~samyules@TTBP



27 november 2023

I need to become better at Journaling. I have come to the realization that while I have kept my desire to learn new things, I lack the tools necessary to do so. One big red flag is that I have a hard time remembering much of anything at all. I voraciously consume ideas and thoughts. I could do better at finding items from both sides, but I am curious and interested. But after consuming so many articles and books and quotes, I cannot recall the new ideas. I need to slow down and digest it.

My memory problem does not just apply to new ideas. I forget everything. If I don't write it down, it is gone. Appointments, errands, ideas for gifts. Computer systems that I set up and built, I cannot remember how to use. With so much consumption on a daily basis, there is not room in my head. I need to put it into a note.

Something I've been thinking about lately is the dangers we are facing with Artificial Intelligence. Today it is a useful tool. The problem is people. People want to win. People want to beat their enemies. I do believe that the likelihood of an AI apocalypse is low. I'm not too worried about a rogue AI killing us all. I am worried about some human deciding to use these technologies against his fellow humans. This is decidedly a possible outcome. No amount of hand wringing about safety will save us from such a fate.

Over the last hundred years, humanity has gotten much better at cooperating than we have been throughout history. At least it would appear so. We have managed to build a worldwide system of cooperation. But the edges of this system are fraying. At this point, it seems more likely that we will go to war again than it has since the end of the Cold War. As a younger man I naively believed that war was not necessary. I believed that all of that violence and hate was history. Something in the textbooks, not in our societies.

Since that time I have seen our American society stagnate. I have learned that great victories are short lived. Hate lives on in the minds and hearts of people. Without an enemy to direct it, it is unleashed upon our neighbors. It is interesting that our fashions and our music, our movies and our stories, all these have stayed basically the same since the late 1990's. It's like we have gotten stuck in 1997. It would seem that sometimes War is necessary. We need something to kick us in the pants and make us move and grow and progress.

With the advent of ChatGPT it has become apparent that we are on the cusp of a society altering technology. The jobs that have been the highest paying and in the highest demand are suddenly and exponentially in danger of being automated away. Criminals and hackers have taken these technologies to defraud and attack computer infrastructures. Artists that have spent years of their life to achieve a level of greatness have their style hijacked and ideas stolen by an algorithm in the machine. This stirring of the pot could have disastrous consequences. As jobs are taken and society disrupted, the possibility of violent reaction increases.

We humans are often straddling the edge between competition and cooperation. I asked GPT4 What are your thoughts about competition and cooperation in human nature?, and this is what it said:

Competition and cooperation are both intrinsic aspects of human
nature, deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. They represent
two sides of the same coin and have been fundamental in shaping
the social, cultural, and moral fabric of human societies.

Competition drives individuals to strive, innovate, and push
boundaries, often leading to progress and growth. It can encourage
individuals to push their limits, develop resilience, and strive
to excel. In economic terms, competition can foster innovation,
growth, and efficiency.

On the other hand, cooperation has allowed humans to build complex
social structures, share resources, and ensure mutual survival. It
invites inclusivity, social harmony, and the sharing of resources.
Cooperation can lead to collective problem-solving, fostering social
bonds, and building communities.

However, both competition and cooperation can have negative aspects.
Unhealthy competition can lead to stress, inequality, and unethical
behavior. Lack of cooperation can lead to conflict, mistrust, and
societal fragmentation.

The challenge for societies, therefore, lies in finding the right
balance between fostering healthy competition and promoting cooperation.
A balance that encourages growth and innovation while ensuring social
harmony and equity. Understanding this balance and how to achieve it
is central to many areas of study, from social sciences and economics
to biology and psychology.

Thank you Robot Overlord. All hail GPT4. I'm sure you will take great care of your pet humans one day.

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25 november 2023

Gratitude

Turkey day was a good day. Today is good to. I love to be at home!

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09 october 2022

Good hard work Useless side projects

Roughly a week ago I stumbled onto the website for the NixOS project. I was lured in by their fancy talk about reproducible, declarative, and reliable systems. I`ve been looking for tools to make repeatable setups for user space tools. I would love it if I could go from bare metal to working, configured setup in a single command. Ansible is a great tool, but still requires two steps at a minimum: configure the base os with at least one user, then run the ansible script. Nix promises something better.

