~will@tilde.club

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20240317: 🐢 Molasses Web

https://danluu.com/slow-device/ hit the top page of HN and lobste.rs.

I've kept the office workstation I use the same since starting: an even-then-outdated Core 2 Duo (2x 3Ghz E8400, c. 2008) w/DDR2 RAM (but 12Gb of it). In the long time since, among many other changes, we've moved from yahoo messenger to slack. This transition is representative. Generic enterprise and organization tools are more web based, more capable, and much less performant.

In migrating to slack, I initially stuck with pidgin (first using the XMPP bridge, then via slack-libpurple). I've slowly moved into weechat w/weeslack inside tmux. With a similar velocity, I've slowly honed my email kludge dance involving crontab, davmail, mbsync, notmuch, emacs, and sometimes nebula or reverse ssh.

I'd interpreted my move to terminal bound interfaces as a developing graybeard accreting eccentricities. Or, at least as a cantankerous resistance to the inconvenience of multi-factor authentication. I'd similarity self-identified the strong desire and subsequent efforts to eschew firefox for w3m or eww as part of the same descent into the arcane.

But Dan Luu's essay(?) allowed me to be kinder to myself. Jeff Atwood really is hostile to my old hardware browsing experience. And probably more importantly, my coworkers with new Macs don't experience the lag I do in web-based tools.

I recently snapped the plastic case below the hinge of my personal laptop (c. 2012). Hedging against a possible mend, I've been scoping out possible replacements. My primary usage is text/source code editing. For that, I'd have thought my current processing power sufficient. But I rarely have a good time browsing around the greater internet. Do I really need a top of the line computer just for that!?

Compared to the math, stats, and modeling I'm working on or the crazy things I ask text editors to do, rendering forums and articles or even editing rich text seems like a low computation burden. But, when I sort htop by CPU or RAM usage, firefox (and it's many children) are almost always at the top.


20240303: 🌹 What's in a name?

I'm here squatting on what is obviously the most valuable username. For fun here's a short about/ page essay: Acute benevolent autocrat.

Exploring the machine a bit ([0]):
df -h $PWD
Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/fedora-root  546G  442G  104G  82% /
grep model\ name -m1 /proc/cpuinfo
model name	: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor
sed 1q /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:       30751332 kB
[0]: using an impoverished org-babel like exec in vim: $y^:!r^R"



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