Don't expect well written entries. I use this as a "personal diary", it simply happens to be public.
A few days ago me and some of my friends from uni discovered that someone we knew passed away. I personally didn't know the guy that much, but he was part of our group. He was found in a river, he was missing for a few days.
What troubles me the most is the fact that I don't really feel anything towards this. Maybe I just didn't know him enough, but I wonder if I'd feel differently had it happened to someone else, someone closer to me...
At our hackerspace we have a new box. Another association in our uni donated it
to us since they weren't using it anymore. It is a Vorke V1 Plus Celeron J3455
Mini PC. On it I installed ubuntu and decided to make a shared server for the
members at poul.org kinda like tilde.town. So far I setup the internal email,
the webserver with a webroot for each user and a utility script to easily create
new users. The next thing I wanted to do was something similar to BBJ or
feels, we'll see.
Today I paid my tuition fees, it will be now my 5th year in my bachelor's. Late by at least 2 years...
Today was satisfying, slimmed down 2 of my images for my containers. Now I have more free space on my VPS.
I've stumbled across this video on my recommended feed today. It is not the first one I've found about people describing how they feel about being considered stupid, actually the first one I stumbled onto was made a guy that actually had certified low IQ, and how they're going about improving their condition. The girl in this video considers herself stupid, the video is titled "I am trying to be less stupid", but I don't really think that's the case. Below you'll find some timestamps and my thoughts on those specific segments of the video.
06:22 - I'd be researching hair and makeup and how it redefined your features,
I'd be looking up workouts to target specific parts of my body.
This girl thinks she's stupid, but if, and I wanna stress out IF, she has
developed overtime the skill to look at a face and know exactly which makeup was
used and how to apply it, the same way a woodworker would think about how to go
about making a wooden figure he saw in a store, then she's not really stupid.
She just has a very restricted interest pool, which isn't great don't get me
wrong, but she's not as stupid as she think she is, she's now getting older and
wants to get into stuff other than makeup.
16:13 - Guilt free civilized analog media.
If you think this way then you've really been brainwashed into thinking that the
book is the "tool" of the intellectual. That's just not the case, knowledge
comes in many different forms, looking at books that way it's just elitist. I
have to admit tho, I myself believe that books are the best way to convey
knowledge when it is easily describable in a written form. The reader can go at
their own pace instead of following the one dictated by the director of the
video, they can easily go back and read again a passage that they didn't really
understand and in case of digital books (I guess I'm really making a point for
text media and not necessarily books) you can easily copy-paste excerpts.
And I know that she also said that it is also a way to keep her away from her
phone, which is great, it just rubs me the wrong way how she, and many others,
percieve books.
20:20 - So she read it and understood the gist of it, the goal of the book and the audience it was targeted at. She's beyond the 2nd/3rd grade level, the miminimum below which I believe as an adult someone is actually stupid. Now, she wasn't able to internalize all of the concepts behind the book, I'd assume the book would go on to talk on how to go about interacting with the different types of personalities and not just list which ones there are and what are their characteristics, but for someone that thinks of themselves as stupid, she understood quite a bit. Personally I think she should read narrative fiction, many of these stories are not just written with just the intent of entertainment, the authors usually want to convey some kind of message. Joining a book club would do her good, these are great because they're usually about narrative fiction, and after the individual reading there's a discussion segment. This is a very important part as she can compare what she understood of the book, what she thinks the message is, with other people's understanding of the book. There's also the benefit of having a curated list of book to read, so she wouldn't be blindly buying books that might not deepen or further develop her reading skills. After that she can move onto educational books or essays.
Went to Acquatica yesterday. It was great, we went as a group of 80-ish people, but we pretty much had the whole park to ourselves. Going on a monday the last week of August was a great idea.
September is aproaching, we'll see how the dynamics will change... IYKYK
Man, I love video essays, but I really need to stop watching them so often. I can't get any work done. Still haven't started studying for my exam in September.
Was at a party yesterday, it had a theme and it was prom night, so everyone
had to go well dressed (well, not really, it was not mandatory but most people
wore at least a button up shirt). The entry fee was 20€, for that you got access
to an open bar. Doors opened up at 10:30PM, we got there at 11PM but it was
still too early for my liking (not enough people were there yet). The night was
pretty good, the songs selection didn't disappoint. The party eneded at 4AM, but
even by 3:15AM, some of us went outside and started chatting with the people we
met there, the topics were varied.
Overall it was a pretty good evening, we all had fun, looking forward for the next one.
My domain mroik.art has expired and I'm not planning on renewing it. Therefore
mroik.art has been moved to cheapskatecollector.xyz.
Today we celebrated BDR's birthday. We even commissioned a cake from a pastry
shop, on top of it we had them write Happy 20 (Expired) as in, she's not a
teenager anymore, so she's expired. We also gave her her 2nd gift (the 1st one
was in entry 2024-05-25), aero-space guy was present, in the end he was able
to remain in town up 'till BDR's birthday.
Now that a few days have passed, I'm still a bit bitter, but overall I think I'm handling it pretty well, but I do from time to time still wonder what could've been.
Ok, after some thought and some mental calrity, I don't think I wanna tell anyone about what I wrote yesterday. Keeping it to myself is the best strat.
Learnt last sunday that BDR and my aero-space friend started dating. When BDR first told me my heart sank, my chest felt heavy all night, couldn't really think about anything else. That's the first time I ever felt that way because of another person. I sometimes wish that they never got to see each other as much during these last few weeks, jealousy is an ugly beast, after all we're talking about two friends of mine. Besides, it's not like I ever had the balls to try to pursue a romantic relationship with her.
Found this tiktok that quoted Dostoyevsky (tried to look it up and it doesn't seem to actually be a quote of his) that hit really hard:
I am torn between the fear of revealing my feelings and the desire to lay my heart bare before her. What if she doesn't feel the same way? But I cannot suppress this love that burns inside me. I want to be your friend, your companion in this life, and, if fate allows, in the life to come. I want to be your faithful servant. I want to be everything to you. I love you more than anything in the world, and I have suffered more in these two days since I've known it than I did in all the years I've been living on this earth. I don't know why, my darling, but in your presence I became melancholic, and it seems I've lost my tongue. I love you terribly, passionately. My heart races when she looks at me, and et it is a sweet torment that I cannot bear to be without. I long to be with her, to talk to her, to share my world with her in her presence.
I also never shared my all to her, despite having feelings for her, I found it
hard. Despite her sharing experiences of hers that are reserved for a lucky few.
I was blessed to be among these lucky few and despite that decided to keep
myself sealed. I am a coward of the worst kind.
But I'm not selfish enough to deny them both, to aero-space guy and BDR as my friends, a happy relationship. I wish them all the best, at least she's with someone that I know will treat her right.
"Letting go of something or someone is the truest form of love." -Alan Watts
But I really wish I had someone to confide this about, the only one that comes
to mind is the girl with the ajar eyes (the one I really pissed off, entry
2024-05-27), but she's still not going to talk to me, and I doubt she'd want
to have a heart to heart conversation right now. Maybe I'll talk about this with
her once we're on good terms.
Funny how, now that I lost the chance to give it a shoat, because I was too afraid of what BDR might respond to my feelings, I feel the need to share this with the girl with the ajar eyes. Now I don't think I'd find it difficult to share myself.
Fortunately I believe that love is something that is cultivated, it is something you grow together with someone else, be it a friend, a family member or a lover. And since I really didn't have the chance to grow it with BDR (more like I was too afraid to do it) it doesn't hurt as much as it could've (or at least that's what I tell myself).
Don’t love deeply, till you make sure that the other part loves you with the same depth,
because the depth of your love today, is the depth of your wound tomorrow. -Nizar Qabbani
It is this cowardice that made me miss my chance, but it is also the reason it won't hurt as much.
I really wish BDR and aero-space guy the best, and hope that I won't be hurting to much watching from the sideline as they grow their love together...
P.S. If you're a friend of mine or someone that I know IRL, please don't make me
aware that you've read this entry, or that you know of this blog at all. It is
because of the illusion that no one I personally know reads this, that I can
truly write down what I think. I have had instances in the past, an example is
entry 2024-06-09 or 2024-05-27, where I kept myself from writing what
happend or what I felt. Also, if you found out about this blog, please keep it
to yourself.
We get really affectionate with each other when we're drunk... it was fun tho, minus the sobering up part.
She's so pissed she even left the smaller group chat. I'm so anxious right now. What if she'll never get over it, what if it'll end up splitting the group in two. I feel like I should be the one leaving if it ever comes to it, but I don't want to. I think I found someone I can finally open up to... my last 7 months revolved around this group. My chest feels heavier the more I think about it.
Yesterday I was able to distract myself a bit. Watched Blue velvet, was an
interesting movie. Apart from that I still feel sad from time to time, actually
most of the time.