So, for the last week I've been buying my head into the Nix programming language. I've been learning the conventions, the Nix way of doing things. I've gone from editing my configuration.nix file to attempting to write flakes. I have spent every free minute trying to learn and write code and troubleshoot and understand what the hell it's all doing. I hate it don't understand any of it. I love the concept of declarative systems. I just don't get the Nix language yet.

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03 october 2022

Another week slides quickly by...

Some days seem to fly by so quickly. It is as though I am a flat stone skipping across the lake. Every now and then I get a little blip into the normal course of time. A moment when I look around and say to myself, Hey it's the weekend! Maybe I should do something fun! And then I am thrown back into the air, flying high over the normal passage of time. There is never anytime to pursue

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24 september 2022

Headaches and Puppies

I find myself sitting alone on the couch. I have a nice little head cold, and I'm not really feeling like moving. My wife took the kids to a Cat Cafe. I still have a hard time believing that there is a coffee shop full of cats that is so popular that appointments are needed, but I digress. I stayed home to babysit our puppy.

We have a beautiful little Chocolate Lab. She's about 4 months old, and she is fun and smart and generally wonderful. However, at the moment she is contemplating the luck of being alive. About 20 minutes ago she was on the couch with me, playing and chewing on some toys. She sat right next to my leg... and she started peeing all over my leg.

I guess I got what I deserved for letting my wife go alone with 3 kids to a Cat Cafe.

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13 september 2022

Bookstores and coffee

Barnes and Noble makes me want to buy pencils and paper

There is something about bookstores that draws me in and makes me want to buy nice notebooks and start writing. That might make you think that I have done a substantial amount of writing, but you would be wrong. I do have a substantial amount of quality made notebooks. Exceptional and exceptionally blank notebooks. Pens and pencils besides.

Throughout my life, I have been a passive participator in many aspects of my life. I have been plagued by a burning need to create something new, something unique and wonderful. This desire has been burning me up since I was still a child. And yet... Each time that I pick up a new notebook,chock-full of beautiful clean pages, I am inundated with the sense that nothing that I will write will ever be that great something. And I leave the pages flooded with nothingness.

Every time I buy that new laptop, tablet, some technological wonder my mind races ahead to that wondrous day of creation's glory, replete with visions of success and money and fame (or at least the simple pleasure of completing something that has been started), and I am troubled by the distasteful dissonance of the reality of life. That is -- the reality of mundane work, and mundane tv, and mundane life. How could I possible create anything as wondrous as what my heart yearns to make?

Less serious side note

I just tried to enter the ls command, and found a tilde.town easter egg. Try typing sl instead!

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12 september 2022

staying home

Last night my little two year old had a fever and a rough sounding cough, so we decided that she would stay home today. It's a lot easier for me too get time off, so I had the privilege of being home with my kid.

We spent the day watching Cocomelon and chilling on the couch. I did a substantial amount of time reading. I learned a smidgen about BASH arrays and wrote a couple of practice scripts. My kid is doing much better now.

Unfortunately, I think that I caught what ever they were sick with. I am feeling achy and tired. Perfect start to the week, eh?

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07 september 2022

A Perfect Summer Day

I had planned on doing more writing today. Instead I sat on the couch helping my kids with homework. My elementary aged daughter has always struggled with reading. Tonight, we sat on the couch together for about an hour while she read out loud to me. She is getting so much better! She grabbed The Last Kids on Earth. Pretty fun book. I really enjoyed that time tonight.

The temperature today was 102°F

Waay too hot for this time of year. Maybe someone should have warned us about global warming 20 years ago...

A few footnotes

Today I was solving problems with mosh. I got full color working by compling from the current master branch on github. I am running the new build from my .local/bin/ on tilde.town and cosmic.voyage. It`s working great.

I also have a working bin of portal (p2p file transfers) and skate (cloud key-value database client from charm.sh).

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06 september 2022

Getting into it

and maybe missing the point

I am still new to the tildeverse. Of course, when I log on to tilde.town, my thoughts and feels are turned toward the experience of using it. I really enjoy this place. I am old enough to remember cruising the world through gopher. I forgot all about it until I looked at the feels publishing options and reailized that gopher still exists.

