![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Miscellany
Today is my first day of leave from work for over the Christmas break. This morning we sent the boys off back home to Asia to visit family, now it's just me and R. I am relaxing on the sofa with our dog L. while R. brings some sanity to the kitchen storage. I already feel my headspace increasing and have been getting some small postponed things done. Many more await.
I am quite good at sleeping. Given the opportunity, I can do plenty of it. This morning, I dreamt we lived somewhere else and I spied a sizable swirly unnatural-looking Weather Thing approaching, and turned to R. to strongly suggest that we leave the house now and drive elsewhere.
Again, I thought back to high school where one of my math teachers figured Cartesian coordinates for the vertices of a regular dodecahedron and, looking at one, I wonder what the straightforward strategy is for doing that. I like to think that enough staring and turning would help make it clearer. Now, this is where I wish I had a large desktop system with lots of PCI-e slots for used RTX 3090's or somesuch: it's the kind of thing I'm happy to try idly chatting to some opensource LLM about. It's not as if anything's riding on the answer. Perhaps they're rather better at classic book suggestions than anything analytic though.
I also got to wonder about mobile telephony. If we have a world-spanning network of antenna towers, and users can travel anywhere then suddenly appear and want to call some other user who did likewise, it works. I mean, I can imagine a bit of route-finding, using hop counts and such, but I don't immediately see some implementation of this that doesn't have some larger nodes having a directory of absolutely everybody who's connected, to know where to route their packets, and eating bandwidth to maintain it. It's another one of these things that might become clearer if I spend more time thinking but it also seems one that, with my Computer Science degree from Cambridge in hand, I ought to more readily know already. I should be able to say,
Update: I realized that the problem of routing to mobile users improves if we fragment the telephone network into a hierarchy then each part of the hierarchy needs that all-users directory only once for those users not connected to that part.
My mention of idly chatting to LLMs reminds me, I have three sizable pending purchases in mind: such a desktop AI system, a small laptop for use while commuting, and a cross-trainer. The interesting question is how to prioritize them though clearly the first there should actually be last while I cross my fingers for the bubble bursting. Also, I'm reluctant to spend too freely until I'm more ahead of the higher-interest debt.
In the meantime, I've found that, as usual, BBC iPlayer didn't exactly help me discover that there's recent Later… with Jools Holland to provide me with a somewhat alternative musical backdrop, albeit a considerably mixed bag of such. I've been enjoying ex-BBC's Stereo Underground recently which is also nicely varied. Given that it often plays the music of my childhood, it makes me wonder: I think of all the energy of especially some of the more punk-ish songs, and how exciting life seemed to me at the time, especially with books filling my head with new intellectual worlds to wrestle with. There's something there I'd be interested to recapture, about possibility and choice, about who I am and what I pursue. I may not quite know which destinations make sense but one of the many wonderful things about R. is how supportive they are.
I am quite good at sleeping. Given the opportunity, I can do plenty of it. This morning, I dreamt we lived somewhere else and I spied a sizable swirly unnatural-looking Weather Thing approaching, and turned to R. to strongly suggest that we leave the house now and drive elsewhere.
Again, I thought back to high school where one of my math teachers figured Cartesian coordinates for the vertices of a regular dodecahedron and, looking at one, I wonder what the straightforward strategy is for doing that. I like to think that enough staring and turning would help make it clearer. Now, this is where I wish I had a large desktop system with lots of PCI-e slots for used RTX 3090's or somesuch: it's the kind of thing I'm happy to try idly chatting to some opensource LLM about. It's not as if anything's riding on the answer. Perhaps they're rather better at classic book suggestions than anything analytic though.
I also got to wonder about mobile telephony. If we have a world-spanning network of antenna towers, and users can travel anywhere then suddenly appear and want to call some other user who did likewise, it works. I mean, I can imagine a bit of route-finding, using hop counts and such, but I don't immediately see some implementation of this that doesn't have some larger nodes having a directory of absolutely everybody who's connected, to know where to route their packets, and eating bandwidth to maintain it. It's another one of these things that might become clearer if I spend more time thinking but it also seems one that, with my Computer Science degree from Cambridge in hand, I ought to more readily know already. I should be able to say,
ah, yes, we chatted about exactly this kind of thing and this is how you do it. As it is, I do recall that, were I to want to model such systems,
communicating sequential processesmay be a useful search term, but that's about it.
Update: I realized that the problem of routing to mobile users improves if we fragment the telephone network into a hierarchy then each part of the hierarchy needs that all-users directory only once for those users not connected to that part.
My mention of idly chatting to LLMs reminds me, I have three sizable pending purchases in mind: such a desktop AI system, a small laptop for use while commuting, and a cross-trainer. The interesting question is how to prioritize them though clearly the first there should actually be last while I cross my fingers for the bubble bursting. Also, I'm reluctant to spend too freely until I'm more ahead of the higher-interest debt.
In the meantime, I've found that, as usual, BBC iPlayer didn't exactly help me discover that there's recent Later… with Jools Holland to provide me with a somewhat alternative musical backdrop, albeit a considerably mixed bag of such. I've been enjoying ex-BBC's Stereo Underground recently which is also nicely varied. Given that it often plays the music of my childhood, it makes me wonder: I think of all the energy of especially some of the more punk-ish songs, and how exciting life seemed to me at the time, especially with books filling my head with new intellectual worlds to wrestle with. There's something there I'd be interested to recapture, about possibility and choice, about who I am and what I pursue. I may not quite know which destinations make sense but one of the many wonderful things about R. is how supportive they are.
no subject
Those are probably the best parts of the "time off from work" experience. :)