Yesterday I fucked up big time. I can't seem to think before doing anything. I've been kinda sad ever since my walk back home, thinking how long will it take for me to fuck up even further. I thought I had made progress over the last trip, but I'm pretty sure now that's gone. I might stay clear of them for a while...
On another note, just finished watching 500 days of Summer.
The girl I commissioned a painting to just contacted me and said she finished it. A bit of joy amidst the sadness I caused myself.
Just finished watching The Promised Land with Mads Mikkelsen. It's a pretty
good movie with a bitter finale.
(P.S. maybe I should start tagging with timestamps the various paragraphs. This way it puts into perspective some of the writing).
On 17th-18th-19th of May some friends and I went to BDR's beach house, went
all the way to Spotorno, Liguria. Her house was real nice and cozy, we really
enjoyed ourselves just chilling at the house/beach.
I'm not going to list everything we've done on the trip like I usually do but I
think we've bonded a lot (more than usual at least) over the trip.
Hopefully we'll be able to do something of the like again during the summer
holidays after the exam session.
Yesterday we went over to BDR's house to study all day. In the evening after dinner my aero-space friend and I gave her an early birthday gift. Aero-boy most likely will be gone by the beginning of the exam session, and since BDR's birthday is in the middle of June he wouldn't have had the chance to give it, so we decided to go for an early gift. We bought her a really cute white sundress.
She's a slim, short, blonde (well, dye'd) girl so the dress really fit her
(though I suppose stuff in white or black looks good on anyone), as she went to
try it on, when she spun she was fairly-like kinda looked like Kaori from Your
lie in April.
Today I've been told something that really pissed me off. The double standards
are insane. People hiding behind the excuse of feelings. How am I supposed to
trust these kind of people? I'm getting tired of being fucked over by such
double standards.
They say ignorance is bliss, that might be right I wouldn't know. What I can tell you is that being surrounded by ignorant people is terrifying.
Well this sucks, localmonero.co today announced that they'll be shutting down the site. It was a great service, one of the few places where people could trade p2p with escrow. Now that it is gone I wonder how many will be able to find sellers here in Italy. There aren't many in this country and since there's no other website that let's you trade using escrow, trusting partners online will be difficult. If you're ever in Italy up north nearby Milan and want to trade hit me up.
If you think about it, Mr. Robot is just Fight Club for nerds. Both
protagonists are schizos and both end up blowing up banks... Both do it by
building a terrorist network albeit they differ in the way they build it and
the scope. Mr. Robot surrounds himself with a few people with very specific
skillsets while Tyler makes use of any meathead he finds going his way.
Remember the girls we met on the 23rd of december at the winebar? Well, this
friday on the 26th we finally went altogether to a karaoke place. It was fun.
There were 10 of us, the chinese and the mongolian girls were there but the one
from Milan couldn't. Instead we got to meet 2 new girls, Chams and Arundhati.
It all went well, sang some of the classings as well as some of the most famous
2000s songs. The karaoke place we went to is Lucky star, situated in Affori.
Chams was particularly good, really carried us on most songs.
Tried out nethack. The amount of knowledge required to complete the game is
wild. Most of the time is spent reading the wiki. So far the best run has been
up to floor 11 as a monk.
Also, cock.li ended up on the OISD blocklist lol.
On the 17th of February I went on a trip to Torino with some friends. Had to be
at the bus station by 6:30AM. It was pretty early but it was worth it for
round-trip tickets at 4€. As soon as we got there we went to Pisciatella (a
place I really wanted to try out) to have breakfast, I got a sweet bun filled
with Chantilly cream, I really reccomend it if you're ever in Torino. I also got
to try what my friend got, she got a Coda di aragosta, it means "lobster tail".
It's a puff pastry that is shaped like a lobster, it was filled with custard
with some strawberries on top, that too was very good.
After having breakfast we spent the rest of the morning at the Egyptian museum, the tickets were only 3€ each since we're university students. The place is huge, we got in at 9:40AM and we left by 2:00PM. Overall a pretty nice experience but if it were me I'd streamline a bit more the route to follow in the museum, just to make it easier on the visitors, maybe by showing stuff in chronological order instead of having big sections to choose from.
For lunch most of us broght food packed from home, I had to go and buy it. I ate a sandwich filled with roast beef, caramelized onion jam and some kind of cheese (I forgot which cheese it was).
For the rest of the trip we just explored the city, went from landmark to landmark. We even happened to stumble upon the department of law of UNITO, their university has a pretty gorgeous upper floor filled with busts and statues.
We had to be back at the bus station by 7:55PM. I really enjoyed my time in Torino, we'll see which city we'll visit next.
I'm so tired of using software written in python. Everytime something breaks
inbetween updates. khal now crashes when trying to create a new event, this
shouldn't be happening. I bet they bumped some library without actually testing
wether everything still worked with that version of the library.
Be me, make a client for https://thephilosophyforum.com/
Start off well, code doesn't look too bad
Incrementally add more features
Decide to add bookmarks to save interesting threads
Decide to hack it and leave the clean up for future self
Now code looks horrible, full of hacky stuff and know full well that I won't be fixing it anytime soon
Monstrosity at https://github.com/Mroik/oxidized-philosophy
So, on the 18th we had our "secret santa" with Polimi social games. We first
went ice skating in Centrale, after that we went back to the uni and had pizza
and other stuff. That's when we had our exchange gift, when I said secret santa
it was in quotation marks because it was only secret up until you had to give
your gift. We didn't go with the more traditional version of secret santa. I
gifted a Raspberry pi, I put the board in the packaging of something else, a
lubrificant if I remember correctly, so that they wouldn't know right away that
it was a raspi. Then wrapped it in gift wrapping, I put all of that inside a
shoebox, so that it would seem like I gifted them shoes. Then I filled the box
with candies and 3 different bags of platano. Wrapped the shoebox and then spent
the entire afternoon gaslighting everyone into thinking that I was gifting
shoes. The moment my gift was being unwrapped was the most fun for me. I got to
see the ups from thinking they were getting shoes, the lows from realizing it
wasn't that and then the ups of them finally realizing it was a raspi. Was great
honestly.
On the 16th I attended a graduation party. It was fun and all, got to meet new people and stuff. The girl graduating is the ex-girlfriend of a friend of mine, after they broke up she wanted to keep up the good relationship with the friends in common so many of the friends she met through her boyfriend were there. Was a bit awkward at times because we didn't really want to mention him, but he was the only reason she got to know us. Regardless the party went well overall, great vibes throughout.
On the 23rd I and the girl that graduated and some other poeple were supposed to
go out for some hotpot. 3 out of 7 were a no show, ended up going to a noodle
place instead. I forgot how it's called and since it is fairly new it isn't on
google maps. While the food was ok (nothing mindblowing but it wasn't bad
neither) it wasn't that filling, when we left we were still hungry. So we went
for some fried chicken in chinatown, I wasn't feeling like getting chicken so I
ate a baozi instead. After that the 2 girls we were with left us and we picked
up a friend of ours and went to Cantine Isola dal 1896 (still in chinatown)
and had a glass of wine. Since they were about to close after finishing our wine
we went to Cantina Sarpi 1 and had a bottle of Pinot grigio. There we met
these 3 girls from Bocconi, a chinese girl, a mongolian (arguably still
chinese) girl and an italian girl from Milan. We were really vibing so we
exchanged digits and decided organize an outing to a karaoke either on the 26th
(which is today) or the 27th. We all wanted to go but the mongolian girl hurt
her ankle yesterday so we decided to postpone it.
Also had our Christmas party on the 25th, was great, played games at great food
and got gited a coat 🤩. The thing is that the coat is an M and apparently it's
too loose for me. So I'm going to the Zara store one of these days to exchange
it for an S.
Today we also had some other family members over for lunch and pretty much had a 2nd Christmas lunch. After that we sang all afternoon with our make-do karaoke (which is just karaoke videos from youtube and a microphone).
Starting tomorrow it's study time 🤡, we'll see how much I'll be able to study this year...
I have reactivated my instagram account on December 1st.
On the 8th I went to BABYMETAL's concert in Milan. The show was great, and Moa
was great live. They played the more popular songs, wanted some BLACK
BABYMETAL songs but I understand those are gonna be rare occasions going
forward. Really enjoyed their PA PA YA performance, everyone was pumped up and
really active. For their last song they obviously performed Road of
Resistance, I jumped in the action for the wall of death, not something I'm
really built for but I survived, and with no bruises nonetheless.
I'm really looking forward for their next concert in Milan (or anywhere in Italy really. If they do decide to make a concert in Bologna I might go see them there), next time I'll get there earlier tho. I really want to have a good view of the stage. This time around I got towards the front only during the later parts of the show, mainly for the wall of death.
