It says something about the state of modern browsers that my preferred way for reading things on the web from my tablet is to:

1. Open termux
2. ssh into my laptop
3. Launch Emacs
4. Browse using eww

Otherwise, I chew through battery in no time flat. As it stands, I've been doing so for many hours straight and still have 88% battery.

Been looking for an iOS compatible #reticulum client for Katy. There seems to be exactly one (Retichat).

Unfortunatrly, it doesn't seem to work properly, and I can't prove it, but I think it's MitM-ing the messages.

Finally found another Android client that's working on an iOS port. I popped over to the project's GitHub page and what's the first thing I see? A .claude directory.

Welp, back to the drawing board.

One of the things I really love about #reticulum is its ability to seamlessly route traffic over literally any communication medium that can handle at least 5 bits per second. I'm also reminded of a YouTube video I watched a while ago where a guy was able to send data (at a very slow rate) over a literal tin can phone. Sadly, I can't find the link.

Anyhow, I think you can probably figure out what I am now legally and morally obligated to do.

Woke up this morning to a very large unexpected bill that needed to be addressed immediately. Managed to put the immediate fire out (or at least reduce it to a manageable simmer) but it took several hours of negotiating and it burnt essentially all of my spoons for the day. I should have just written the rest of the day off and done nothing else.

Katy and I decided to go run an errand anyway because we could turn it into a nice relaxing bike ride, which honestly sounded pretty appealing. Unfortunately, the errand went sideways and resulted in me having to spend another hour on the phone putting out another urgent fire.

I've done what needed to be done, but I know I'm going to pay a heavy price for overtaxing my system like that. The spoon tax is real.

Turns out I've been pruning my #BorgBackup archives wrong. There's a second step involved that actually deletes the "removed" data rather than just (presumably) removing the refrences to that data from the index. While I knew about this second step, I assumed that it was like how it works when you delete a file: the data technically remains intact, but gets overwritten by subsequent writes. Apparently I was wrong about this. I've been pruning—but not compacting—my daily backups monthly for years.

Long story short: I just spent an entire day compacting my backups. My backup storage just went from 71% full to 38%.

I have an unnamed family member who insists climate change is a hoax. A few days ago, we got an emergency alert about a tornado. I've lived through tornado watches in the past, but this was the first actual tornado I've ever encountered. He insists that this was fake news because he never saw it.

There was a funnel cloud sighting (with photos) on the major road that runs closest to his home.

I just didn't have it in me to argue.

In the late 90s, I remember everyone freaking out about Y2K. I knew how to write software, and I thought I understood the problem (and from a purely technical standpoint, I did). I wrote the whole thing off as people making a mountain of a molehill because surely no competent modern programmer would make a mistake like that, right? This opinion seemed validated when the year 2000 came and went without any apparent major incident.

Thing is, I was young, inexperienced, and naïve. I didn't understand a few things:

1. How often hastily-written good-enough-for-now code finds its way into production systems in order to meet a deadline (also, how long legacy code tends to stick around (I'm looking at you, COBOL)).
2. How much work went on behind the scenes scrambling to fix the problem before it happened.

Now, with LLMs, we have a way to generate such code at scale, and I can't help but wonder about the price we're going to pay for it down the line, all in the name of shipping code on an arbitrary deadline.