Happenings

Been in a slump the last several months. Going to try an experiment, that I suspect will fail, of writing down daily or at least weekly blurbs here of things I've been up to, like things I've been learning or doing. Or if nothing else, maybe some food I've been eating or music I've been listening to. In short, a public journal, but without trying to be super detailed -- but maybe some entries will be TMI anyway and I suppose I'd rather go for more details than fewer if the thing is triggering some thoughts. All entries will go in this post in reverse-chronological order (so updates are at the top -- note that "today's" updates may not be complete when you first see them). We'll see how long I keep it up.

7/26/24

Crashed for some hours, got up a bit after midnight. Got jack in the box. Seeing some stuff from FV Major, poking fun at myself for dumb feelings. Found a silly react channel mostly of rap songs https://www.youtube.com/@CliffBeatsOfficial I don't usually like react stuff but it's nice when I find people vibing with what I like and picking up on stuff, his non-rap reactions are kinda hilarious too. (Shakira lol.) Also funny that listening to a lot of NF had him make this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvHSgq9J7c4 NF can do that, yeah. I kinda broke in May; thought I was stronger than I am, but I'm still strong, just not invincible, and had to build up some calluses (and not become callous). Took out the trash. Somehow I missed this Babymetal song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDnIEWyVIlE When did Su's English get so good? Always impressed with her... chaj. Watched random recommendation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIGDkQchMY on learning tekken characters... Waste of 13 minutes, oh well. I mean, it's not a terrible approach, and my very first steps are similar (not at all the same though), but you can summarize that in a couple sentences, no need for a video. Youtube must know I've been thinking about it being cool to reach chair ranks with every character, one guy finally "beat tekken" by reaching max rank with every character, but sadly I just don't like tekken 8 or how its characters play for the most part. I want Chloe back. Also I got curious and my man you're not high ranked enough to be giving advice to the void. Read https://www.betonit.ai/p/do-ten-times-as-much (maybe re-read?), it's a premise/simplistic piece of advice I can agree with, if not execute on. Watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXiPWa9RWgc live. Useful review, learned a couple new things. (Like just how big the branch predictor silicon is. A long way from the start of The Slow Winter days of 2-bit saturating counters per branch getting to 94% accuracy.) RDTSC gives wall-clock time but uncorrelated to clock cycles/instructions. Covered some instructions that utils like perf use behind the scenes like RDPMC. Can get back the count of actual processor cycles on a core. RDPRU on recent zen cores. wikichip.org is a great site. Got some useful insight that he doesn't do anything special to avoid other process/kernel context switching interference in his normal perf work, especially because most things aren't using all of his 16 cores (I only have 12 cores) so it doesn't really matter if one core is used by an OS thingy. He did however remind me of the existence of Agner Fog's work over at https://www.agner.org/optimize/ which I've visited before but had forgotten about, very useful especially if you want to just boot into your own custom code right from the BIOS. Updated blog Linkify button to not re-linkify existing links; used the ever-useful (more useful?) https://regexr.com to save some thinking. Tried to find opening song of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvoNHajaMlg for someone, failed. Watched some videos on elden ring fall damage. chaj. Watched an old drag vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oR-ozwMDy8 Watched chunks of a vid on train drm hacking. Ate a block of cheese.

7/25/24

Got out of bed after midnight (currently coming up on 6am). Sleep didn't restore mood, so starting out full of negative thoughts. Had dumb idea to do this blog style thing and see if it'll help but it probably won't. Had some cheese sticks, water. Popped moda and caff. Took a shower. Decided not to succumb to getting jack in the box. Not going to write down rest of day plans, I want this to be things I'm doing/did, not things I plan/want to do... ... Played a bit of tetris. Made some pointless lisp comments. Went shopping (this time to walmart, mostly for their $2 cheese blocks). Refreshed myself on CAP theorem issues (my thoughts pre-refresh were it's sort of irrelevant) with https://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/ and https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/05/11/please-stop-calling-databases-cp-or-ap.html (that one especially good, especially its analysis of ZooKeeper). Skimmed https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/jacm85.pdf but didn't find it interesting. https://github.com/guicho271828/bit-ops is a cool Lisp lib with a nice related work section, basically optimized bit twiddling. https://github.com/thephoeron/bit-smasher has some nice conversion functions. Rewatching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aAWtFMeeIc and making a couple clips, it was privated for a bit for some reason but returned. (lol, forgot just how bad she was at this game...) At the store, saw sunbelt bakery oats and honey, my favorite, and I didn't think they sold it out here. So I got a box... and had one... and now I've had a lot more than one. Oops.