On an unrelated note, the FnF blog post on POuL's website is up. Actually it has been up for a while, I just forgot to point to it.
I also made new friends during these last 2 months. Ravioli kinda died out, so I kind of moved on with this new group.
I've disabled my instagram account, it has been that way for at least a week now. The urge to reactivate my account and check up on it is strong. I decided to disable it until December, it was too distracting.
I should really start studying for my exams, the winter break is coming soon.
Just got back home from Brussels where I participated to an advocacy effort with EDRi. I left on the 8th but the meetings with the MEPs were on the 9th and 10th. Our efforts were aimed at making sure that the CSAR proposal will not pass the plenary that will be held soon, most likely in November. The proposal aims at restricting our fundamental right to privacy online by having companies that provides any form of interpersonal communication scan all of the messages that are sent through that company's communication service.
We were able to secure up to six meetings, five with accredited assistants and one with an actual MEP. While most of them were receptive of our concerns there were a couple that didn't seem to see the issue, or simply didn't care, which would be much worse.
Overall it was a great experience, this was my first time doing anything like this. If in the future I'll ever have another chance to get involved in something like this with expenses paid, I wouldn't mind joining in the adovcacy efforts to repel a proposal that I personally find restricts my fundamental rights.
About the FnF conference... I can't be bothered to write about it anymore, especially not as detailed as I was last time. Instead I'll point you to POuL's blogpost whenever it will be ready.
I came back from Canada on the 29th, arrived in Milan on the 30th and on the 1st
I had to fly again. I went to Brussels, Belgium, to attend the Freedom not
Fear conference. It is a digital rights and online privacy conference, it is
more on the political side rather than technical, so a lot of activist. A few
devs did attend and some paranoid nutjobs (but that's to be expected when you
host a conference centered around privacy). I went with some of the members of
the association I'm part of POuL.
The first day when arrived it was pouring hard, and Brussels' manholes really
don't drain a whole lot... but that was fine I guess. After we arrived at the
hostel we played some ping-pong there and after the weather cleared a bit we
went out for lunch. For lunch we went to a fast food place that made the worst
chips ever, I quickly realized that google reviews mean shit in Brussels, they
must be used to eating substandard stuff (or so I thought at the time). After
we went for beers at a place called Delirium Café, it was nothing like a café
tho, we were specifically looking for a pub that served belgian beers, when we
saw that they served meters of beers we went in straight away, and for those who
don't know, a meter beer is a slab of wood onto which you line up pints of
beers. The reason it's called a meter of beer is pretty obvious. Into each pint
there was a different beer.
The beer we tried were:
There were a couple that I didn't like at all, but the rest were pretty good.
We even had a CodiMD document to rate all of the beers. There were 9 of us and
got 3 meters. After we drank our fill (after tasting all of 'em we had to get
seconds of our favourite ones) we went to the conference location.
It was held at Mundo Madou a café that also had some conference rooms.
After registration we went to the main conference room.
We kicked off with an overview of each attendant's country, listing all of the
current news of our own countries related to digital rights and privacy. After
that we had what they called a fishbowl, we pretty much listed all of the
topics we were interested in discussing at the conference. After that we had our
first talk held by Wojciech Wiewiórowski the current European Data Protection
Supervisor, his presentation was on the use of fediverse instances hosted by
the EU, mainly peertube. These instances had no tracking, transparency on the
platform's workings (it was all opensource) and they were idependent from
corporations. Despite all of their efforts these platforms were barely used, and
could soon end up being closed.
After the talk we had some more informations on logistics and then we headed towards a music festival held in a park, there we had dinner with street food.
Onto the 2nd day, after breakfast at the hostel we headed for the conference straight away. We started the day by sharing an overview of the status of each member's own country in matters related to digital rights and privacy. As per Italy, we really had nothing to share other than the fact that digital rights and privacy online don't really make it on the news.
After that we moved onto the scheduling of the day, this was something we had to do every day, as the program was filled at the start to make room for "spontaneus" workshops based on interest showed on topics discussed previously.
For the first day the talks/workshops were:
Of these I attended:
Chat control was held by StopScanningMe. It was
about the current state of the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation or CSAR for
short, it's current draft, why and how to stop/delay it.
There were rapresentatives from about 5 different associations that together
held the presentation. I'm not about to share what the CSAR legislative proposal
is all about, you can inform yourself here.
This was one of the better held talks of the conference, there was even an MEP,
Patrick Breyer, the MEP leading the opposition of this proposal (at least in its
current state). It doesn't really help with catching abuse online, and even if
it did, it comes with the cost of mass survailance and infringement of our right
to privacy. I was pleasantly surprised to find this talk, 'cause it seemed to me
like no one knew about this proposal, there's no one talking about it online and
even less on TV (not that I expected italian news outlets to pick up on news
related to privacy).
A natural consequence of this talk was the announcement of an impromptu talk
held during the last 30 minutes of lunch time to talk about how to contact your
MEPs to bring their attention to this (or any) proposal, since one of the things
that Mr. Breyer highlighted was the fact that many of his colleagues (even
within his committee) didn't know about the proposal.
For lunch we had some sandwiches, everything was donation based, so it could've
been a free meal if you really wanted, but I didn't want to be that guy...
anyhow, after I ate I crossed paths with one of the speakers at the chat control
talk, it was a rappresentative for EDRi a network of NGOs that advocate for
digital rights. We exchanged a few words and since I showed some interest she
asked me and the other member of POuL that was with me if we were interested in
joining the protest that is happening in October to raise awareness to the MEPs
that are not. I most likely won't be attending, I have classes in October and I
and it is also an economic burden that I can't afford right after coming back
from holidays (well, if I really wanted I could, but I still have classes).
Either way she left us her card in case we wanted to attend or even if we just
wanted to contact her.
The talk on how to contact your MEPs was held by both the girl that I just mentioned and her colleague, another girl that was in EDRi. They shared their methods of contacting an MEP, how to better pique their interest and which MEPs we'd have to contact ideally to help oppose the CSAR proposal. One of the things that really surprised me (it really shouldn't if you think about it) was the fact that if the MEP was not available for a meeting to discuss the proposal, and they instead pointed us to their advisor, it is even better than meeting the MEP. If you think about it it does make sense, MEPs have to work on multiple proposals at once, so the advisors are the ones most likely to know all about the proposal they are working on. After the talk I asked the other girl from EDRi for her card as well, in case I wanted some pointers in case I decided to contact an MEP regarding CSAR, which I most likely will.
I then attended the workshop on Educational software. There we mainly shared the current state of cloud based solutions forced onto students, specially during the pandemic. If you didn't want to use zoom or any of the other video conference software you couldn't attend classes, the main problem we all had was the fact that instead we could've used open-source solutions not hosted by any corporation.
The Going Dark session was so bad, I don't even want to talk about it. The one
hosting it was a nutjob. We were all flabbergasted by the end of the
presentation.
The talk about CCTVs was hosted by the same guy that hosted the talk about educational software and was pretty good tbh. It was about the fact that there were so many CCTVs in Portugal that didn't conform to GRPR laws and the fact that in recent years they started installing more and more of them. He understandably was concerned, he didn't want to live in a place where everyone is surveilled 24/7, I thought it was a bit of an overreaction, but I guess I'm used to being monitored since I live in Milan, we literally have cameras at all the entrances of our city center to monitor the cars that enter (we have area C which is a restricted area for cars with older engines, it's a pollution control zone). After the talk I even met this girl from portugal that was attending the talk as well, well she was with the host, they both were from the same organization. She very plain, no makeup (or very little of it, if she had any I didn't notice) and was wearing a Tor Project t-shirt (was my way into a conversation). Had a nice talk with her, exchanged a few words, our experiences as students. She's even a weirdo that uses QubesOS, an OS were you can run each program in their own virtaul machine, achieving security through isolation. Wild concept if you ask me, I wonder how much is the loss in performance. It is pretty nuclear option to achieve security.
After that we had our evening plenary which consisted in a quick overview of the talks/workshops of the day.
We then moved to a place called DK a cultural center, for dinner. But before that me and 3 other guys from POuL went back to the hostel to take a shower. When we arrived at DK we had some beers (there's a picture of our table of 4 that had a bunch of beers, the other tables must have thought we were drunks). We then had dinner, they served hummus or paella but vegan, it was all pretty ok, but I was starting to miss meat. At some point of the evening we had a bit of a conversation with the barman. He was a black fellow that had been in Brussels for the last 2 years, before that he was in Italy for over 15 years, so he knew Italian pretty well. At some point me and him went out to go get some weed, my first time buying off the streets, went pretty well. Didn't even need to do the talking, he did everything for me, I just handed over the money. When I got back me and some of the members of POuL chilled outside and shared a joint.
