Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 09/06/2023: Thoughts on Flatpak and Apple Cultists



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Ashamed of My Penmanship

        I have a confession to make: I'm ashamed of my penmanship.

        My handwriting isn't particularly bad: on the contrary, it's quite legible. I dislike it not because it's unreadable, but because it's so utterly generic.

        I grew up in the last few decades that cursive and other forms of advanced penmanship were still widely taught in schools. Of course I was first taught how to write in print, and to this day I still form letters using the exact same movements taught to me in my preschool spelling books. We learned a standardized form of cursive around my second year of elementary school.

      • Butterflies and Roses 2023-06-09 (Fairbanks, AK, USA)

        A few more pictures for the collection, from the trails near the Tanana River. This was from last Wednesday.

      • The Porklet and the Ash

        The springtime had finally come to the little forested valley in Vermont where the young ash tree stood. After another long winter and a rather surprisingly short and uneventful mud season, the slender tree was starting to unfurl its new leaves in the pleasant warm rays of sunshine beaming down over the hills that rimmed it on all sides. For a few days...maybe even as long as a week, the sparsely branching tree let its tiny feather-like leaves grow and spread like the wings of exotic birds. It was a good time in the valley.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • My thoughts on Flatpak

        I have been chatting about this with people who know more than I ever will about Flatpak.

        Soo I have added few edits here and there.

        If I seem frustrated, most of my frustration is aimed at the unnecessary shit slinging over packaging formats.

        *We all want the good stuff, why the hell are we fighting?!*

      • Rambly rant about my Apple fan boy coworker and tech illiteracy

        So, I had dinner with other people in my company today (as of when I started this post). One of them are absolute Apple fan boys. He knows that I piratically a VR resident. And the topic of Apple's new Vision Pro headset showed up. I expressed my view that I don't like it and it does nothing what current VR users want. And that I'm not their target audience. Also what Apple is doing is nothing new. We have it for ages. The Quest 2 have vision hand tracking. Quest Pro/Vive Pro eye/Pico 4 Pro have eye tracking. There's external mouth tracking addons have existed for a long time. And talking through an avatar is what the entire game of VRChat is about. Go get a VR headset and hop into VRChat for even an hour. See what the frontier is like. That's where innovation and new ideas are. Guess the reply "I don't care about innovation. It's not Apple and it's not a convinent package".

        I wanted to facepalm myself immediately. I asked myself. Seriously, this man wants to wait for a 3500 dollars headset that does nothing new. Just.. argh!.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Mastodon

          I am a microblogger now! Decided to finally try out Mastodon, even though I still rather dislike the involved technologies. But to avoid interacting with them too much directly, as well as to setup a separate communication channel, I registered at emacs.ch and tried to use an Emacs Mastodon client, mastodon.el. Quickly discovered that there is a memory leak in my Emacs version, related to images, so now using the usual Mastodon's web interface. It is okay: somewhat buggy and awkward, but there are many worse ones.

        • Yesterday’s Posts

          Another day, another proof-of-concept server.

          [...]

          I’ve no idea if this works in practice, let’s see. I plan on adding aggregators and otherwise tweaking the output until it matches what I like to read, then trying reading everything this way for a while to see if I prefer the forced slow cadence to the “live” versions.

      • Programming

        • Shell Script That Runs Forever

          Critics will point out that this script will not run forever due to e.g. the heat death of the universe, the hardware running the script failing, the human getting bored, etc. However given a running system this script will (probably) run forever, the lite version of forever that ignores our daystar going all red giant.

          The script does need a bit of help to run "forever". One lever is that shell scripts take pains to operate line-by-line, to ape an ape at a terminal. Either shells read single bytes to find where the next line is, or they read chunks and use lseek(2) to scoot the file pointer back to the start of the current line. This can be observed under ktrace(1) or similar, which is a great way to learn what system calls a process makes while going about its business. Especially if there are too many lines of code to easily follow what some too complicated shell is doing.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Microsoft Staff Explains How Microsoft Swindled Employees and Avoided Paying Out Severance Pay (Microsoft Hasn't Much Money Left in the Bank)
This is a classic way to avoid paying workers
Techrights Should be Even Faster Now
We're now better off
Richard Stallman (RMS) Gave 3 Talks in India in Less Than a Week
In India this month we've not seen a single negative comment about RMS
Microsoft Mass Layoffs Without Severance Pay Reported Hours After Microsoft Reported Weak Numbers and Microsoft Stock Fell
Microsoft has a bloodbath this month
Another Slew of Fake Articles About 'Linux' and 'Security' From Brittany Day at linuxsecurity.com (Spamfarm/Slopfarm)
linuxsecurity.com is basically a pariah and parasite. It lessens the incentive to write real articles about "Linux" by generating fake ones to outrank the originals.
 
