Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 08/05/2023: Recalling Tradewars, Suckless Window Manager, and More



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Mercedes team mates 🏎

        The Mercedes car is difficult again this season. They're a long way from Red Bull's pace. But of their two drivers, Russell seems less bothered by it that Hamilton. In commentary, Coulthard said this is the best car that Russell has ever had, whereas Hamilton is used to a car that can win. They are coming at the problem from different head spaces.

        Hamilton's been around for long enough that he knows how far away they are, and he seems dispirited by that. There's only so much that he can do to make up for the deficiencies. He's getting near the end of his career, and it's quite possible that he'll not have another car good enough for a championship before he retires. But Russell is going to be a round for longer. He's doing a good job against a team mate with extraordinary stats. If the car comes good he knows that he can challenge. And if it doesn't, he's going to have other teams interested.

      • Why not 'inquiry'?

        Just a quick off topic/title update on today:

        Went all the way to the courthouse, through the metal detector, up an elevator no doubt teeming with COVID :-), only to learn from the person taking names that - as they'd allegedly informed me (she didn't say how) - I was granted reprieve from the entire jury selection period (of three months) due to my dad's possible need for my care.

        Except they didn't inform of that. Instead, my sister fly from several states away to care for dad (his current woman needed a cruise..).

        2023, yet communication is still rocket science.

      • Episode 48 Elephants

        Elephants are cool in war, and they have ivory tusks. Do you want your players to be poachers?

      • I'd rather be Ferrari than Ford

        The movie "Ford Vs Ferrari" is a great watch, and you can't help but root for the Ford team. It was an inspiring story in one light, while also being a tragedy when looked at from a different light.

        Something that I've given a lot of thought to in my life is how our society seems to be in a perpetual race towards mediocrity. When I ws a kid there were still a lot of little independent stores on Main Street, one of them being Hummel's grocery, which was a little mom and pop grocery store that had been there for a few generations. Another favorite of mine was Jack Frost, a little combination candy shop and Greek diner where there was a spit of lanb cooking behind the counter and a little Ms Pacman table to waste some time on. They had awesome gyros. Then too, we had an honest to goodness drive in diner called Maxi's, where you could get a hot dog and fries if you wanted but the real attraction was the homemade root beer. And when my dad wanted lumber or other supplies for one of our numerous home improvement projects, he had 84 Lumber or Stambaughs to choose from and could get just about any domestic hardwood he wanted, in stock.

        All of those places are gone. That town has a WalMart, a Home Depot, and a whole army of chain restaurants now. It's depressing.

      • Duolingo

        I've wanted to learn Irish for years. Ages ago the best resource online was a website that had some, uhhh, sketchy real world connections. But the Duolingo owl can be easily summoned on the phone. So, it begins. Girl and woman. Boy and man. Variations on "I". Apple, water, is, has, eat.

    • Technical

      • What is Tradewars?

        Tradewars is a classic multiplayer game that was first released in 1984. It was one of the earliest examples of a game that could be played by multiple users over a network, and it quickly became popular among computer enthusiasts.

        The game is set in space, and players take on the role of space traders who must navigate the galaxy, trading goods and resources with other players. Along the way, they must also defend themselves against pirates and other threats.

      • IPsec, Rust, burritos, stew

        This is yet another post with assorted news, on both IT and cooking.

        A few weeks ago I have set an IPsec VPN, mostly used for home devices, with strongSwan (on both computers, with Debian systems, and mobile devices, with Android: a mobile version is available via F-Droid): password-based authentication (eap-mschapv2) for clients, pubkey authentication (with a personal CA and its certificate manually imported everywhere) for the server. Maybe I would rather use a pre-shared key authentication for both (with it being simpler), but the Android client does not seem to support that. Have set it with static addresses for "roadwarriors", so that they can be identified by an address, and making them available to each other. Tried SIP on top of it: baresip works mostly fine on Android (without video), Twinkle mostly works on Debian (apparently requires user names though), and though I tried Kamailio as a router initially, it is not that useful with static addresses (since P2P can be used easily then). Though most SIP clients support SRTP (and ZRTP), along with TLS. Also tried to control a remote mpd and listen to its streams via M.A.L.P. (also available from F-Droid), which does work. Maybe it could be useful for rsync as well, since it doesn't have encryption on its own (though it is commonly used over SSH, which is more straightforward than setting up IPsec). I have not yet investigated how it works with ICE and XMPP's Jingle: maybe it would help to establish more efficient connections, going through a local machine instead of a remote TURN server (though then again, it is easier to achieve by just setting local XMPP and TURN servers). Anyway, IPsec is nice and it feels good to have it set, at least for a few local machines, even though it is not quite useful to me currently.