I then found again the portuguese girl I had talked to, to not make it obvious that I wanted to talk with her I first approached the dude that held the CCTV talk that was in her group and talked a bit about the need of CCTVs, mainly the fact that I was arguing the fact that there is a good point to be made for the use of CCTVs in some areas. We talked for so long that most of the POuL already went back to the hostel. I then joined the group of portuguese guys to a bar to join some other group. The place was a pretty good bar, the vibes were there and the drinks were reasonably priced. There we talked a bit more, I got the chance to talk to the girl but by the end of the evening (at least the end for me) I realized that the dude that held the CCTV talk and the girl I was going for were a couple... there I then found another member of POuL, he too was trying to get into another girls pants, and since he was not getting anywhere we both decided to go back together to the hostel.
This took longer than I expected, so I'll write about the other days of the conference another day.
Welp, they cancelled my flight for tomorrow. I'm in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada) for vacation and was supposed to fly out to toronto tomorrow morning, but the flight got cancelled. Was looking forward to it but whatever, as long as we're still going to Vancouver everything's fine.
Met up with a fellow channer that I know from mumble yesterday. Had an apertif and then after that went to a nice restaurant. Talked about a bunch of things, like his holiday trip to China and Japan, current setups we use for our self-ran services etc...
He even gave me a sticker pack as a present (which is what I'll be expecting
from now on from anyone that I got to know from the interwebz comes to visit).
For dinner we went to La Pesa a restaurant that specializes in local dishes
from the Lombardy region.
Haven't written here in a while. On July 15th I went to the Arctic Monkey concert here in Milan. It was fun, entrance was at 5:30PM (tho I got in at 6:30) with 4 bands playing with Arctic Monkeys being the headliner. Pretty much missed the first band but who cares, judging from the 2nd band on the stage I didn't miss much. With the 3rd it was a bit different, the ones playing were The Hives. The music was alright, I actually enjoyed it, and the singer was very theatrical, really pump'd up the crowed for the headliner (gotta say that the signer kept spitting on stage, was a bit of a meme by the end of it, everyone in my section of the crowed would wait for him to spit, everyone was comparing him to a llama).
Then came the turn of the Arctic Monkeys, the concert was great, everyone had a good time, but I really don't want to go to a mainstream concert ever again (I say this but I'm sure I'll attend one again), it was full of mosquitoes, it was hot AF and there were too many around me. When it was time to leave it took us 20 to 30 minutes to get outside. Thankfully most of the bands I like are not really mainstream here in Italy, for example Polyphia, or BABYMETAL (I'm going to their concert in december).
So... I made https://mroik.art/ to have a virtual shelf for my paintings.
It might change a lot while I decide what the final UI shoud look like.
I finally migrated my server. Email, XMPP and IRC should all be working fine now. But from now on I'll be paying, up until now I leeched off of my cousin for access to a VPS. Had that machine since 2018 and after 5 years I now have to pay. Not that I mind tho, I now have somewhat of an income, albeit not much I can still pay 7ish€ a month. I also setup the various services the proper way, in a container so next time it won't be an hassle to migrate.
Today (May 23rd), well, yesterday really, I went to the Polyphia concert here in Milan. My first concert ever (at least my first that required tickets), was a fun experience. It was at Alcatraz, tbh I couldn't see much, I'm a short fella, but the music was great. At one point Scott (or maybe Clay, dunno they both have long hair, from my POV I couldn't distinguish them) wanted more crowdsurfers, was tempted to surf myself, but was too afraid that stuff would've fallen out of my pockets. Also missed the moshpit, weren't close enough to the stage, next time I'll get my ass in the front. Like I said tho, overall a great experience!
This video gave me anxiety https://youtu.be/5wAo54DHDY0 . Here a comment I left on the video of what I think might happen in the future:
This video gave me anxiety for an hour and forty minutes... I wonder what players will experience when we'll start having these kinds of mods for games with hyper realistic graphics or games that really immerse you like a game that runs on VR. People might end up actually needing to go to therapy at that point ahahah.
I would love to have such experience. Imagine the nightmeres you'd be having at night after going through such gameplay using VR or the new version of the unreal engine... might even induce PTSD in more susceptible people.
You listen to "Money Trees" for Kendrick Lamar, I listen to "Money Trees" for Anna Wise.
I really hate being ghosted. I understand if you don't want to reply right away, but holy shit, it's been 4 days now. I know you've seen the notification, I've seen your online status, just read the message and reply!
On another note, was able to enumerate most of Netflix's italian catalog. Now we have 6600 out of 7.5k~ title IDs, was supposed to use the IDs to generate keys to remove DRM from the videos but the API is not replying with a valid license.
This year I spent easter at home doing fuck all. Hopefully next year will be better. Could've spent the free time on studying, instead I played vydia all day. I feel like I won't be able to pass many exams this semester and that makes me anxious, I already know I'll be spending an extra year in uni, don't want to make it 2.
After watching Serial Experiments Lain I still don't understand why everyone
on the spectrum likes this show. Since I don't want to rewrite what I think
about it I'll just copy-paste what I wrote on fedi.
It doesn't really matter what does make sense and what doesn't, since they don't explain a whole lot of what happened before episode one (how Lain came into existence) or how the Wired is able to affect the real world. What it's more important in this series are the questions that she asks herself after learning what she is not, questioning what she is and what it means to be. « "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of these events. » If no one remembers us, if we leave nothing behind after our death, did we really exist? If in a forest a tree falls and no one is there to hear the sound it makes, did it really make a sound? Reality is limited to what we're able to perceive, to a person that has been blind since birth colors don't exist, I'm pretty sure they don't even comprehend the concept of colors. Is this why many people what to leave a legacy behind? Is it to validate their existence? For how many generations does the average person exist?
That's all, hopefully people don't get all existential after reading this (I'd be concerned if anyone over the age of 16 did, you should've asked these questions a while ago).
P.s. sorry to those who are reading this in plain text. Because of how I wrote the CSS for my ttbp page I had to put some HTML tags that shouldn't really be there. It looks very hacky and it's really horrible.
Yesterday I went with some friends at a bar called Art Mall Milano.
It's a bar in which there are various paintings on the walls, all of these
paintings are up for purchase, so it is pretty much like an art gallery with a
bar. Usually there's also some live music as well, this bar is supposed to be a
way to advertise artists.
The evening went pretty well, when we got there it was pretty empty (I believe the only ones there were the musicians that were going to perform), but by 9PM a lot of people started showing up. The entrance fee was 15€ which included 1 drink the buffet and the wardrobe service for the jackets, or 20€ if you wanted 2 drinks. Drinks by themselves were 10€ each (pretty expensive but I do understand the pricing considering the location).
Among the various paintings, in my price range, I really liked "Passeggiata" by
Deirdre Angela Gillies which goes for 120€.
I also really liked "Reflections" by Eclipse_Graphic_Art but this one goes for
300€.
If you're ever in Milan I recommend checking out this place, you won't regret it.
Lately I have been feeling like I'll never feel anything romantically. No one is really interested in me in that way and the ones that I'm interested in are always out of my league. But hey, it's fine, I guess.
Today a friend of mine graduated from university with a bachelor's degree, now he wants to persue his masters in Denmark. I wonder when I will graduate...
From Friday 17th to Sunday 19th I was volunteering at SWERC 2022-2023. It was lots of fun, I did this last year as well but this time around the organization was way better.
On the first day there was the team registrations and opening ceremony. The registration went pretty smooth, apart from some teams not getting there in time almost everyone registered on the first day. After that the opening ceremony started, some of the sponsors had some time to advertise their company to prospective employees and the organizers had time to explain SWERC to new comers. After that the opening banquet started and we had dinner altogether. I might've had too much wine with a spanish contestant that was sitting next to me, though I didn't drink enough to make a fool of myself, at least not that much of a fool anyway.
On the second day we had late registrations (for the teams that couldn't make it on the first day) and then moved to the practice session. This session is meant to test the infrastructure set up by the tech team, so that on contest day everything goes as smoothly as possible. After that some remarks on the rules, what to do and what not to do on contest day (what gets you disqualified). Followed by the last event of the day, which was not mandatory to attend, a quiz in which another volunteer and I hosted as MCs.
The third and last day was contest day. The day before I asked to be moved to another room, one of the bigger ones. Despite it being bigger it was actually easier to monitor, in the smaller rooms the desk were in rows and a single desk was pretty much as long as all the width of the room. That made it difficult to pass printouts to the teams in the middle of the room, while the bigger rooms had a corridor that made it easy to get to any team. About the printouts, because all teams have only one computer to work with they are allowed to print out code so that they can work on multiple problems in parallel. After the contest there was the showing of the final rankings (at one hour to the end the leaderboard is frozen so contestants are only able to see the rankings up to the end of the 4th hour), it is always pretty hype because of the way the showing is set up. For each problem there's a cell colored either white, green, red or yellow. White being the problem was never attempted by the team, green having sovled the problem prior to the 5th hour, red having tried and failed to solve the problem prior to the 5th hour and yellow being it not solved before the 5th hour but attempted in the 5th hour. Starting from the last place the cells that are yellow are reveald to see if they're green or red. If they're green the ranking changes and team that fell by 1 place is evaluated. If all of the yellow cells of a team are evaluated the next team in the rankings is evaluated. This goes up to the 14th place where the first bronze medal is awarded to the team that is confirmed to be in 14th place. This goes on up to the first place.