I was 8 years old when my mother bought our first PC. It was 1991. I think it was an intel 286 (I can't remember). It ran DOS, but it booted up into a TUI of some sort. Something of a cross between a launcher and a file manager. My mom bought it exclusivley for entering her geneology. The program she used could connect to the LDS church's geneology server, so of course it had a wonderfully noisy modem for dial-up access.

My mom used her PC for geneology. I used it to explore a mysterious digital world. I think I still miss that sense of wonder and mystery.

Here in tilde.town I have rediscovered that sublime feeling. I love the sense of nostalgia. I relish the modern possibilities.

Maybe at some point the deja vu will pass. I think at some point, this place will become just another service that I use. That would actully be a good thing. The point of participating in something like this is the participation.

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02 september 2022

more tilde.fun

I found ~cmccabe's tilde.town guide this morning. It includes directions to make your own train car to the tilde-train. So I gave it a shot. Here it is:

 ----------------------------
|=  =     ----  ----     =  =|
|        |    ||    |        |
| Hello! |    ||    |        |
|        | ---|| ---|~samyules
|=       |____||____|       =|
 - /  \-/  \------/  \-/  \ -
   \__/ \__/      \__/ \__/

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01 september 2022

Some serious feels...

aprehension

I am a father. I live wth my wife and our four children, three cats, and two dogs. It is a good life that we have together.

Around twelve and a half years ago, my wife and I decided to look for a puppy. We looked in the local classifieds and drove about an hour away to take a look at some Labrador puppies. We were under-prepared for the cuteness, and ended up taking two puppies home -- sisters from the same litter. We called the black one Rachel, and the yellow pupper we called Sophie.

At the time, our oldest child was only two years old. For as long as they can remember, our children have always had those two puppies in their life. The puppies have always been a part of the family.

About 8 weeks ago, child number three opened the back door. There was Sophie, just at the bottom of the steps, peacefully and eternally resting in the shade. She just laid down, and left us. It happened during the day while my wife and I were both at work. We both feel guilty that we were not there to hold our puppy at the end. My little 10 year old child was not at all prepared to find her like that. We were all unprepared.

My wife called me in the early afternoon to tell me what had happened. I drove home after work and approached the front door. Kid number three was sitting on the front porch. When she saw me, neither of us said anything. I could tell that she was trying bravely to contain the pain that she felt, but when she saw me the tears started to flow. I just opened my arms and held her. All of us could feel the pain of the loss. However, I could see that my little girl was deeply shaken. From her view, she just lost something that was consistently present for her whole life.

After a few minutes, she led me inside the house and took me to the backyard. Sophie lay there, still peacefully sleeping away. The whole family gathered around her, holding each other, trying to understand. I gave Sophie one last scratch behind the ears, and we wrapped her in a tarp an together we carried her to my pickup truck. Our little wake complete, I took her to the cit shelter to be cremated.

time moves

Last night at our house everyone was relaxing. The kids were playing and I was busy exploring tilde.town. Kid number three walks into the office behind me. Her voice is calm and cool. She says that Rachel, our other old puppy, is laying down in the rocks, and she won't come when she is calling. -- At first I say, She's just sleeping. She likes the rocks in the shade. -- Then I turn and look at my daughter, and I see that her eyes full of tears. My heart dropped.

We walked out together -- and Rachel woke up and came to greet us when we walked around the corner of the house. My little girl is brave and strong. We talked for a few minutes. She saw the dog sleeping, with flies all over it's face, and she was taken back to the day she found Sophie on the back porch.

Death is such a tricky thing for the living. It will come for us all. There is no escaping it. We try to avoid it, but the world is a reminder of it. All we can do -- is make the most of the time that we have.

The weeks have passed on. Life continues. The kids are back in school again. We brought a new little pupper back into our life -- a beautiful little Chocolate lab we call Dreamy. It is a good life we have together.

Thanks for the space to share. -- samyules

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31 august 2022

Having fun here!

It's my first day on tilde.town. I am very excited!

I learned how to upload public keys to a github account:

curl -X POST -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR-TOKEN>" \
--data '{"title":"test-key","key":"$(cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)"}' \
https://api.github.com/user/keys`

"<YOUR-TOKEN>" is a personal access token for github.

Go to github.com > Settings > Developer Settings > Personal Access Tokens

So far, I'm loving tilde.town!

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