomous agents
My favourite video game of all time was, for a while, The Beginner's Guide, written by Davey Wreden--the same guy who wrote the Stanley Parable. I'm not sure if it still is for reasons I may get into if I ever start seriously doing media analysis, but it shaped a lot of the way I think about video games and it stuck with me for quite a while.
I still think it's a really good game that's worth playing so I'll try my best not to spoil it. I will say that the game is a sort of narrated anthology of games, and a big part of trying to read The Beginner's Guide involves interrogating the relationship between the anthology's narrator, the creator of the games themselves, and you, as the player.
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Not Yet, Apparently. (Also: Outage)
I have yet to get an offer for a used computer at work, but I'm no longer resigned to using my current work computer for Blender projects.
Despite the computer having more than enough power to comfortably run this amazing piece of software it kept crashing. I suspect there is an issue with the graphic card drivers, but I don't really care to deal with that.
But since Blender kept crashing I looked around for an alternative. Sandra (Idiomdrottning) kindly suggested Wings3D and wow! It's definitely not as feature full as Blender, but it has everything I need for my project. And it works perfectly fine on my old 32-bit Atom CPU laptop with 2GB of RAM.
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A retrospective on actively using ReactOS
After i recently noticed that i haven't posted anything about ReactOS after July, and then noticing that i haven't linked the posts i have written about the installation "adventure" to my "Computer Stuff" category i thought it is on the time to correct this missteps.
Well, where do i start... first things first: I am still running ReactOS on my Thinkpad and surprisingly it works. After i have fiddled around with drivers and various settings i have it in a state where it runs pretty stable for alpha-stage software. Yes, it can (and will) bite you in your backside if you treat it like a super stable Unix system, but if you treat it the same way you would have Windows 95 everything is fine.
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Oh it HURDs...
I think i have some undiagnosed masochistic tendencies, because i am constantly drawn to ever more esorteric and fringe operating systems and software that will make my life a little bit harder.
The HURD is something that got my attention a long, long time ago, as being this "mysterious next-gen OS that will change everything". Well, it was the late 90s / early 00s, the CD was still king and dialup was really expensive (at least here in germany). I was already messing around with linux and most of the time i compensated my utter lack of knowledge with determination and pure madness.
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24 January 2024
I have now played around with GNU Hurd and - while there are some really cool features like the translator concept - i must confess that i am not THAT impressed. With this i mean absolutely no disrespect to the work of the developers or the users of this project, it is just that - after having used Plan 9 for a couple of years - most of the features that Hurd has are working "a little bit better" in the realm of the bunny.
On the other hand: Hurd has, was Plan 9 is painfully missing: A big chunk of the Debian / GNU / Linux software ecosystem available as packages to simply install.
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Programming
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Guix REPL in Emacs (publ. 2024-01-24)
Part of my quest for world domin... err, automating more of my local computer processes, is being able to control Guix directly through lisp commands. The "guix repl" command is intended for that purpose, bringing up a guile prompt inside guix-user module, with everything initialized for interacting with your profile.
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