It is a shame that there won't be another SWERC hosted in Milan anytime soon, the current Chief Contest Organizer doesn't want to be in charge of the next SWERC because he's too busy. We'll see where the next one will be held.
P.S. I wanted to finish up the problem sets of the AoC 2022 (I had gotten till
day 10 then my schedule got a bit busy), this evening I got to finish part 1 of
day 11. The solution would be fairly easy if it weren't for the fact that I'm
using OCaml to solve the problems, so only pure functions are allowed (apart
from I/O). I also discovered that one of the sponsors at SWERC uses OCaml in
their codebase, Jane Street, they are a fintech company.
I might be a coward, in refence to the last blog post. On friday I went out with some friends, among them there was the girl that I like, I thought it was a good idea to invite her. We first had an aperitivo and then for dinner she met up with us at the restaurant. After dinner went to a bar, there was a waitress that a friend of mine likes. We were all like "tell her you find her cute or something", but I guess he was too shy to do that. To try and get him to say something to her I call him a coward 'cause he didn't have the balls to say anything to her. Now the girl that I like jumped in saying that she understands how he feels, you never know how she might react, asked if I would have the courage do something like that. Of course I said yes I would be, and to prove it to her I said to her that she was really cute and all (can't quite remember the exact thing I said) but she reacted saying "ah yes, sure" as if I didn't mean it. To be fair I was quite tipsy, so that could have made her think that I didn't really mean it, but today I realized, I'm a fucking coward. I'm able to tell her outright only when there's an excuse to shield my ass from repercussions...
Met a new person the past week. She's gorgeous, she doesn't talk much and seems like a loner. I invited her to join me and some of my friends to dinner this friday, looked like she enjoyed herself.
I was thinking of asking her out, but we'll see.
Oh right, last week I acquired a cock.li invite, so now I have my very own
cock.li email (I regret not going with cocaine.ninja but whatever).
On friday I went to a really nice restaurant, first time having kaiseki.
The name of the restaurant is Osaka, as the name suggests it's a japanese one.
The menu had various things which came in the following order:
For drinks we ordered a bottle of muscat wine. I appreciated particularly the
seared vagetables, especially the sweet potato that paired well with the sesame
sauce. The only thing I regret was not getting their matcha green tea rollcake.
This saturday I tried some pills to help me study. It was modafinil. It isn't anything heavy and the effects aren't that much better than coffee tbh (atleast, it doesn't on me), but that's fine, it was my first time trying pills for "doping". I really wish my contact could get me some addreall (at a reasonable price), that would actually help me alot more. My contact gave me some xanax as well and for free, didn't try it yet and I think I won't for a while. They're there tho, just in case I change my mind.
On another note, this friday I was at a party that rev.ng threw (it is a company that's making a decompiler), I was invited because most of the guys at rev.ng are from POuL (Politecnico Open unix Labs), which I am part of and they invited all the members. I really had a good time, got to know some of the older members that I knew only through IRC (yes I'm one of those that still use it, insert relevant xkcd meme here). On my fedi account I posted a picture of the cake if you're curious, but the moscato that they bought was the real impressive thing.
Anyway, not much progress with my twelf interpreter (the fact that I never took a serious course about grammars doesn't help), but to view it from a different angle and with the hope that I'll have some inspiration, I'm doing the same thing, and interpreter for twelf, in OCaml.
I also met this girl at the study room in my department that is a really good painter. We talked a bunch (instead of studying like I should have) about paintings and drawings. I even wanted to commission something but she doesn't draw faces too well so she was hesitant. Instead I offered to buy some of her paintings if she has to get rid of some (apparently she's only allowed to put the paintings on the walls of her own room despite them being so cool, she said her mum doesn't like her painting style).
Heyo, since anime.website was about to die I made a new account on another instance. You can now catch me at @PositiveC@cawfee.club if you're on fedi.
Been writing a twelf interpreter of my own. Making changes to the internal rappresentation without breaking stuff is so hard I had to start writing test (this is something I never do). At least is fulfilling, which is good enough for me. The idea was to write a twelf interpreter that actually had caching of previous function calls. Since they are all pure functions, therefore the output depending only on the input parameters, the interpreter could cut branches from the execution tree when identical parameters are given. Despite twelf being nothing more than a plaything I find myself coding in it.
If anyone is interested this is the repo: https://github.com/Mroik/twelf-interpreter
Just switched to neomutt and I found something that mutt does better than neomutt (actually neomutt doesn't do at all). In mutt if you use imap it will automatically detect all the mailboxes found on remote, neomutt doesn't do that. You have to manually set which mailboxes it "sees" (or maybe I'm just unaware of how to do it... if so someone tell me how to).
On saturday I went to my friend's birthday party. She's from a city in Tuscany while I'm from Lombardy. To get there I had to take a flixbus (not the most) comfortable way to get there but the cheapest by far. I departed at 8:30 and arrived by 12:30, I wasn't travelling alone, some other friends were invited so we went together. When we arrived we got picked up by another of our friends that is from the same city and stayed at her place, ate lunch, lasagne made by her grandma, and then visited Prato's chinatown.
There we found this milktea place that had 2 cats. Both very cute, white with dashes of gray and blue eyes. While there I was dying of a heatstroke, honestly, I was dumb enough to depart while wearing the suit for the party instead of changing clothes over there...
After that I went to Prato's station to meet the person I was gonna stay at for the night. We went to pick up her girlfriend and then got to his house to get ready.
We were supposed to arrive at the party by 6:30PM, we were supposed to have an aperitif before dinner, but our late asses got there by 7PM (tbf the birthday celebrant was late too). The place was gorgeous, a villa on a hilltop facing the city of Florence, we could see all the pretty lights from the city. The aperitief was held at the poolside on the left of the villa. Everything was delicious, there were cured meats, bruschettas and italian fried dumplings. With that they served prosecco.
After the aperitief we moved to the villa were the dinner was going to be held. Inside there were multiple tables for the relatives and outside, in the garden, a big table for the birthday celebrant and us, her friends. There were 4 groups of friends: us from Milan (so the people that she met during her studies), her italian friends from Prato, her teammates from when she used to practice synchronized swimming and her chinese friends (she's chinese and Prato has a pretty large chinese community). The seats were assigned and I was seated directly infront of her. On my right side all her friends from Milan and her friends from Prato, on my left all of her chinese friends and, at the end of the table, her teammates.
Dinner was a 10-course meal, well at least on paper (but 2 of the apetizers came together so I'd say it was more something like 9).
Apetizers:
Entree:
Main dishes:
Deserts:
Everything was delicious (and fancy), especially the apetizers, well everything about the party was pretty fancy, I mean, everyone was wearing a formal attire.
I got to know some of her italians friends from Prato during the aperitief, and the chit chat continued during the dinner. As for her chinese friends, I didn't get to talk much with them, they didn't open up easily, it was a typical situation with minorities (typically they tend to stick together and mainly interact with people within the community). Despite that I got to know 2 people, the ones closer to me on my left, Vincenzo and Luciana (those are italian names, it's common for chinese people to choose their italian name and use that one. Usually people mess up their chinese one). Vincenzo is specializing in something related to design for clothes or something like that, while Luciana is in her 5th year of highschool. During dinner I also discovered that Luciana is a good artist, she draws quite well so I asked if she'd be interested in making me a drawing/painting kinda like the one that I talked about a few blog post back. We exchanged instagram handles and later on we made an agreement for the painting.
Just before eating cake we sang her happy birthday, she opened a bottle of rose, not before shaking it a bit, so some of it spilt on the gifts. After that we took some pictures (oh, there was a professional photographer as well). Following that we ate cake and sang a bit at the karaoke, that one was a bit lame, the mic kept peaking, so meh.
Then came the opening of the presents. Me and two other friends pooled some money for the gift and got her a fountain pen. It was good and all if only there weren't another two fountain pens as gifts, and those looked better than ours sigh. Someone else got her some jujutsu kaisen merch (a hoodie and two buttons). The most expensive gifts were a bottle of Dior perfume and jewels (three different groups got her bracelets).
Everyone left by 12:30AM. Overall the birthday party was very fun. Now I'm looking forward for my drawing/painting from Luciana. I made her choose the subject to draw among 7 pictures, can't wait for it to be finished.