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Japan Trip 4 and 5

Previously.

I went to Japan again a couple more times. But nothing too exciting to report here. The 4th time was indeed primarily for the reason alluded to in the previous post, seeing my favorite idol have her birthday concert. I ended up helping with the preparations, too, which was a fun experience. I had a good time, but I was there for a while, basically from December 4th through January 16th. (Originally Jan 11th but I extended my stay for an extra weekend to see her a few more times... The plane ticket change didn't increase my fare.) So about 6 weeks. I was happy to be going home.

Of course, on the day I flew out, I heard that her group was disbanding with a final graduation event in a month. My friend is funny, he said when I got home, "So I guess you'll be going back soon right? You'll regret it if you don't!" He was right, of course. So I went back.

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Possible errors and downtime

I've migrated my blog and other things over to OVH, leaving Amazon's EC2 behind. The DNS switch has been made, though my local machine keeps trying to talk to the old server I have shut down to encourage not caching the old IP. I also had to upgrade to PHP 8.2 and recreate my database. I've fixed a few errors so far, but there might be more. Anyway, just a warning as the title says in case anyone is experiencing the issues.

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Parting is such sweet sorrow

One of the few Shakespeare lines I like.

Wrapping up a trip soon. I'm ready to head back home and resume something more resembling the hikikimori lifestyle.

It was a good trip, I'll write up a bit more about it later. Part of me wants to stay, but it's time.

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Leaving a mark

Most people in all of human history didn't leave much of a mark. The greatest, longest lasting contribution for most of them was simply having children.

So it's actually rather arrogant, but goes well if you have the ambition, to try and make it your life goal to leave a big mark somehow. This drive isn't a bad thing, without it much progress would not have been made.

But one shouldn't feel bad if one lacks the drive. We don't all need to save the world, we don't all need to fill our every waking hour trying to make some difference. It's ok if you do no better than the average human ancestor in the last few hundred thousand years -- it's ok to do rather worse, too. And if you don't plan to have kids, or don't see that happening for other reasons, you probably will do worse. Fine.

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Keep saying no to unionizing tech

There's a lot of hot takes on the OpenAI meltdown this last weekend. One I don't think I've seen elsewhere, but relevant, is that the so far 710/770 employees (with the rest seemingly on PTO) have collectively signed a letter threatening to quit if the board doesn't resign.

It's yet another reminder that collective action does not require unions. Keep them out of tech.

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Bowling

Went bowling for the first time in a few (more than a few? 2018 or 2019?) years, it's a good hand and finger workout! My best game was only 121, but I've always been happy with anything over 100. I also discovered that I can bowl left handed, possibly even better if I practiced it more.. Did two games left handed, first game I'd say the first 4 frames were just adjusting to the weird feeling, but then that was over and my aim was a lot better. Second game choked at the end but ended with a 99, a lot of well aimed throws. Got robbed a turkey by one pin that didn't go down~

I used a 10 pound ball, I think I would have gotten more strikes if I had an 11 or 12 pounder instead. But I'd need to train my muscles or grip strength more for it I think. In the past I remember using 8 or 9 pound balls though. I don't remember what I used most when I took an online bowling class -- it required something like 6 games per week for a few weeks, it was a short class I took to substitute a PE credit.

I'd like to learn to hook the ball next. I tried several times based on vague recollections from the class on how to do it, but failed. Apparently it's harder if you use the alley balls. This seems like a promising video to try and follow next time.

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