There was a man of Sung who was strolling in the street and picked up a half tally someone had lost. He took it home and stored it away, and secretly counted the indentations of the broken edge. He told a neighbor: “I shall be rich any day now.”

@erincandescent is this something you could call with the //go:generate directive?

@boutell @louis over a decade ago i used a vps for a work site that slowed down massively in the afternoons. i suspect i shared the hardware with a site that used a lot of i/o or something. my solution was to pre-render page templates twice a day and store them in redis with a ttl of three days. pre-rendering them meant it took very little cpu to push them to the browser, and keeping them in memory meant almost no disk i/o for most of the day.

it took a total of 140-150 kbyte/page (there were three variations) and there were about 700 pages in all.

using redis instead of memcached meant if the vps rebooted unexpectedly or something, it could still load up the page templates from disk and be up and running within seconds.

When coins go out of circulation, after all, the metal doesn’t simply disappear. In the Middle Ages—and this seems to have been true across Eurasia—the vast majority of it ended up in religious establishments, churches, monasteries, and temples, either stockpiled in hoards and treasuries or gilded onto or cast into altars, sanctums, and sacred instruments. Above all, it was shaped into images of gods. As a result, those rulers who did try to put an Axial Age–style coinage system back into circulation—invariably, to fund some project of military expansion—often had to pursue self-consciously anti-religious policies in order to do so. Probably the most notorious was one Harsa, who ruled Kashmir from 1089 to 1101 AD, who is said to have appointed an officer called the “Superintendent for the Destruction of the Gods.” According to later histories, Harsa employed leprous monks to systematically desecrate divine images with urine and excrement, thus neutralizing their power, before dragging them off to be melted down. He is said to have destroyed more than four thousand Buddhist establishments before being betrayed and killed, the last of his dynasty—and his miserable fate was long held out as an example of where the revival of the old ways was likely to lead one in the end.

-- Debt, The First 5,000 Years

Encoded using the finest acid-free high-entropy binary digits.

@two_star a lively discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40010066

@thomasfuchs https://youtu.be/6_CtgelI6xU?t=18

wayland, the ipv6 of windowing systems

@annika i don't enjoy linking to his posts, but this will help: http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/

start at section 4: padding

i tried it: https://app.suno.ai/song/a2e3f7f1-e9af-442e-a4ac-088fe0138899

had to rename risc-v to risk 5, otherwise it pronounced it "riskiv" or something

When Alexander set out to conquer the Persian Empire, he borrowed much of the money with which to pay and provision his troops, and he minted his first coins, used to pay his creditors and continue to support the money, by melting down gold and silver plundered after his initial victories. However, an expeditionary force needed to be paid, and paid well: Alexander’s army, which numbered some 120,000 men, required half a ton of silver a day just for wages. For this reason, conquest meant that the existing Persian system of mines and mints had to be reorganized around providing for the invading army; and ancient mines, of course, were worked by slaves. In turn, most slaves in mines were war captives. Presumably most of the unfortunate survivors of the siege of Tyre ended up working in such mines. One can see how this process might feed upon itself.

-- Debt: The First 5,000 Years

I should be clear here. I am not using the word "violence” metaphorically. I am not speaking merely of conceptual violence, but of the literal threat of broken bones and bruised flesh; of punches and kicks; in much the same way that when the ancient Hebrews spoke of their daughters in "bondage,” they were not being poetic, but talking about literal ropes and chains.

Most of us don't like to think much about violence. Those lucky enough to live relatively comfortable, secure lives in modern cities tend either to act as if it does not exist or, when reminded that it does, to write off the larger world “out there” as a terrible, brutal place, with not much that can be done to help it. Either instinct allows us not to have to think about the degree to which even our own daily existence is defined by violence or at least the threat of violence (as I've often noted, think about what would happen if you were to insist on your right to enter a university library without a properly validated ID), and to overstate the importance -- or at least the frequency -- of things like war, terrorism, and violent crime. The role of force in providing the framework for human relations is simply more explicit in what we call “traditional societies -- even if in many, actual physical assault by one human on another occurs less often than in our own. Here's a story from the Bunyoro kingdom, in East Africa:

Once a man moved into a new village. He wanted to find out what his neighbors were like, so in the middle of the night he pretended to beat his wife very severely, to see if the neighbors would come and remonstrate with him. But he did not really beat her; instead he beat a goatskin, while his wife screamed and cried out that he was killing her. Nobody came, and the very next day the man and his wife packed up and left that village and went to find some other place to live.

The point is obvious. In a proper village, the neighbors should have rushed in, held him back, demanded to know what the woman could possibly have done to deserve such treatment. The dispute would become a collective concern that ended in some sort of collective settlement. This is how people ought to live. No reasonable man or woman would want to live in a place where neighbors don't look after one another.

In its own way it's a revealing story, charming even, but one must still ask: How would a community -- even one the man in the story would have considered a proper community -- have reacted if they thought she was beating him? I think we all know the answer. The first case would have led to concern; the second would have led to ridicule. In Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, young villagers used to put on satirical skits making fun of husbands beaten by their wives, even to parade them about the town mounted backwards on an ass for everyone to jeer at. No African society, as far as I know, went quite this far. (Neither did any African society burn as many witches -- Western Europe at that time was a particularly savage place.) Yet as in most of the world, the assumption that the one sort of brutality was at least potentially legitimate, and that the other was not, was the framework within which relations between the sexes took place.

-- Debt, The First 5,000 Years

@yogthos where is this from?

"You ain't pretty," he started in at his reflection. "You ain't that bright. You ain't that funny. Or charming. There’s nothing in you worth loving."

Like an offering to the stirring serpent in his belly, he repeated his daily mantra aloud. His core truths to begin the day, bottoming himself out; that way the day could only get better from there.

-- I Can Transform You by Maurice Broaddus

@beetle_b it's just a badly explained answer. the free gemini model is much better -- but can't be self-hosted.

gemma:7b on ollama. prompt: prove that the sum of all interior angles in a triangle is 180

Sure, here is a proof that the sum of all interior angles in a triangle is 180:

In a triangle, there are three angles. Let's call them A, B, and C. We know that the sum of the angles in a triangle is always 180. This is because the sum of the angles in a triangle is equal to the sum of the angles in a straight line, which is 180.

Therefore, the sum of all interior angles in a triangle is 180.

@jym

i don't know, i don't think this works: https://chat.openai.com/share/af115783-7671-48bd-bbc8-c16a351d767b

maybe better: https://g.co/gemini/share/29b5ba8a4170