Too many have been judging my coding style, therefore I decided to change it. From now on I'll be using the K&R coding style for C and C-like languages.
Might end up going from vim to neovim. I want to be able to have rust hints using the build-in LSP support. For now I'll stick to vim tho, not having hints will help with remembering stuff.
Couldn't bring myself to study for the exams in september, so now I'm trying to learn Rust instead. Might as well do that instead of wasting time playing DOTA. But this means I'm fucked if I don't do my exams in january...
Yesterday I went bungee jumping. It was an amazing experience, the location was the Stockhorn lake, jumped from a gondola hanging over the lake. On the first rebound I tried doing a spiderman pose, but on the way down the rope hit my foot, I thought I was about to lose a shoe there.
After the jump when we returned there was a free beer (as is costumary with these sort of activities). When it was time to go back the gondola that was supposed to bring us back down to valley had technical difficulties, so we were stuck in the mountains for a while. Up there there was a restaurant that was close. Since it started becoming pretty late the bungee jump guys decided to open up the restaurant so that we could eat something (don't worry, apparently there was someone that worked there at the restaurant with us, we didn't just break in lol). The whole experience was surreal, really liked the whole "we're in this together" kinda vibe. Whipped out the cards and started playing.
By the time we got back to valley it was 11:30PM.
On monday I started my vacation here in switzerland. I'm staying at Wengen in the Jungfrau region. Everything is so expensive over here (that much I expected tho), even transportation is 28€ a day.
I'm on vacation with my family, not ideal but can't complain. I wish to meet new people over here but in the evening there's litherally nothing to do here. There's something like 3 pubs, most of the clients are locals and no one my age.
The only local that is around my age that I met is the teller at the train station, actually she might even be younger, looked like she wasn't a day older than 19 y/o. Really cute, definitely out of my league, and not about to ask her when there are people in line (besides, it seems like she's new to the job, there's always a supervisor by her side).
On another note, on saturday I'm going bungee jumping. Can't wait. In Lauterbrunnen I also saw a bunch of people going wingsuit flying. Maybe I'll try getting into that next year lol.
Yesterday I've experienced my first dab sweat. I hit my fattest dab yet. I was sweating for the next 30 minutes while sitting. The experience wasn't that bad, apart from the sweat everything else was normal. One of the guys broke the bong tho... sadge. It was on the floor near the table and he accidentally kicked it, when it hit the ground it broke into million pieces. I was thinking of gifting the owner a new bong. I don't really smoke on my own (actually, I don't even buy my own weed) so it could be an investment. I dislike smoking a joint, with the bong is somewhat different. It's easier to inhale, and it's fun hearing the bubbles.
This thursday the painting I commissioned to my friend's cousin arrived. I still have to decide where to hang it. I'll probably post a picture of it once I decide.
I try not to use spotify too much, mainly 'cause I don't pay for it. For now I'm
fine with using it, with pihole the ads get skipped. The reason I don't want to
use it too much is because I don't want to get used to it, for now I don't
listen to music with my phone when I'm outside since the jack port is broken,
but when I'm gonna eventually change my it I don't want to be used to spotify.
I usually download the files, but some friends of mine decided to make a
collaborative playlist and the easiest way was through spotify.
So I wanted to use spotify from a terminal and found ncspot. I reccomend it
to anyone that uses spotify and prefers TUI over GUI.
With the new update for gajim the UI is now horrible. Who the fuck asked for a redesign of the interface... actually mad at whoever made this.
Today I've been to "MeRLin Robotics and Mechatronics Lab" @ POLIMI. It was really cool, they showed us various robots they were working on, and explained some of the research that they were doing. This is one of the few times I wish I took engineering instead of CS (though I still prefer CS).
The reason they let us visit the labs was because of a git course we did for them (I was one of the speakers). This sets a precedent (for me atleast) in case other departments/student clubs ask us for private courses, I would probably try to make time for them, if I knew that their labs did some cool stuff.
Last night I hung out with some friends and talked about "society" and its problems. Talked about various societal structures and their pro and cons. While it was nice to have a discussion about our own beliefs, I don't think most of what they believe is correct and/or feasible. Personally, I believe that in our world, if you want to stand on the top (coming from the bottom), you have to be willing to take from someone else. And if anyone talks about redistibution of wealth as a solution, they don't realize that, after that redistribution, the wealth will start moving back to those, who are willing to take from someone else.
Heyo guys, I recently have been paid in monero (XMR) for a job I did, but I'm having trouble finding a buyer to cash out (I'm keeping it strictly p2p). If anyone from Europe in here, trusts me enough and would like to buy it off me it'd be great. I'm doing 1 XMR -> 204€ SEPA Instant payment.
This year I was a volunteer at SWERC 2021-2022. I had lots of fun. On day one, registration day, we had to checkin every team, but only around 48% showed up, the rest came during the late registration the next day :/ . We had to check for allergies and give them their bags with the tshirts of the event (which they had to wear during the practice session and the actual contest), and a couple of pens. They could also submit a notebook up to 25 pages that they could use as reference during the competition. There were a few funny ones, the first is litherally a notebook with one page, it had a bash script with the flags for the compiler... Another funny one was when we asked a team if they had a reference to submit, and they were confused, after explaining to them what it is they panicked, "no one told us we could bring something like that", "if you don't have it is fine", "no, it's not fine, we need it". Fortunately there are multiple printing shops around the campus (this year SWERC was held at the Polytechnic of Milan). The last one that I remember is a notebook that had a vim config at the end of the notebook.
The teams were not the only ones coming in for registration day, there were the sponsors as well as the judges, one of which was Petr Mitrichev (https://codeforces.com/profile/Petr), he came back to the reception and asked me if he could have 2 more tshirts for his wife and daughter. I told him he could come back later after all the judges arrived since I didn't know if there were enough shirts. Later on I asked my supervisor if it was fine if I gave out more tshirts for the judges (there were 4 tshirts colors, yellow for the volunteers, black for the coordinators, green for the partecipants and red for the rest of the staff, tech team, judges, etc...) 'cause a judge that came with wife and daughter asked if he could have 2 more. "Ah Petr, yeah sure he's super VIP, he held first place on codeforces for many years", I didn't know who he was, after hearing that I felt so bad 'cause I denied him the tshirts on the first day... but more on that later.
During the 2nd day there was the opening ceremony and after that a break/late registration. And that part of the day was exhausting, the hall at the entrance was packed since only 48% showed up on registration day... Nevertheless we start registering everyone. By the end we had registered everyone except for a few coaches (that's fine since the only condition to compete was to be in 3 students). After the break the teams had to attend the talks of the sponsors (got a bunch of swag from the companies, 2 termos from Huawei, 1 for water and 1 with a filter for tea, a bag of the Oniro foundation, pencils and buttons from Bending Spoons, btw Bending spoons one of the few unicorns in Italy, and various stickers from everyone) while the halls were empty we started talking with some of the sponsors, more specifically the guys from bending spoons, HR was really nice, and the front end dev that came was really humble. After the talks it was lunch time, unfortunately the Bovisa part of the Polytechnic has 2 campi (see how I used the correct declension for campus lol), and the canteen was in the other one. So we were tasked with showing the way to the teams (but most of them ended up going on their own). I led the sponsors from huawei but halfwei (pun intended) to the canteen they asked me how far it was, and after hearing that it was a total of 15 minutes at walking speed they decided to eat at a diner nearby.
After that there was the practice session, and oh boy if we were tense for that one. When the clock reached the starting hour, the computers didn't unlock, everyone had the same problem for over 15 minutes, after the tech team broadcasted the updates to each computer they still weren't unlocking, after a while someone realized that for the update to take place we had to turn off the computers for 30 secs and then start them up, instead the tech team was rebooting them (remotely ofc). So I went computer to computer manually turning them off. After that some of the computers were not able to print, so many teams were not able to work on multiple problem sets at the same time (there is only 1 computer per team as of the rules). VSCode was also missing the extension for printing (I just told the partecipants to use a different editor to print, lmao). I was litherally sweating from the tension...
After the practice session they had their Q&A for actual competition and after taht a banquet at the Crowne Plaza hotel.
On day 3, entrance to the labs in which the competition took place was at 8 o'clock (I had to be there at 7:30, I had to wake up too early for this stuff). And at 9 the contest started, this time everything went as smooth as it could go. This time around I was placed in the biggest room, a grand total of 35 teams in one room with 3 competitors per team, 105 people inside + me and another volunteer (yellow tshirts). During the contest some of the staff would come inside and attach some helium ballons to the table of the teams based on which problem set they solved (a cute idea ngl, and helped out with spotting the top teams).
After the contest ended there was lunch, problems analysis and theclosing ceremony.
It was a fun experience and if they ever ask me if I want to volunteer again next year I'll gladly accept, that is if I'm not competing myself (this year I tried for selections at my uni but didn't prepare enough). If anyone here on tilde participated or will next year let me know, we could have a small meet up at SWERC next. year.
