khm @khm@mastodon.sdf.org

still totally flummoxed by the concept of 'professional fulfillment'

doing shit is not my jam. I am way more into not doing shit

I literally only do shit for money because I need it to buy food for my my kids

I'm good at what I do only because professional success gave me some control over how I spend my workday

if I didn't need to pay for food and housing you can bet your ass that nobody would ever hear from me again because I'd be riding a bike extremely slowly or staring at trees

after so many years of people showing up like "what is this crap, why would I use this, explain to me why I should be interested, convince me to replace arch linux on all my computers or else this OS sucks" it is disarming to see people show up like "hey look at this thing let's make it do tricks"

gratifying, but it feels like some kind of hallucination

maybe it's just my internet-bubble, but the current wave of interest in plan 9 feels way different

it used to be dozens of people demanding Chrome or Netflix. this time it's people using the software that's already there and making new things with it.

way more fun to see, even though it's slightly disorienting

somehow I wound up with two long-running public webshits (a blog and a radio show) without attaching my name to either of them

it's a lot of work but at least I don't have to take responsibility for any of it

For those who might be curious, one of the current computer things I think is cool is Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture: the idea that you can just wire really fast compute elements ("multiply these numbers", "sort this text", etc) together and write a compiler smart enough to analyze code and dispatch things efficiently.

It's SORT OF like how CPUs work today, but flexible enough to aim the hardware DIRECTLY at a specific problem space. Semi-bespoke computing.

I suggested a specific book to someone and I think they read it and that's pretty much all I've got to show for this summer.

successful summer. great book.

"hey this game seems interesting"

"narrated by Alan Watts"

"maybe I should play a game I already have"

"Honda is recalling 608,000 vans and SUVs because of faulty software that can, among other things, cause the backup camera to fail and the driver display to malfunction or reboot. The recalls will begin on September 23rd. "

good thing we're mandating these cameras instead of unproven unreliable technology like "mirrors"

just realized that over the course of my life "pause" developed a transitive verb usage.

OED has a previous transitive use but it explicitly meant 'to kick'. Other users related to the modern meaning were either noun ("gave her pause") or intransitive ("he paused briefly").

But now I overhear "let me pause you for a second" and "just pause the game"

@sirjofri the 9front wiki is behind the invite system because wikis are spamtraps and/or 4chan shitposting targets and I lack the free cycles to properly tend that garden. I apologize if this comes across as gatekeeping; it's just the best I could do with the resources I have.

I'd love nothing more than someone else making a better tool.

pinebook pro users: these people have greatly improved the trackpad firmware: https://github.com/jackhumbert/pinebook-pro-keyboard-updater

it's still a really bad trackpad but at least it works better than before

I'm getting rid of some stuff in my computer nerd dragon hoard, trying to raise money to build a bicycle that's nicer than usual without impacting the family budget.

Right now it's mostly keyboards and trackballs (and a Depraz mouse). This stuff will be listed on eBay in coming weeks, or you can contact me to buy any of it.

The list is here:
http://sciops.net/information/_forsale

commander data runs at sixty teraflops and has a hundred petaflops of storage.

my work cluster is about fifteen times faster, but only has 1/5th the total storage.

there has to be a better tool to mix a pre-recorded radio music show than audacity, but I haven't found it yet

honk if you like shoving language features into comments so you can pretend you don't have preprocessor macros

https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/draft-embed.md

Today in webshit doublethink: writing software to manage your spam campaigns and calling it 'mail for good'

https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good/

karma: not an entire day after I bitch about the pinebook pro, a friend contacts me, needing to borrow my thinkpad, possibly permanently. now the pinebook pro is my main laptop until @mntmn reform ships...

...I have no middle mouse button and I must paste

The Pinebook Pro is proof positive that a competent laptop, affordably sold by a customer-focused manufacturer, benefiting from thousands of open-source contributors around the world, will not fully function under any operating system without severe manual intervention by the owner on an ongoing basis.

Buy now if you like running outdated kernel forks copied from some rando's dropbox share, then shoved into SourceForge's download manager!

It really is the heroic success story of our age

is there a name for the syndrome where someone reads one edward tufte book and immediately becomes utterly insufferable about graphics forever