One of the things I’d not really considered about the crypto-mining craze of the last few years was its out-sized effect on the market for components:

One of the perks of normality largely returning to the PC components market now that the crypto mining bubble has popped has been a big improvement in component availability. Video cards were of course the biggest change there – even if prices on the latest generation remain higher than many would like to see – but crypto farms were also soaking up everything from CPUs and RAM to power supplies.

It’s obvious once you’ve been told about it. It’s fascinating to think of the sheer quantity of parts that these mining operations would’ve required. It’s depressing too, given the vacuousness of the market.

I wonder whether the new craze in AI model training will soak all these components back up again.

Via Anandtech.

I used Vim for several years, albeit at a rather shallow level of skill. I stopped about ten years ago, for one reason or another. Still, I kept a candle burning for Vim. There was just something about it. And so it wasn’t hard to be tempted when I was told that it had improved a lot in the time I’d been away.

And, oh my, it has. There’s everything I loved, still there. The weird but lovely modal editing. The speed, oh goodness the speed. But also Vim now has the things I left Vim to search for. Smart completion and navigation. Code refactorings. Pop up documentation. Clever highlighting. A scripting language I can understand.

There are so many truisms in The Grug Brained Developer. I enjoyed it immensely; the writing is somehow so, so apt for its subject. So many clubbable grugs. Including myself, of course, but I think I’ve learned.

complexity is spirit demon that enter codebase through well-meaning but ultimately very clubbable non grug-brain developers and project managers who not fear complexity spirit demon or even know about sometime

one day code base understandable and grug can get work done, everything good!

next day impossible: complexity demon spirit has entered code and very dangerous situation!

We have a big rosemary bush in our back garden. The bees love it. A sure sign of spring having sprung is the buzzing from the rosemary.

There are beautiful items and there are useful items. Some precious few are both.

I love this wallet. It’s super slimline. Over the years, it has prevented my carrying pocketfuls of cards, coins and the other detritus larger wallets accrete.