Silent Lucidity

Another break is in order.

A month ago in Retiring Signal & Taking Time Off I commenced what proved to be a week of not being around much. Since that time MIOS: Iran’s PressTV has landed, as of yesterday someone serious is looking at MIOS: Russpublicans, and earlier today we learned of the Imminent Foreclosure: Kiwi Farms. There’s another torpedo in the water, leaving a nice bubble trail and running straight. I don’t have to hang around and watch that one, I can just listen for the inevitable boom.

I traded my big folding table in the convection oven of California’s Central Valley just in time to avoid the heat dome. This sturdy work desk is half the width, but the window above it lets in the Bay Area’s sea breezes. I’ve been luxuriating in the 10C temperature difference and I’m about to take a walk to ship that SSD and PCIe NVMe carrier. Because we got a half price PowerEdge R430 which has double the ram and double the processing power of the R420 it’s going to replace :-)

The combination of the earlier break and getting free of the stifling heat has done wonders for my sleep schedule. The Garmin still misses half of it but overall this is a dramatic improvement over what was.

So I’ve got an upcoming server migration, but this sort of thing is fun when one has spare equipment. Not enough has happened in the three months since I posted Artificial Intelligence For Disinfodrome. I will take a moment to note that the processor in the R430 has the AVX2 instruction set, which our older machines lack, and which Dify.ai insists on having present.

And maybe while it’s nice and quiet I’ll have a chance to conjure up something that makes sense for us to do in Q3 of 2024. Q2’s Malign Influence Operations Safari has bagged one excellent trophy and the work already unleashed may net us a couple more.

I look forward to seeing all of you again come July …