baffled's blog

I have spent a good portion of the morning reading through the summary, so far, of the Stanford Computer Index for 2025. In a nutshell the U.S. has a slim lead on the rest of the world in computer technology from an innovation and design perspective but they're all catching up! In particular China is not only catching up but just about to surpass the states. I am not political but it appears to me that Trump's tariff campaign against the rest of the world will backfire spectacularly. The reason I believe this is, I think it will encourage everybody else to become more isolationist rather than cooperative. China already produces the very large majority of electronics the states use so getting into a pissing match with them seems stupid to me. But then, I'm an anarchist so I think everyone should take care of their own backyards and help everyone else do the same.

So yesterday, in the exciting world of installing emacs applications, I was struggling with two apps. I resolved the greader issue and so am still scratching my head over the empv.el package. Still, it makes me happy that my book reading problem is fixed and my wife and I can read again. BTW, we are currently reading Fenrir EARC by Eric Flint & Ryk Spoor. We are also listening to a debate held by the IEEE Spectrum on whether large language models understand what they are writing. A completely different topic for a completely different post.

I not only surpassed my walking score of yesterday at eight minutes to move up to 17 minutes today. I contribute it to changing to a different Chinese pop station and thus changing up my listening experience. Doesn't matter that I changed to the new station yesterday, that's my story and I'm stickin' with it!

Last night I sifted websites looking for meal replacement bars. There appears to be millions of them but the large number of them are just wanting to sell these meal bars. They say things like "the top 19 meal replacement bars" and then have each one they are discussing winning or most recommended in various categories such as high-energy, athletic-prowess weight-loss etc, etc. I am interested in vitamin and mineral count and how well they absorb by your body. Of course, they have to be vegan because I am. Another story for another post. Anyway, I've narrowed the selection to about four bars but only three that I have any real interest in. I have a hunch that the top one on my list won't be available in my local grocery store.