Gemini Links 14/02/2024: Cancer Horrors and Daily Show in Hindsight
Contents
-
Gemini* and Gopher
-
Personal/Opinions
-
a pinecone and a plan
It's been a grey kind of time.
It usually is, these days.
I just spent a few minutes carefully tweaking a few seeds -- maybe a half-dozen -- out of a pinecone I picked up outside of work, that opened up on my bookshelf in the warm.
-
Canon F1
I had to bring my primary camera into a shop a few weeks ago. The guy just called me saying that it's ready for pickup. There were a couple things that had gone awry with how it metered light, and there was another small issue with how the shutter was firing.
Apparently from what he saw, the camera had never been serviced since it was first sold in 1984. 40 years straight of working in almost perfect condition before any noticeable issues started coming up... Thinking about it drew my attention to my other main camera, a Pentax Program Plus from the same year that still hasn't had any issues whatsoever. It's staggering to think about the average lifespans of a lot of consumer- and professional-grade technologies from the 1970s-90s vs now. Something something late-stage capitalism.
-
you never know what a day will bring - 2024-02-14
my significant other had an aggressive breast cancer diagnosis late 2023 dec. less than a month later tests showed that her cancer had already metastasized; lung, liver: no cure.
but WTF! how can a person go from being vibrant and active when spotting a minor symptom; at the time "nothing to worry about but we'll get it checked"; to full on multi-organ cancer two months later. the tests could not keep up with the progression of the disease. SO is now on a 6 round very harsh chemo and coping well with it so far, maintenance chemo to follow. regardless the clock is still ticking in probably months not years.
-
4 🔤SpellBinding: BILSTVY Wordo: TIMER
-
-
Politics and World Events
-
Daily Show
Wow what a treat to see Jon Stewart host The Daily Show again.
The segments and the tone were so nostalgic and the comedic beats were like he never left.
For middle-class American Millenials like myself, watching the Daily Show was a shared ritual that predated youtube.
-
-
Technology and Free Software
-
The Customer Service Email Experience
Two kinds of otyg rolled up in one this morning after contacting a company last night. First they replied to my email with an “SMS” text message (that woke me) with an URL that was five lines long. My phone turned off eight times as I was typing that URL into the computer. Instead, just reply to email with email! Not only is email encrypted while text messages aren’t, I’m way more likely to be able to cut & paste an URL from email than from a text message. And also not awoken by a beep from it.
-
Three weeks with the DevTerm
Well, as the title states, i am now using the DevTerm for about three weeks for nearly all of my mobile computing needs. So, how does this odd little thing works out as a potential replacement of my Thinkpad R60?
-
ChatGPT wrote a wild story for me
I could not sleep last night so I made ChatGPT (Turbo 4.0) generate a story from a few prompts and it quickly turned into a cutesy mess of a dystopian and utopian future. I spent only about $2 on this (costs go up as the story goes longer, as all the preceding text becomes part of the prompt by which ChatGPT builds the story upon them).
-
Benchmarking RK3588 NPU matrix multiplication performance EP3
Today is the last day of CNY and being honest, I have nothing to do. Out of nowhere, I decided to look deeper into RK3588's NPU performance characteristics. To figure out what it actually needs to be performant. Like how batch size and native/normal layout affects the performance. I haven't done any of these before, as llama.cpp only supports one configuration, the normal layout with batch size of 1. But knowing more could unlock more potential right?
-
At Least Someone's Ethically Making Bank With This AI Madness
A lot of people are caught up in the generative AI madness of the last year or two, using it to apply a fresh coat of beige paint to their website copy, their emails, even their memes. In my group chat, one of the people shared a picture prompted by her network engineer husband: kangaroos shitting on toilets in the style of Dali. Safe to say, as someone who likes making new things, I'm not a fan.
-
Programming/Admin
-
lspls
Creating zshbrev kinda stopped my releasing of apps into a halt because now instead of making a whole app I’ll just add a few lines to .zshbrev/functions.scm, usually hardcoding paths and variables too just because that’s simpler.
-
Re: zombies
There's a "signal (SIGCHLD, SIG_DFL);" line somewhere in src/plugins/ruby/weechat-ruby.c that sets the default action for SIGCHLD. Elsewhere there's a signal_init function that sets up actions for various signals, none of which are SIGCHLD. The default for SIGCHLD is to discard the signal. So unless there's signal code hiding somewhere else that I missed, the weechat default is the default for SIGCHLD. Unless of course the parent of weechat setup some funky signal handling that was inherited, though if the ruby code is ever reached the handling for SIGCHLD should get set back to the default.
-
-
-
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.