Links 31/01/2025: Mass Layoffs at Amazon and Microsoft, Sweden Again Fails to Protect Critics of Violence
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Fake Articles About "Linux" and More (Latest Roundup Featuring BetaNews, Janus Atienza, and Brittany Day From Guardian Digital, Inc)
LLM slop season
"Not one of us" by Dr. Andy Farnell
Elon Musk has brought embarrassment to nerds and technologists
Gemini Links 31/01/2025: "Bulletin Buble" and "Why Blog?"
Links for the day
Static Site Generators (SSGs) Pay Off: Vastly Faster Sites, Much Smaller Hosting Bills
success story for SSGs
Of Note: Linux Foundation Has Already Let Linux.com Rot for About 4 Months (No Activity)
there's no campaign aside from marketing spam there
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, January 30, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, January 30, 2025
Indian Data Biases statCounter For or Against "Linux"
In statCounter, the GNU/Linux increases and decreases are deeply tied to what it does with data collected in India
The Corporate Media Pretends That Facebook ("Meta") Has Performed Well, But Its Debt Doubles Every 2 Years Despite Mass Layoffs
That same media also helps parrot misleading financial claims
Microsoft's Debt Surged by More Than 6,000,000,000 Dollars in Just 3 Months
numbers released hours ago
The Sheer Irony of Microsoft Proxy Accusing Others of 'Stealing'
Wherever DeepSick's data came from, Microsoft (or its proxy) is in no position to issue criticism.
The Difference a Decade (and GAFAM Money) Makes
Credibility cannot be purchased
[Meme] The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has Critics Because Its Message is Effective
Applying to others the same standards one is willing to violate?
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raised $422,000 (Another $22k in the Two Weeks After Campaign Ended), Proving That Truth and Justice Tend to Find a Way
10,000+ dollars a week even without campaigning for more funds
Faking Revenue Increase by Buying Your Own Products and Services (Through Scams and Scammers Like Scam Altman)
Is this what society deserves? Media that instead of exposing corruption has chosen to participate in it and profit from it?
Links 30/01/2025: Fentanylware (TikTok) Causes Deaths, FBI Seizes Domains
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/01/2025: Action vs Inaction, Gopherholes, and More
Links for the day
Links 30/01/2025: Microsoft Wants Convicted Felon to Give Fentanylware (TikTok) to It (After Making a Phonecall Asking for That in 2019), "Moving Away From Google's Ecosystem"
Links for the day
Jack M. Germain (LinuxInsider) Seems to Have Turned to LLM Slop, Graphics Slop, and B2B SPAM
LinuxInsider is barely active anymore
Links 30/01/2025: Amazon Layoffs and DeepSeek Panic
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/01/2025: Chaos Reigns, E-mail, Searching
Links for the day
IBM: Many Thousands of Layoffs in 2025
If 2025 is expected to be the same, then perhaps about 20,000 IBM workers will no longer be there
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, January 29, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Google: Your Only Option is Google YouTube (Coming Soon: Mandatory DRM and Attestation?)
Digital Restrictions (DRM) to follow? Only for "approved" (attestation) browsers?
Mastodon Was Always Biased (Just Like Twitter After Abandoning Chronological and Neutral Timelines in Order to Become More Like Facebook)
So bury-brigading and click-farming control what people see
Certificate Authority Let's Encrypt Falls to Only 0.4% of the Total in Geminispace
Geminispace does not need to outsource trust
The Munich-Based EPO is Still Using a Platform That Promotes the Far Right and Rehabilitates Nazism
Active Twitter account
Links 29/01/2025: Dismantling Public Health in the US, Air Busan Plane Up in Flames (South Korea's Air Disasters Streak)
Links for the day
Announcements and Administrivia
This week we're going out for two days in a row to celebrate an achievement that's very respectable
Gemini Links 29/01/2025: Japan, GTD, and More
Links for the day
Sir, Yes, Sir. The Life of EPO Patent Examiners.
If working for the EPO makes it harder to sleep at night, take action
How the EPO Pressures Staff Into Minting More Monopolies (Patents), Even Illegal Ones That Harm Europe and Ultimately Dismantle the Rule of Law
insights into the pressure examiners are under
LLM Slop Machines Are Not a Win for "Open Source" and If They Get Cheaper, It's Even Worse
If some program that claims to be "Open Source" pollutes the Web with fake articles (Microsoft SPAM and fake "Linux" articles), whose win is it?
Links 29/01/2025: Data Privacy Day and Growing Tensions in Europe
Links for the day
Nazi Twitter (aka "X") Became a Troll Site That Lets People Buy a Blue Tick While Its Boss Actively Promotes Neonazi Politicians
the intellectual level of people who infest the Web through "Twitter" or "X"
This is Why They're So Afraid of Richard Stallman (He Tells People the Correct History)
Then they post about it to Microsoft's LinkedIn
Richard Stallman Speech in Bengaluru, "Silicon Valley of India"
62 years have passed since his "young nerd" days and he's still at it
Claim: Facebook Deletes Posts of IBM Red Hat Critics
As always, follow the money (advertisers)
Links 29/01/2025: Climate Crisis and "It’s time for the Xbox to fade away" (Microsoft Lose)
Links for the day
Links 29/01/2025: Buying Groceries During a Trade War, Political 'Retro'
Links for the day
More Illegal Patents at the EPO, Legality of Granted European Patents No Longer Matters to the Office
breaking the law for profit
Network Improvements Tomorrow
"Network maintenance" down in London
Sharing is Caring (But Advocating Copyleft Makes You a "Target")
GPLv3 does not close all the loopholes which the "Affero" helps close
Articles About Free Speech at Facebook
'Facebook vs Linux' story is now receiving a lot more media coverage
We Were Right About stallmansupport.org Making an Error by Joining Social Control Media. mastodon.social Suspends stallmansupport.org.
From what we can guess, accounts can be banned by some oversensitive admin or a mob of users ("bury brigades")
"Latest Technology News" in BetaNews Still LLM Slop and SPAM Composed by LLMs (It's Basically a Spamfarm Disguised as a News Site)
Only a fool would visit BetaNews in search of actual news
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, January 28, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, January 28, 2025
The EPO's Corruption, If It Remains Untackled, Helps the Far Right and Enemies of European Unity/Solidarity
Do not negotiate with evil
The Web, Including Wikipedia, Gets Filled With Lies About Bill Gates, Added by Bill Gates and His PR Team
Of course Wikipedia is funded by Gates
Facebook Banning Linux Sites (or People Who Link to Linux Sites) is Another Symptom of the Web's Demise
The state of media on the Web is really bad; Social Control Media amplifies the badness, as Facebook serves to show
Gemini Links 29/01/2025: Neovim Telescope and Writing Less
Links for the day