As I was contemplating the last letter, I noticed a fairly big problem.
The trick.
It didn’t work.
Once I sensed my intention to publish this letter, my writing changed—“when I had some kind of external audiences in mind,” indeed.
But who did I really intend to write for?
I mean, if I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that someone’s gonna read this, I probably should try to understand the essence of that “someone,” right?
I just wrote a short daily memo to you before going to bed.
I had to, or your brain may have dropped something important or precious by dawn.
Post-COVID brain fog is really infuriating, huh?
Nonetheless, writing that memo was actually fun—I didn’t have to think much, just letting whatever came to mind manifest through my fingers.
In a similar vein, I was shocked that people actually read my
Steam review of Citizen Sleeper.
The me of the past didn’t record how she composed this, but I saw minimal editing and fairly unpolished structure—signs that she didn’t think anyone would read it, and she was just posting it as a thank-you gesture to the developers.
RSS—short for Really Simple Syndication—is an XML-based content syndication format, designed to share content across different platforms.
In plain English, RSS is a machine-readable file telling a reader program the list of content entries (posts, podcast episodes, etc.) from a certain site.
It’s kind of like the role of “follow” or “subscribe” in modern social media, but in an open and decentralized manner.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” — William Shakespeare, Hamlet
The term “woowoo” often arises in discussions of spiritual things—unexplainable phenomena—or even conspiracy theories.
It carries quite a dismissive connotation.
Irrational.
Superstitious.
Nonsensical.
One of the YouTube creators I follow even puts in blaring “woowoo alerts” when discussing some not-so-scientific aspects.
The top-voted definition on Urban Dictionary1 perfectly captures the derogatory feelings of this word:
I had long been using Cygwin as my main operating environment when I needed to use Windows—which helped me keep my sanity level above zero.
A little while ago, I migrated from Cygwin to one of its derivatives: MSYS2.
Why?
Cygwin’s package manager (the setup.exe) wasn’t nice, to put it nicely.
MSYS2’s package manager, pacman, was one of the low-headache package managers I liked.
I frequently needed to interact with native Windows executables from the command line. Famous ones include go, node.js, and rust, but there were also obscure things like Kerbal Space Program or Monster Hunter modding tools—these would be difficult to interface with from WSL. Cygwin didn’t do too well in this respect—I had a lot of wrapper scripts to convert paths and things.
However, it wasn’t exactly a no-brainer.
There were pros and cons—MSYS2 was designed with a very different purpose in mind from Cygwin, after all.
This page from MSYS2 wiki describes this in a nice summary (emphasis mine):
I had always believed the “work for 40 years then retire and enjoy life” script1.
I started my corporate life in 2014.
I didn’t really enjoy it.
I wasn’t interested in climbing the corporate ladder, either.
Of course there were still promotions and things—but I couldn’t find a role model I wanted to become.
“Work’s just like that,” people said.
I procrastinated, putting myself into autopilot, attempting to push through these 40 years of employment.
Until I can’t anymore.
I had been coasting in autopilot for 6 years when The 2020s2 hit.
And
It was many years ago.
At my to-be-previous job, we wanted to try some new modeling things.
We grabbed the then-latest TensorFlow docker image (Since the model was based on TensorFlow—I forget which one though) and it spun up smoothly.
The container even printed a pretty logo in colorful ASCII art as shown in the cover image.
The experiments went well.
We eventually packed some more dependencies and an sshd (and some sort of init, of course) in, and asked IT to put the image on a shared GPU box.
It became part of our development infrastructure.
The shared box had access to NFS, so the sshd was mostly just for getting a remote shell.
Everything went well.
I’ve been wanting to do this for a pretty long time.
Wanting to set up a place.
A place to write things, where I own what I write.
A place not at the whim of some random megacorp walled gardens.
A place that represents who I am and what I do.
A place I can point people (or other internet-capable entities) to in social situations.
A place to keep all those fleeting ideas.
A place that holds the potential to attract interesting people with similar value.
A place that may one day be of help to someone else.
Then there was this constant voice in my head.
Who am I to write?
Aren’t I a
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882 words
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Hojin Koh