Oh one last note, at the end during the awarding of the medals, there was one of the coaches that looked so cute, and I wasn't sure if she was a student or a professor (see, at my uni you can attend as a coach only if you're a professor). So me and this other girl tried to talk with her but she was never alone, and we didn't want to ask her in front of her students. Then another volunteer came to us and asked what was going on, and after telling him he went and asked for us. We followed him, and when she said teacher and asked why, this guy said, "I guess he meant that as a compliment because you're pretty", I tried to make it less weird by saying young, but this guy threw me under the bus and insisted pretty, you should have seen the grin on his face. During that interaction it felt kinda awkward, hopefully that professor didn't take it the wrong way...
Went to my friend's house yesterday, stayed over with a few friends. But it was nice meeting up after something like 2 months. It was the first time he had people over in the new house, I was really impressed with the way he and his roommate decorated it. It is really aesthetic (I wish anything of mine looked half as good as their house). Tried smoking weed out of a bong for the first time as well. First time I felt so high, not that I smoke often, I don't even buy my own stuff, plus, I suck at smoking joints (or anything cigarette like), so I never really felt stoned, atleast not too much. This time was different tho. Overall it was an enjoyable night (and another evening spent not studying).
I met up with a friend I haven't seen in a while on friday. Talked about a bunch of stuff, and had dinner with her and then went for some drinks. Unfortunately she lives in a nearby town and not in my city, so she had to go before the station closed down. Had fun, she's a bit of a lightweight when it comes to drinking tho... Because of that I was worried for her when she had to go home. Fortunately she got home in one piece.
Was thinking about switching to "victor-mono" in cursive for my terminal font. Right now I'm using "cascadia-code" mono in cursive with calt turned on. People keep telling me that they aren't able to read anything on screen but meh. I think it's pretty good.
For reference: https://github.com/rubjo/victor-mono and https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code
This wednesday and friday I was the speaker at a git course for newer users hosted by the unix club I'm a part of. On the 1st day (wednesday) a whole lot of people showed up and they seemed to enjoy it. There were plenty of questions and almost everyone was following along.
On the 2nd day only a few showed up, I suspect it's because it was a friday and people had better things to do.
Nevertheless it was a success and I hope others will be able to properly use git for their projects.
Yesterday a friend of mine had a party to celebrate her birthday and the end of the winter session of exams. We were 14 in total, 12 guests, my friend and her brother. Had a blast, we only drank and talked to each other but I got to meet new people so it wasn't "simply talking" (normally it'd get boring after a while). Also I'm glad that someone was taking pictures, I usually don't take any so I end up not having any pictures as remembrance. Slept over there and woke up with a light headache (I guess from drinking lol). Overall had a blast can't complain about my weekend. The only thing is I wish I could have been to my other friend's birthday (they were on the same day...), it looks like they had fun too. Well, I guess I can't have everything in life.
Gotta love how the professors aren't consistent with the marks they give. People that have done similar implementations of the program given as an exam were not treated the same way. The current passing rate of that exam is 5%. Only 5% out of 98 students passed that exam, the previous exam had a similar passing rate. It'd be fine if the exam were simply too hard, but no, the professor isn't consistent with the grades he gives...
The worse thing is, it's not like he's giving low grades, no no, he's failing 95% of the students every time.
Well, it's that part of the year again. Time for my winter exams at uni. Wish me luck :D (even tho it has nothing to do with luck...)
Today my friends went out and I couldn't make it... the FOMO levels today were high AF. Saw their videos on the group chat which didn't help.
I'm feeling a bit sick and the timing is unfortunate. Tomorrow we're supposed to go out and on saturday it's my friend's birthday party. I really hope tomorrow morning I'll wake up feeling well.
On another note, someone I know changed their domain on neocities and my need to know as much as I can about people (they used neocities as a diary) is killing me.
I think I'm an actual dumbass. Yesterday I went out drinking, and even though I wasn't drunk I started texting werid stuff to this friend of mine... I'm not sure how she took what I've written, nonetheless, I'm a dumbass!
Today I also went out to eat with the same group of friends I went drinking with, but in a bigger circle. We were about 14 today. I checked the transactions on my debit card, it doesn't look too good for my wallet...
Today I met new people at POuL that I've seen online on telegram. Went for drinks with them afterwards, was a fun night 10/10 would do again.
Today I saw something that made me real sad... I know I shouldn't be, but it does really make me sad. I know I should be happy for this person, but it is hard...
Today I visited The "Politecnico Open Unix LABS" with a friend of mine and met some of the members. It was a cool experience and their space looked really cool, cozy and messy, but great nonetheless. I think I'll visit them again, hopefully I'll get to know them more, and maybe get to learn from them. In my university we have nothing of the like, and while it would be great if someone started something similar (not me tho, lol), I feel like I wouldn't be able to learn enough from a newborn organization...
On tuesday I got real drunk and I passed out... the feeling was horrible, worst part? I was outside with my school mates. I bet I was a nuisance...
Today I was on a vc on discord with some of the students from my department, and while talking about various things one of them told me he realized that I don't show my social skills to others. He described me as an intelligent person with good social skills that tries to not show too much of myself, and pointed out that everyone else knew very little about me. I do admit I tend to not open up with someone if it's in a big group, and I'm not talking about the group as a social circle. I mean that if we're having a conversation and it is within a big group, it's unlikely that I'm gonna open up. If you want to get to know me it has to be 1 on 1, or at least in a group with a restricted number of people, further more, I'm not gonna be the one to open up first. I guess I do have a lot of social barricades that I raise up... That guy was drunk tho, maybe he was just blabbering nonsense.
Also, on the 27th I have an exam and I don't feel like I'm prepared at all. I'm thinking of not doing the exam this session and do it in January.
Today the wire of my headphones broke. Instead of buying new ones my mom gave me a pair that were laying around that, she wasn't using and oh boy... these are noise cancelling ones (fairly standard nowadays) with a really good bass subwoofer. When she told me that she got these ones with the supermarket points I thought they were gonna be shit. I was clearly wrong. I have blue switches and I bareley hear my own keyboard. I guess I'm gonna keep these.
Today I was leaving a review for the T470 that I bought on ebay, and I was typing away when I saw something that didn't add up. The sticker on the laptop said i5 7th gen, but on ebay it said i5-6300U. So I double checked with neofetch, and... I got a i5-7300U yay. I think they sent me the wrong laptop but alright shrugs. Got a better product so...
Yesterday I got my first very own thinkpad, got it on ebay for 339€. It is a t470 with an a 6th gen i5. Finished configuring arch and all the software that I need last night. The only thing left to do is to make it real pretty, for now I'm using KDE's plasma. I use i3 on my home PC but decided that I can't use the bindings I'm used to with a laptop's keyboard, not really used to it. We'll see.
Haven't written anything in a while. I have an exam on the 27th and as usual I'm procastinating (what else is new?). I also got to know someone new, she's gonna be a freshman in my UNI. A very weird person that does surf the obscure parts of the interwebs. She says she has social anxiety, and you can kinda see it (or should I say hear it) on discord. She doesn't really openly talk with people exept for 2 or 3 (if there's someone other than these 2 or 3 she just lurks). I wonder if she'll be able to talk to me in person the same way she does on discord... we'll see.
It's already the 15th of August and I still haven't gone anywhere for a vacation... might end up not going anywhere.
I started working as a developer for a streaming website. Gotta say, the JS that I wrote for the front end was awful. That part ended up getting rewritten by someone else. Was a let down...
Italy champion of Europe!!! Allowed England to make a goal at the 2nd minute just for the suspense.
Today I finally went out for drinks with my friends after a long time. Went to "La città del gioco" (The city of games), a place with a lot of tabletop games. After that we went to a pub. Overall it was a prety good night, the only downside was the amount of mosquitos... got eaten alive by those fuckers.
Man, I think I'm getting depressed. I mean, seeing other people doing stuff on saturday evenings while I'm at home makes you feel not too good about your own social situation.
Well, on saturday I got sorta drunk again. This time it was at a friend's house, we were about 14 (way above the limit imposed by the italian government). Was a fun experience, the place wasn't really big but it fit all of us. I swear, college kids drink whatever kind of alcohol there is, doesn't matter if it tastes like shit, they'll drink anything with alcohol in it. I guess I'm a bit of a lightweight compared to the others, also, tried weed for the first time, it sucked, I mean maybe it was just because it was a joint and I don't smoke, so no experience there. Maybe if I assume it from edibles i.e. brownies i'll be able to enjoy it, we'll see.
