● 08.15.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 15/08/2023: UTF-8 and Newsboat Over SSH RSS

Posted in News Roundup at 6:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Snapshot of pre-KamehamehaIII caste system in Hawai’i. The presentation of the high Hawaiian system’s etiology is muddy because its generative conditions aren’t readily appreciable by Hellenistic Weltanschauung – the “modern secular” dead-materialistic gaze has massive blind spots. There was likely no external causus to yoke communities to serfdom in Hawaii. No barbarians at the gate, as the commenter notes.

• So much energy, so much heart, such a unique sound. Their other album Madness in Miniature, is also incredible.

• Thank you for coming to my microblog.

• I was more physically active when I was a kid, engaging in sports like basketball and going on hiking trips with the Boy Scouts. I also did gymnastics for a short time, but I didn’t have much interest in the sport and I dropped out after one season. In the aftermath I quickly lost much of my flexibility.

• Today, after working desk jobs for almost seven years, I can barely reach my shins without having to bend my knees. My legs in particular are very stiff, with my back not far behind.

• I was recently recommended a self-care app called Finch. I love Finch–as I’ve been going through some touch mental work lately, it’s been a big help for me–and I’ll write a review of the app eventually. But one of the self-care activities Finch can prompt the user to do is stretching, and I’ve tried to take advantage of it in recent weeks.

• I realized today might be one of my last days to catch the sunrise this season, before sunrise starts overlapping with my shift schedule. After reviewing direction and timing, I decided to try the south side of the airport again. The skies were too murky to capture a sunrise proper, but I got a few nice twilight photos.

Politics and World Events

• So, I am a very ‘cis’ male, perfectly happy in my body, without any alphabet leanings (not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld said). I am sick of _everything_ being sexualized (or genderized). My male toddlers were always referred to as ‘she’ because of long hair or maybe a doll-in-hand. One of my kids had to literally escape a mob of children in the playground at 3, a mob screaming “Get her, she has a penis”! My female dog is always called ‘he’ because she’s big – and well, she lifts her leg and pees on everything, so maybe she is gender-queer, but anyway.

• My neighbor came to our morning-coffee-ritual wearing a simple yet fantastic Comme De Garcon dress. He wore it well. I was extremely envious.

Technology and Free Software

• I wanted to find out what the minimum hardware for running a reasonably good Large Language Model at home would be, so I bought a refurbished ThinkCentre M715q with AMD Radeon 5 PRO 2400GE CPU. It’s a 2018-era machine costing only around $200. With no upgrades, I was able to run llama.cpp in CPU-only mode on the smallest Llama 2 7b model (q2_K) generating 5.2 tokens/sec! Very impressive! I can also run Vicuna 13b (q4_1) at over 2 tokens/sec after upgrading the RAM to 16Gb. All this while consuming around 40W of power. One trick I had to employ is to use “LLAMA_AVX2=1 make” to compile, as it doesn’t detect AVX2 by default. Anwyay, I love this ThinkCentre machine, it is amazing bang-for-buck and will be my main dev machine for the forseeable future.

• Another method is to brute force the problem with a Monte Carlo simulation, which at best will waste lots of CPU. However, where Monte Carlo is practical this may help confirm that a better approach has not gone off the rails. Or, that both the Monte Carlo and the better approach are wrong in ways that produce the same results, which maybe isn’t so likely? Richard Feynman said things about actually verifying results in his 1974 commencement address at Caltech.

• When it comes to managing dotfiles, people like to come up with all kind of different and complicated solutions: bare repositories, git submodules, self grown bootstrap scripts, symlinks. Let me tell you: you’re doing it wrong!

• I regularly see people reporting high memory usage on OpenBSD when looking at some monitoring program output.

• Those programs may be not reporting what you think. The memory usage can be accounted in different ways.

• Most of the time, the file system cache stored in-memory is added to memory usage, which lead to think about a high memory consumption.

Internet/Gemini

• RSS is dead, isn’t it?

• Well, not at all, not for me. I’ve been an rss user ever since I’ve made my first step into the world wide web. When Google Reader still has been a thing and the world has been ok. I just like the idea to keep up to date with all the things I’m interested in, without any algorithm predicting what I’m going to read.

• After g’reader died, RSS feeds felt more liken an on-off relationship. I tried different alternatives and even stopped using them altogether. But there was definitely something missing. Someone told me about ttrss then, while others moved to feedly, a free as in pay-with-your-data software-as-a-service solution.

• Hey, it’s been awhile. I’ve had a long, long year and a lot has happened. The good thing though is that I’m going to have some stability soon for basically the first time in my life.

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