Summary I think that I, a technically skilled modern man, “need” ~$2000 of computer over 4 devices. I can walk around those machines before the sun sets. Server I bought the core setup consisting of a Supermicro X10SLL-F motherboard , an Intel Xeon E3-1271 v3 cpu , a used 480GB Samsung SM883 SSD with only 2% of its rated TBW (so very lightly used), and two 8Gb Kingston 1600Mhz unbuffered DDR3 ECC RAM sticks for a total of $100 from a local computer parts reseller....

TLDR: When selecting adults with whom you will travel, only consider those whose reasons for travel align with yours. Different people have different reasons for traveling, especially internationally. Some travel for work. Some travel to see family. Some travel to see history, art, music, and cultures. Some travel to relax/be pampered. In many cases, fulfilling one of those comes at the expense of others. Those reasons for travel will affect one’s choice of habitation, day-to-day activities, price tolerances, basic “expectations....

HTML is a verbose lisp – and that’s great but awful Therefore is JSX basically a shitty LISP embedded in JS? To bridge the gap between “LISP” for data and “not LISP” for the programming (Javascript). But for a LISP to work, especially in a setting as dynamic as that of Clojure or HTML, one needs to understand the structure of the domain (libraries/frameworks vs DOM). And that…requires work. It’s all for the best, but it requires lots of work, presumably by lots of people....

Why should we study languages We study languages to conquer brown people, pit them against eachother, and order slaves around We study other languages because there are ideas that can be captured with one word or phrase in one language but require a paragraph or a book to describe in another language. We study other languages to interact with the most intimate and formulated thoughts of a people. Why should we study mathematics We study mathematics to develop more systematic and precise ways of killing brown people and stealing....

I have reached a critical mass with respect to how useful and cool USB-C can be. Here are a few of the devices/gadgets in my life that can all charge from the same cable: My ThinkPad T495s My work Macbook Air My Samsung Galexy S22+ My wireless headphones My wireless mechanical keyboard My 8bitDo controllers There are only a couple of devices in my life that require something else. My work iPhone requires a lightning cable....

At some point, I will write an essay on how the ‘West’ weaponizes ‘rights’ to subjugate the world’s people and how they honestly believe that all of the resources of the world belong to them. But the following is honestly what I hear whenever I hear the common refrain from the United States regarding its 51st state. For the 10 year olds reading this, I never drop the hard R unless I am using a direct quote to make a point about history....

One thing I enjoy about runing a home server is that there are so many levels of “hygeine.” These levels range from “running everything as root with no SSH hardening and asking to get hacked” to “locked down with 97% of the security measures of a large tech company” and everything in between. Here are a few levels I have traversed: Dedicated users for each service (or a dedicated kubernetes user if you go that route) SSH and firewall hardening to do things like forbid password-based authentication, only allow connections from specific IP addresses or interfaces, forcing the use of modern cryptographic algorithms and key-exchange mechanisms, even forcing all outbound traffic to go through a proxy that enforces rules/standards....

Mother India (1957) is a 10/10 movie that I will likely watch atleast a couple more times. Here are a few reasons. I have imagined myself as a young person during a famine many times throughout my life. Before watching this movie, I had never imagined myself as a mother during a famine. I look at a list of famines in Indian history and think I cannot imagine the strength Indian women have shown time and time again during the most difficult of physical/material circumstances....

On Christmas Eve 2024-12-24, I mistakenly nuked my home server, the night before I was leaving the country for a month-long vacation to India. I bought a used 1.92Tb SSD to be one of two drives used to store my media, because my single mirror vdev was reaching 70% capacity. The plan was to buy the second drive when I returned so that I can create a separate ZFS zpool with a single mirror vdev....

On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched coordinated attacks on Israel from Gaza on the 50th “aniversary” of the Yom Kippur War. Israel is cutting off water, electricity, food, medicine, etc. to the Gazans (who basically live in an open-air prison) and indiscriminately bombing Gaza. It is a horrifying shit show and we will understand the full scope of the hellscape in the coming days and months. I spent some time as a 14-15 year old reading about reading about the nature of wars between Israelis and Palestinians, but was always daunted by the seeming need to parse through 2000 years of history to seriously justify having much of an opinion....