Today my university fixed a bug in their booking system for booking seats in the laboratory. It sucks since I was abusing it to get a seat even if it said that there were no more seats left (that lab is never full anyway...). Good thing is that I just finished my script, so I don't have to worry about forgetting to book. If there's some other users that attend "La Statale" aka UNIMI in Milan checkout it out https://github.com/Mroik/Prenotazione-Automatica-Unimi you'll never need to worry about having to book a seat again, just put it in crontab as a daily task.
Today I did nothing productive, all I did was watch anime. I have to start studying in a serious way or I won't be able to pass any exam this semester...
So, because of covid the rooms at the uni can't be filled at 100% capacity,so if you want to follow the lectures in person you have to book before all the seats are taken. You can only book for the lectures 7 days prior (I guess it's to prevent people from booking every lecture of the semester and hogging all the seats). But I'm too lazy, so I made a script to automate the process. The school site's js code isn't obfuscated, so it wasn't that hard to make the script. Now I'm never worried of not having a seat in class, and I don't have to worry about booking one. I made the code open-source, I wonder how many of my classmates (or anyone from the same school) will stumble upon it. I wonder if someone will try to report it if they find out.
Ok, it's time to start studying... haven't done that since the start of the semester (since March 1st). How long will it take for me to catch up? Starting monday no more DOTA and Netflix, take too much time.
Well, the side of my face is not as big as it was right after surgery. That's good but I still feel like I can't eat properly, so far I've been eating mashed potatos every day... I like it don't get me wrong, but I'm getting tired of it.
Well, got one of my wisdom teeth extracted, it was fucking painful. It hurt so bad the dentist had to use more anesthetic than the usual, I think I'm too sensitive...
Today I went to the dentist for a visit 'cause my wisdom teeth grew. Apparently the top ones are fine (thank God) but the bottom ones have to go. It is expensive AF as well, I just hope that the post extraction won't be that uncomfortable.
For the first time I went to a lesson on site instead of the online ones (today was the first day where it was possible to choose to do so), even though I'm pretty sure we're gonna go back to online classes. And tbh I wouldn't mind, it is way comfier from home. We'll see if I'll decide to go back to online classes next week.
Well it has been a while. I passed my programming exam and i gotta say, I'm disappointed. I got 28 out of 30 when I could have gotten more...
It's finally christmas season, so now I'm on vacation. I'll prolly gonna be spending it studing for tests.
I played a bit with iptables and i couldnt connect to some services for some reason, later realized that i fucked something with it. Now everything is working fine.
In case anyone was wondering, I didn't pass my driver license pre-exam, so they didn't let me take the actual exam. The thing that allowed me to take the exam has is gonna expire so I won't be able to take the test later on without paying more. Well, should be a good lesson about procrastination.
Today I have the pre-exam for my driver license. There's no point in doing the pre-exam tho. I've procastinated so much that even if I dont feel ready I'll have to go the exam, regardless of how much I score in the pre-exam. Well, wish me luck!
Just reinstalled arch. It feels good knowing that your system doesn't have garbage stuff and orphan packages that weren't installed as dependencies. Also, if someone knows how to auto /who on weechat message me.
Next week I have my first math exam, hopefully it will turn out alright. I bet I'm gonna lose a shitton of points just cuz I'll confuse a sign.
Last night I ported my discord bot from python to golang, and holy moly if it is way faster.
Welp, the girl ain't replying to my text... I guess she was just being nice then :'(
2 days ago, on wednesday I went to a party for freshmen organized by some students at the uni. The event itself was kinda sad, the idea was that you had to go with people that you met in class to get to know them a bit more. No one knew that, everyone (me included) thought that we'd meet new people at the event itself. Apart from that it ended up being a nice evening.
I went with two of my friends that I knew from highschool, we hoped to get to know someone new there. When we arived they made us take seats outside in the open, the place was nice, really cool looking and it was infront of the castle in my city. The waiter brought us wine for the table, the starters and after that the main course. The early evening was alright, had some good conversation and we brought up some of our shared experiences, it wasn't bad at all.
After a while one of my friends wanted to leave, he had a bit too much wine and was kinda sleepy, so he left the two of us. I personally didn't want to leave until I got to know someone at that event, after all we went there to meet new people. Because I'm not the most confident human being in that kind of social setting I thought it would have been a good idea to chug down some more alcohol to relax myself, and oh boy if I was relaxed. Not so long after my friend left a guy selling roses approched us, he saw that we were looking at a table with some girls and was trying to convince us to buy them roses. We declined instantly as both of us were not that confident, but that didn't matter the guy still insited and insisted, because of that the girls at the table we were looking at noticed us. The rose vendor left after seeing that we wouldn't buy his roses, after a few minutes I decided to muster all my courage and stand up and go to the girls we were looking at, I think the fact that I was tipsy helped with that. I aproached the table and guess started with the dumbest shit I could have came up with: "Hi, I was wondering are you here for the event for the freshmen?". Like... everyone there was there because of that event, none the less it made for a good opening and I was able to have a long conversation because of that. After a few minutes my friend joined us and we started talking about some trivial things, you know just to make conversation. Everything was going well, we ended up being the last group to leave, we were pretty much the only ones at that bar. There was just one other girl from another table that was all alone, some of the girls noticed that and asked her if she wanted to join since she was all by herself. Even tho I'm pretty cringe in situations like these I guess the more the marrier. I gotta say, this girl that joined us was badass, she was a chinese girl that arrived in Italy a year ago, she spent all of the last year just learning italian and with just one year of experience in italian she decided to attend to an italian university. I was mindblown.
The evening was proceding quite well and I was glad I had the balls to talk to some strangers at a bar (like I said, not the most confident human being). By the way, remember that rose vendor that approached us earlier? That guy came back and asked us if we wanted to buy roses, this time I convinced my friend to buy some roses. He gave one rose to the chinese girl and because he wanted to be all smooth and stuff like that said: "And for you, because you're called Rose, I'll give you two roses". I thought that was pretty smooth but I was tipsy so I don't know if it actually was. The rose vendor after a while came back for a 3rd time, and this time it was my time to buy roses. The vendor was pretty convincing: "Look some of them don't have roses, buy some roses", yeah that sounded convincing to me at the time OK? Anyway, I bought three roses and gave them all to this girl that I liked. After a while I did another thing that I would have never done if not for the alcohol, I want you to picture this... a guy that is super cringe that is also short, very short (I'm about 1.60m and I have 20 y/o D: ), I decided to ask for the number, and to my surprise, she actually gave me her number, despite me being not very attractive and being visibly drunk (at that point I was), and it wasn't a fake number either, I call that a big W in my book. Anyway we decided to leave and take some pictures by the big fountain in front of the castle, after that we all left and everyone went home. I've had this number for 2 days now, am I supposed to text her when I wanna ask her out or even just now? You know, without alcohol is hard to make these decisions...
Apparently every professor of every course feels the need of explaining from the begining how to convert from decimal to binary. This stuff is something you're supposed to do in highschool or even middleschool, they should just leave it as a requirement for the course and assume that everyone knows how to do this. It actually drives me insane.
For our "Programming 1" course we'll be learning golang and I gotta say, I hate the fact that the K&R style is forced on me. Other than that it seems like a language that I could like, it looks a lot like C without the need to manually allocate arrays. We'll see if I'll grow to hate it or not.
The first lessons at the uni were kinda boring, since there's a lot of people that don't even know how to move around the filesystem through a terminal... Hopefully we'll move faster in the following weeks.
I gotta say, online classes when people are not used to it makes for some funny situations. There was a girl that forgot to mute her microphone on the first class and said "He's the programming professor but can't find a file on the computer". The professor was cool, didn't take it personally, still, some people should think twice before opening their mouths.
My discord bot has been finally approved on top.gg and I realized, people will add anything to their discord servers. It is already in 60-ish servers even tho it only displays covid-19 stats.
I also started reading my text book for my driver license test, I enroled last october and I still haven't taken the test (procastinating). The thing for the test expires in december so I actually have to take the test. I don't even want a driver license but my parent said "but you need it for emergencies", yeah whatever I live in Milan, I don't have a use for a driver license, public transportation is very good here.
My parents told me not to shave my mustache, they said I'd look bad... So I shaved my mustache and indeed I look awful.
Dude, waited for 24h to test something and it bombed cuz I miss-spelled a varible, bruh moments. I guess it's really my fault, I could've tested the program in a way where I didn't need to wait for 24h but, meh whatever. I guess I should start using another editor that highlights variables named the same way, or install a plugin for vim that does something similar. The default coloring doesn't seem enough for me. If anyone has a suggestion for the extension send me an email :P
Do you guys procastinate a lot like I do? I'm supposed to read my text book for my driver's license, but end up playing games all day or doing something else.
Also, do you have fucked sleeping schedules like me? For a while now I've gone to bed at something like 5 to 8am, and wake up 4pm. This mainly happens when I'm on vacation tho, so I suppose it's fine.
