Good reads:

• “How branches influence the performance of your code and what can you do about it?” https://johnnysswlab.com/how-branches-influence-the-performance-of-your-code-and-what-can-you-do-about-it/
• “Modern Microprocessors - A 90-minute guide” https://www.lighterra.com/papers/modernmicroprocessors/
• A maintained collection of brachless algos https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#CopyIntegerSign
• “Why can’t you multiply vectors” - talk by Freya https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htYh-Tq7ZBI pretty elementary but refreshes my knowledge on linear algebra. Good talk!
• “主題分享：深入 Spectre V2 - VM 如何攻擊 Host？- (Gavin Guo)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYRI60uAwYc
• “The Linguistics Iceberg Explained” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFz6KqZurFY

Ginseng’s blog

https://gi.nseng.art

I finally set up a hugo generated static blog for my GF. The challenge is to establish a workflow and teach it to a non-tech person. Teaching her git or commandline is a no-go. Therefore I tried several static CMS, including netlify(now known as decap). To be honest it disgusts¹ me:

• it binds you to netlify services
• it binds you a small collection of code forges (github, gitlab, bitbucket)
• self-hosting is non-trivial: as it’s “serverless”! They suggest you don’t have your own web server in the first place!
• they automatically hosts the webpages for you, I think you can turn it off but I was to hasty to find the option. No I don’t want this. I only want a portal to manage the content.

Serverless?
In general, I’m strongly for decentralized network. “Serverless promotes decentralization!” – one may argue. But that’s not the same decentralization I’m talking about.

Serverless is a design pattern that encourages you to think of a service provider as an arbitrary collective of servers as in “cloud”, instead of a specific program running on a specific machine. On one hand it abstracts the servers and scales well, on the other hand the name “serverless” is just wrong. The server is there no matter your abstraction.

Decentralization is not only a technical aspect, but also a social construct. Yeah, stuffs are scatter into the could, you call it serverless and “decentralized”. But who do you think owns that whole cluster of serverless servers?

How the blog works for now?
Before I can find (or make) a proper CMS, I would manually edit the content for ginseng… I set up a filemanager endpoint for her with which she could upload her artworks. I have a script that sync the files to my machine, patch url into posts, render the site then sync the site to the webroot.

Luckily since her work is (visual) art oriented so I don’t have much text editing to do. I only need to patch the media. So this workflow does have much overhead as it seems.

I want to read

• Echopraxia by Peter Watts.

Mad dogs

If two dogs are biting each other, it doesn’t necessarily mean one of them is good and the other is evil. It’s not always Heroes versus the villain like in Hollywood!

TIL? the “&” is called “Ampersand”

because it was included in the English alphabet and tought in schools, hence the slur " x y z’and per se and’ “… -> Ampersand.

Trivias:

• “Statistically, every fifth instruction is a branch”
• You can normalize bool variable by applying !! operator on it.