I’m currently running a simulation on this PC. For reference it’s a Hewlett Packard z440 with an Intel Xeon E5-1620 with four cores and two threads per core. It has 64GB of RAM and a M.2 SSD. The simulation is taking half an hour so far. It’s not even a hard simulation. The problem is the simulation software, it’s not exactly utilizing the power of this machine. The calculations are done inline, single thread, and the virtual machine has a maximum of four gigabytes of allocated memory to work in. Honestly, it’s like taking a Ferrari or Pratt & Whitney custom racing engine and strapping it on a Geo Metro transmission filled with mud instead of transmission fluid. Engineering choices like these make me sad for humanity. “Doing the right thing would be too expensive, so we’re doing the next best thing.” Why do we even bother? The two design choices are so far away from one another that the second choice isn’t even worth pursuing.

I don’t feel older. I haven’t started feeling older since I turned 37, in all honesty. That felt like “peak age” to me. The rest are just high scores, I guess. Do they ever really matter to anyone? I can’t relate, if they do, high score boards have never had any significance to me. I’ve pegged a few top spots with my initials, but I can’t even remember them exactly anymore. They’re just vague notions. When is a success not really a success? I guess when it’s relegated to the back of your mind and eventually replaced by a grocery shopping list.

I am an odd, solitary creature. I know my strengths and my limitations, and I fully am aware that proper socialization is an area I’m severely limited in. It’s likely both nature and nurture as far as how I wound up here. I do naturally have a tendency to keep to myself. I also found a great deal of solace in escapism with video games, computers, and the internet. I’ve never played well with others on social media and, as a result, have largely avoided it. I do hang around a number of old school internet relay chat servers. My IRC setup is an odd mix of relays, VPS endpoints, and a raspberry pi or two. It works for me. That’s all that really concerns me with my setup. I also find that casually interacting with people on IRC and at work sates any desire I might have for interacting with people. I have my wife, my kids, my immediate family, a few friends from early in life and from work, and some random goons on the internet who have similar interests to my own. That’s really about it. That’s all I need. Honestly, IRC is better than twitter. You get decent information relayed quickly, compared to platforms like Twitter (or X) where any moron with a Tracfone can tweet about how 5G causes COVID.

I don’t think I really had hoped to accomplish anything with this post, per se. It’s really just a rant. Sometimes ranting just makes me feel better, especially on really trash days like Monday. Fuck Monday, man.