Lý sự pclouds

A 17 year old kid won champion in 2024. Two years later, an "old" kid, 20 years old, won Candidates 2026 to challenge him. Even if we won, he would not be the youngest champion ever. Gukesh on the other hand could gain an unfortunate record: youngest champion defeat.

I don't even play chess! A tournament of grandmasters, commentated by grandmasters or international master. Zero idea what's going on.

Learned that semi-hard way. While ACPI hooks still run, e.g. to hibernate the system on pressing power button. Upon resuming, it continues to... shut down.

It turns out, according to some random comment on the internet, and logind.conf, many ACPI events are intercepted by elogind as well. So doing this works, without messing around with acpid

[Login]
HandlePowerKey=hibernate

Not exactly sure how acpid is bypassed in this case though, because the defaut script will still try to power the thing off. Oh well, not curious enough to find out.

(from Going Postal)

Moist handed the paper to Miss Dearheart.

"He's going to walk away with it", he said. "He's just throwing words around. The Trunk's too big to fail. Too many investors. He'll get more money, keep the system going just on this side of disaster, then let it collapse. Buy it up then via another company, maybe, at a knockdown price."

"I'd suspect him of anything", said MIss Dearheart. "But you sound very certain".

"That's what I'd do", said Moist, "... er.. if I was that kind of person. It's the oldest trick in the book. You get the punt---you get others to deeply involved that they don't dare fold. It's the dream, you see? They think if they stay in it'll all work out. They daren't think it's all a dream. You use big words to tell them it's going to be jam tomorrow and they hope. But they'll never win. Part of them knows that, but the rest of them never listens to it. The house always wins."

"Why do people like Gilt get away with it?"

"I just told you. It's because people hope. They'll believe that someone will sell them a real diamond for a dollar. Sorry."

I remember not being to finish the very first puzzle, gave up after maybe an hour and the game stayed there for hmm... a decade? Looking back maybe the problem was I didn't even follow the tutorial because the very first few puzzles should be just "do as told".

(from Feet of Clay)

"I Wish To Ask You A Question", said the golem.

"Yes?"

"I Smashed The Treadmill But The Golems Repaired It. Why? And I Let The Animals Go But They Just Milled Around Stupidly. Some Of Them Even Went Back To The Slaughter Pens. Why?"

"Welcome to the world, Constable Dorfl."

"Is It Frightening To Be Free?"

"You said it."

"You Say To People "Throw Off Your Chains" And They Make New Chains For Themselves?"

"Seems to be a major human activity, yes."

Dorfl rumbled as he thought about this. "Yes," he said eventually. "I Can See Why Freedom Is Like Having The Top Of Your Head Opened Up."

"I'll have to take your word for that, Constable."

(bonus on religion)

"But the gods plainly do exist", said a priest.

"It Is Not Evident."

A bolt of lightning lanced through the clouds and hit Dorfl's helmet. There was a sheet of flame and then a trickling noise. Dorlf's molten armour formed puddles around his white-hot feet.

"I Don't Call That Much Of An Argument." said Dorfl calmly, from somewhere in the clouds of smoke.

"It's tended to carry the audience," said Vimes. "Up until now."

The Chief Priest of Blind Io turned to the other priests. "All right, you fellows, there's no need for any of that---"

"But Offler is a vengeful god", said a priest at the back of the crowd.

"Trigger-happy is what he is", said Ridcully. Another lightning bolt zigzagged down the bent at right-angles a few feet above the Chief Priest's hat and earthed itself on a wooden hippo, which split. The Chief Priest smiled smugly and turned back to Dorfl, who was making little clinking noises as he cooled.

"What you're saying is, you'll accept the existence of any god only if it can be proved by discussion?"

"Yes", said Dorfl.

Teams can no longer steal my Alt-num. Ha ha ha. So annoying.

Forever starts tonight! Forever ends tomorrow.

It started again maybe in last summer. Almost consistent flare up every week, usually Monday or Tuesday. So that's probably about five months.

Despite disliking flights I somehow became a flight junkie for once. Counting from when I locked the door for the airport until I opened it back, two hours short of full four days.

That was supposedly the most expensive mobile sim upgrade, which turned out not to be true. Instead it was the most expensive text just to unlock 4G in Mobifone.

In hindsight I should have checked if I got 4G sim instead of just assuming 3G. But even then I would still need to go back in Vietnam just to send "KT VOLTE". At least that's one fewer crisis. Let's hope the rest of the year goes well.

One lesson from this is prepare in advance. I ended up hurrying up to the airport last minute, cutting a bit too close to buffer time at the airport. And forgot cash. And also forgot the ID. Luckily the ID thing motivated me to have a look at the eID thing again and got it working this time.

And I sat next to two Japanese! Last time it happened (or last time I heard Japanese in an airplane) was probably more than twenty years ago, the first (and last?) time I went to Japan. Japan seems to have changed a lot and speaking Japanese isn't strictly necessary (at least in Tokyo).