      • Suckless window manager

        One of my computer environments is a text-only session supported by tmux. I am using it with much joy for over two years. I'm working also with many true window managers, on Apple, Windows, and GNU/Linux systems. But I am enjoying that almost-true window manager made above of tmux the most. In the passing weeks, I read about Suckless Dynamic Windows Manager aka. dwm. Because of several holiday days, I had the possibility to install dwm on my own, and I realized that it's so similar to my tmux experiences but in a graphical environment. I've set it up as my main window manager and the time spent on playing with it was very good for me.

        When we are looking at [dwm Tutorial] we are able to get the whole concept of that program by looking only at the ASCII sketch which I copied below. So we have a base concept created by: /tags/, /title/, /status/, /master/, and /stack/ terms. And that is all!

      • AI Questionnaire

        A researcher in artistic applications of AI contacted me because some of my projects may have given the impression that I was working with AI, which I don't consider to be the case. However, as our preliminary exchange clarified, there is an EU definition that seems to cast the net wide and would include even very simple Markov models. Now, in fact, my Peptalk program does use a first order Markov transition matrix for letter combinations used to create nonsense words in its own polyglottally trained language. But really, would anyone seriously hype up such a thing as being AI?

        [...]

        When using software written by others, I tend to prefer that which is more transparent about what goes on inside. For example, I use a small subset of Csound for sound synthesis and processing and, when feasible, I write my own programs in C/C++ where I (hopefully) have a detailed understanding of what the program does. The approach is very different from having to deal with the black boxes of proprietary plugins, which I also use to some extent. With machine learning, it appears that no-one understands exactly how it comes that a model achieves what it does. In my algorithmic compositions, I program everything myself from low level routines for sound synthesis to the generation of the entire piece. A curiosity about algorithms or formalised representations of music has been an incentive for this work. Thus, it would be pointless to trust a third party readymade composition program with a few parameters to tweak, instead of having to engage in the modeling from the ground.

        Evolutionary computing was in the vogue when I did my PhD, and since I worked on sound synthesis, feature extraction, and algorithmic composition, it was almost expected that I too should find use for evolutionary algorithms. But I didn't. Limited programming skills may have stopped me, but most of all, I needed a subjective evaluation in the loop which I never found a way to formalise away.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



Recent Techrights' Posts

A Note on SimilarWeb
Or why SimilarWeb is meaningless for more than 99% of the sites on the Web
IBM Said to be Shutting Down Offices or Sites in the United States
the press can no longer avoid admitting that IBM moves many jobs to India
LLM Slop as Attack Vector on the Reputation of Linux
The attacks on Linux have escalated to information warfare
 
