It’s the wildest thing to be watching. Wild claims coming out of South Korea about room temperature superconductors popping up out of nowhere. Apparently we’re edging ever closer to breakthroughs in Quantum Computing as well as goddamn nuclear fusion. There are wild new technologies being developed for space travel and all sorts of wildly exciting things on the horizon. We could be on the verge of becoming a Type One civilization.

I used to read Bradbury and Asimov as a kid. I’d read 1984 and all sorts of futuristic novels of science fiction adventures in other dimensions, other galaxies, other worlds. Sometimes civilizations would be idyllic, utopian. Other times they’d have technology beyond all comprehension and still not have solved basic human problems. It’s bittersweet, always. On one hand, none are written as actual utopias. The notion of a utopia can’t be introduced in novels, it prevents the reader from connecting with the material. You can’t suspend disbelief for something as possible as a perfect society. We’re so disconnected from positive societal notions that any attempt to describe a “perfect” version of any human society falls apart in the mind of every reader. Sure, one can force the point and imagine if free will were no implication and what might happen in an actually perfect society from design. But it wouldn’t represent a free society that still enjoys full free will.

Holy shit. It happened. Ruby Franke has finally met with the law. And I totally called it. They’ve arrested Ruby Franke on suspicion of child abuse. Wow. Wow wow wow. I mean, it’s been THREE YEARS since I wrote about this lady, but it finally happened. What blows my mind even more is that her daughter said “Finally!” when she was arrested. I just… I don’t even know how to process it right now. It feels like a person has to do an obscene amount of really abusive shit for the system to really kick in. I mean, god damn.

Sometimes I feel guilty about the advantages I’ve enjoyed over the years. At work I find myself pretty consistently applied to things. There’s never a shortage of stuff for me to work on, ever, it seems. My coworkers complain pretty frequently about working help desk, or even help desk having no tickets for them to handle. I’m rarely ever left alone to just dick around for a day. Part of that probably comes from me pressuring my employers to pay me more every opportunity that I get. Whether job-hopping or other means, I’m always looking for more money. Typically, if someone’s paid amply, you keep that person engaged and going, hacking away at whatever stack. I guess that’s part of it.

I don’t write as much as I used to. I’ve gone through periods where I could write page after page of all sorts of thoughts popping into my head and I could just bang out idea after idea. Actually, I don’t really know if that’s true or not. I think I’ve been more prolific than in recent times, but I don’t have numbers to support that theory. One thing I do know is that I’ve sat at this keyboard, at a post not unlike this one, and I’ve erased the first line. Then I would write another first line. It too would be erased. Then I deleted the new post and just went back to staring blankly at a YouTube video. It’s not that I don’t have feelings to express, it’s that the motivation to express them just dwindles. It used to be a way to purge myself of negativity and find some contentment. It gave me an opportunity to untangle a mess in my mind and set things straight. Writing just to write can be incredibly therapeutic. I just haven’t lately. I haven’t been able to. Even this post is really more an excuse than therapy. It’s to let you know that there will be more interludes and less genuine expression of emotion or thought.

It has easily been something like two decades since I’ve been to the Renaissance Festival. I’m excited, but my excitement is also tempered by the reality that I was far easier to impress twenty years ago. However, the absolute redemption I’m expecting from this is that you can get a giant ass turkey leg and a beer. I think that should be a decent enough trade-off for middle-aged me versus myself two decades ago. I think the Renaissance Festival should hold up quite well in that regard.

I started using Byobu with tmux for sessions on my various machines, and overall I have to say I’m really impressed. It’s an awesome addition to the arsenal, but if you’re not super familiar with some of tmux’s finer points, byobu can really fuck with your head.

I noticed that disabling the “F-Keys” in byobu gives you access to F1-F11, but F12 is still fucked. That’s because it’s added as a second prefix. On the fly you can fix it with:

Twitter, to me, is an excellent example of why monolithic platforms are bad for society. Jack Dorsey had ultimate authority to manage Twitter as he saw fit since Twitter’s inception. As soon as Elon bought it, you could see Musk starting to shift the “culture” surrounding Twitter to his silly little man-child libertarian bullshit.

Facebook, Myspace, Twitter; They all share the same problems. They also all share the same fate. They’re destined to die. They will start life humbly, expand, peak, and eventually whither and die. It’s the cycle of “monolithic platforms”.

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.