hualapais

Here I was thinking it would have been Kedit…

Just experienced this with one of the reclining mountain lions at the San Diego Zoo; the same two short blinks followed by an extended slow blink in response to my own. There were others nearby but we alone seemed to be “sharing that moment”.

The opportunity cost point is fair enough if one is thinking in terms of two concrete individuals. The illustration I offered was meant at a more abstract level, the two persons standing in for the creditor side and the debtor side of a closed economy taken as wholes. In that framing the issue is not whether a particular borrower can put the money to productive use (clearly he can), but that the system as a whole is being asked to generate more units of the circulating medium than currently exist within it. Even when real value is created, the monetary claim still exceeds the monetary stock. Settlement then requires continuous expansion of the money supply, continuous transfer of existing assets toward creditors, or periodic default. That structural pressure is what I was trying to get at.

I suspect the deeper difficulty is the “bond” in bonds themselves, the ongoing compulsion that interest introduces. Once interest is attached the debtor is under continuous obligation to produce additional claims simply to keep the accounts from breaking. Traditional writers on the Christian and Islamic sides generally preferred arrangements that avoided this continuous pressure. A pure discount (as with discounted Treasury bills and similar instruments) prices the time element once, up front: the creditor advances a smaller sum and later receives the larger face amount. The cost is paid at the beginning rather than levied as a recurring claim that must be met out of future circulation. In that sense the time value is acknowledged without the mechanism that forces the system to keep generating more monetary units than presently exist.

[edit:] Clarified the discount language.

I suggest looking into “EQL”, or better yet, just replicating its index by taking a position in the 11 XL* sector funds from SPDR, allocating equal weighting to each. One will end up with one’s equities equal weighted by sector and with plenty of large cap exposure, as opposed to the pronounced mid-cap tilt found in whole market equal-weight strategies.

Personally, I drop the financial sector entirely (Thomistic prohibitions on usury) which leaves an even 10 funds which is easy to allocate mentally and in practice. For example, assuming a 60/40 allocation where one is holding the lion’s share in equities and the remainder in bonds (I substitute with a combination of gold, crypto, cash, and Swiss Franc here), one would allocate as follows:

XLC 6% XLY 6% XLP 6% XLE 6% XLV 6% XLI 6% XLB 6% XLK 6% XLU 6% XLRE 6%

(Note that XLF is consciously not taken as a position here, decide if it’s right for you. The Mortgate REITs which would make XLRE problematic are in XLF per the sector selection rules)

The remaining 40% is bonded debt if you are fine with usury, or some sort of asset negatively or neutrally correlated to equities.

IMHO, the best I’d seen of mouseless UI was the pentadactyl/vimium/vimperator model (possibly originating with (lynx or elinks somehow) where a hot key was pressed and everything clickable was overlayed with a number allowing a direct click. Obviously simpler than what is being proposed here, but it was my preferred way of using the browser for some time.

Went this route after hemming and hawing over a Mac Studio Pro for some time. Eventually bought and configured a headless HP Z620 with 192 GB of ECC RAM and dual Xeon E5-2680 v2 processors, an Optane AIC, two P102-100s with 10 GB VRAM each, and a minimal bootable SDD running Debian 12.6 with an older, locked version of CUDA that supports the Pascal cards. Run it remotely from the basement via AMT/meshcommander. Just fire up llama.cpp and its front end and connect over the local network. Currently playing with Talkie, Qwen 3.6 27b, and medgemma, but have had good luck with GGUF performance in general after selecting an appropriate quant. Total cost was under $500, but I bought the server via eBay last year; things may be different now.

Details aside, the hope is that ternary LLMs blossom in the coming months and this old hardware can eventually host some very dense models full of factual information, perhaps even larger than the GPU RAM and spilling over to the Optane for IO. Speed would be less important than general factual knowledge. The plan would be to configure then mothball the machine in a Faraday trashcan in the basement, retaining it as a possible "rebuild civilization" oracle should the world fall apart. Of course, power would be an issue in such a scenario, but for how cheap this hardware is and how often AI seems to be practically useful in its latest iterations, why not...

OI uses IPS packaging, which is the same packaging used by Solaris 11 (some find it over engineered). Tribblix, on the other hand, is also an illumos-based distro but is based on Solaris 10 (and prior’s) SVR4 packaging which is managed via a utility called “zap”.

Both are good distributions, but I strongly encourage you to try Tribblix if OI is problematic; for whatever reason the latest OI installers do not seem to include the same amount of driver support as Tribblix, in my experience.

I know this is a bit late, but I second the recommendation for an updated openlook and XView on Tribblix. In addition, ol/xv as a default desktop environment would be an strong differentiator for the distribution, IMHO. Along those same lines, Tribblix could more aggressively tout the historical justification for its SVR4 packaging, highlighting its retro-ness.

And thank you so much for tribblix; I was about to give up on illumos after repeated trouble installing OpenIndiana on my laptop (Tribblix worked out of the box on the hardware). I’ve since picked up a copy of “Solaris Internals” and have spent some time appreciating Solaris. Kudos.

Done.

I’m personally fond of Motif, even going so far as to hold XEphem as the epitome of timeless user interface design; I wish I had an entire OS following those blocky UI conventions. While normally using emwm, CDE would be productive and welcome on any of the BSDs and illumos distributions, IMHO.

Now if only OpenLook/XView could be made to lose its 32-bit cruft and become more portable. What a wonderful pair of desktop environments CDE and OpenLook would be to choose from—and perhaps add more functionality to—in 2025.