Traf-O-Data, the Company That Jeffrey Epstein's BFF (Bill Gates) (Co)Founded 53 Years and Went Out of Business Due to Heavy Losses
Who will die first, Bill or Microsoft?
Why Microsoft's Shares Sank Almost 20% in Recent Months (the Bubble is Imploding)
verified press reports from the past 24 hours
GNU/Linux Rises to Almost 5% in Algeria While Windows Sinks to All-Time Low
GNU/Linux grew tenfold
Where to Get More Gags
A valued reader recommended that to us
Links 04/04/2025: Tech Stock (Inc. GAFAM) Fall, Google Pretends to Do End-to-End Encrypted Emails (With Google in Control)
Links for the day
To Participate in Fedora Diversity You Must Use Proprietary Software
Not for the first time either
Yandex About to Be Three Times Bigger Than Microsoft (Bing) in Asia
That's about 60% of the world's population
Gemini Links 04/04/2025: Decoupling Updates, Elaho as Gemini Client
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 03, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, April 03, 2025
Microsoft's Trouble in Africa and Asia
A new all-time high for GNU/Linux
Brett Wilson LLP Reported to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
The saddest thing in all this is that law firms can maintain high standards shall they wish to
Links 03/04/2025: Tariff Pains and C.D.C. Cuts
Links for the day
StatCounter: Microsoft is Masking a Disaster, It's Way Behind DeepSeek Already and Interest in LLMs Has Waned
it turns out the money "raised" for "Open" "AI" may not even exist at all
Links 03/04/2025: SoftBank Money for Microsoft "Open" "AI" Probably Doesn't Even Exist, Wikimedia Foundation Blasts LLM Nuisance While Microsoft Admits Demand Has Shrunk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/04/2025: Patch Panel and Pictures
Links for the day
Islamic Republic of Iran: GNU/Linux at All-time High This Month, Windows Falls to 12%
Vista 10 is up this month despite being "end of life" (EoL) soon
Indonesia: All-Time Highs for GNU/Linux
What's noteworthy right now is the growth of GNU/Linux
statCounter Says GNU/Linux Usage is Up Again (Internationally)
some preliminary April data
Only on April 1st Can the Free Software Foundation Associate With Microsoft's Open Source Initiative (OSI)
We saw some pranks that day linking the FSF to Microsoft (e.g. "endorsing" Windows)
Confirmed in the Mainstream Media: A Lot of Microsoft "Workloads" Were Just LLM Slop (Helping to Fake Growth for Years, as Microsoft Had Paid "Open" "AI" to Become a "Client") and Demand is Rapidly Waning, Datacentres Canceled and/or Shut Down
Anything to facilitate further accounting fraud
Taiwan's Media Covers Closure of Microsoft's "AI" Lab, It's Time to Talk About the Gradual Death of Windows and Implosion of the "AI" Bubble
Earlier this week we showed that mostly Asian media had the 'nerve' to mention Microsoft silently shutting down its 'AI' lab
IBM Gets Rid of Kelly Chambliss as Mass Layoffs Reported in IBM Consulting, IBM Loses Key Contracts/Graft
IBM Consulting has been in disarray lately
More Gains for GNU/Linux, Based on Web Surveys
the Steam site shows rapid growth for "Linux" this month
Slopwatch: Anti-Linux Articles, Not Even Written by Humans
Why aren't Web sites more vocal about this problem?
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, April 02, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, April 02, 2025
Links 03/04/2025: Apple Fined Over Secret Surveillance, "Elegant Writer For A More Civilized Age"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 02/04/2025: Books and Cold Tea
Links for the day
Links 02/04/2025: More Layoffs, Nokia Again Takes Advantage of Illegal and Unconstitutional Patent Court With Nokia Staff as 'Judges'
Links for the day
Links 02/04/2025: Seizures and Returns to Windows of 24 Years Ago
Links for the day
LLM Slop Helps Obscure and Distort News About Layoffs (IBM, GAFAM)
It's hard to find accurate information
Links 02/04/2025: Microsoft Developers Are Threatening to Go on Strike, World Backup Day Noted
Links for the day
Gemini Protocol Has Growing Appeal (the Web Got Too Bloated and Full of LLM Slop)
For any "data plan" with bandwidth limits or "tiers" it would be cheaper to use/browse Geminispace
The Web Can Survive LLM Slop, But Only If We Collectively Shun and Discourage Serial Sloppers
Doing nothing ought not be a possibility
Amid Secret Shut-downs and Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (4 Waves of Layoffs in 3 Months of 2025) Some Microsoft Staff Expected to Go On Strike
workers going on strike
Gemini Links 02/04/2025: No more on Mastodon and Gemini Mention Script in Go
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, April 01, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, April 01, 2025
My Motion Disbarring or “Striking Off” Brett Wilson LLP for Enabling Violent Americans Who Try to Crush Microsoft Critics in the United Kingdom by Multiple SLAPPs
"Guns for hire" (for Microsoft people who received Microsoft salaries)
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Hijacked Again by Patent Litigation Industry, as President Cheeto Prioritises Aggressors
The "mafia" has taken over the "industry" and the Federal system (justice and constitutions trampled upon)
Ubuntu Slop and FUD Manufactured With LLMs and Funded (by Oneself) 'Studies'
Slop and FUD are ruining the Web