Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 19/06/2023: “We Need More of Richard Stallman, Not Less”



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 🔤SpellBinding: ACYGINF Wordo: SKIPS
      • Re: ~christyotwisty's Five Questions for June 2023

        I guess it depends a bit on what you consider an object? And whether I should limit it to things I have a realistic possibility of ever buying. Is a house an object? If so, I'd like a Victorian in a walkable neighborhood, please. If a house isn't, but a car is, I'd like a Hyundai Ioniq or Kia EV6. I'm under no misapprehension that electric cars are a real solution to climate change; we need to aim at eliminating cars almost entirely, in favor of universal quality public transit. While I'm waiting on that dream, I hate my current car. It gets much worse in-town gas mileage than I expected it to, and has been unexpectedly expensive to maintain. I don't have any foreseeable chance of buying either of those things, since electric cars are still priced as luxury items here in the US.

      • Good Music You Haven't Heard Of

        "Music is my life" is a cliche, so I'll refrain from saying it. Suffice it to say that my life has revolved significantly around music for a very long time.

        Starting from high school I was one of those kids who had headphones on at every possible second. While not quite so anti-social anymore, I have worked as a developer for more than 10 years at this point, and have spent every work day of all of those listening to music while coding. And that's to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of miles driven, workouts worked, and dinners cooked while blasting tunes.

      • Medevel23 Free and Open-source Documentation Generators For Developers

        What is a Documentation Generator?

        A documentation generator is a tool that automates the process of creating documentation for software projects, APIs, or other technical products.

    • Science

      • New Rubik's 4x4x4 Cube

        I've been interested in Rubik's Cubes and other twisty puzzles for almost twenty years, but the height of my obsession was around 2010. Most of the puzzles I own come from those days, including my two Rubik's-brand 4x4x4 puzzles.

        The original mechanism in official Rubik's 4x4x4 cubes consisted of a plastic ball with grooves just offset from each perpendicular equatorial ring. The offset allowed one half of the puzzle to slide along the groove, while notches on the other side of the offset held the other half in place. As the outer layers turned, pieces would be swapped in and out of the grooves.

      • The lack of time for geeky tasks!

        It's been a busy month! New things going on at work world compounded with plenty to do around the house means I haven't spent as much as I would doing side projects. In turn, nothing really notiable to phlog about as of late.

      • RE: Division, remainder, mod âž—%❓

        Yes, you are qualified. You can tell whether -1 and 1 are the same number.

        And yes, as a programmer, you should care. Integers are the most basic atomic data type in a computer. As programmers we have to deal with integers and do integer arithmetic all the time. Both remainder and modulo are useful (the latter more so than the former, in my experience), and knowing which one we have in hands can be the difference between the program we just wrote doing what we expected or crashing.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Yet More On Paging

        So it turns out that amfora copies Bombadillo and only scrolls some of the page. Half-page scrolling can be problematic as the new content may be hard to find in the middle of the terminal. Half-page might be good if you're quickly skimming the text; two impressions might help you spot something that was missed when it was elsewhere on the page, and in that case you're glancing around and not following the prose. One option here is to patch amfora for full-page motion; probably these should be distinct commands like less, mutt, and vi have for full- or half-page motions.

      • Neovim: init.lua from scratch

        After chucking one of my only remaining Arch installations in favor of FreeBSD (now a dual boot with Void) I've been one by one massaging my dotfiles and fixing software compatibility issues to get my preferred environment up and running. Only yesterday I managed to get my multiplexer, Zellij, up and running by backporting a fix from upstream git to their current release. I've been having trouble getting my NeoVim config setup, in that it was reporting that it couldn't set up language servers, and last night after work I began investigating.

        I've been using kickstart.nvim for a while as a jumping off point, as when I made the switch from an init.vim to init.lua I didn't really feel like starting from scratch. But what I found bothered me enough that I chucked it all. About four months ago they switched from the Vim package manager they had always used, Packer, to a new one called Lazy. I've never experienced issues with Packer, but if that was the only change and things were working I'd probably just roll with it. They also switched from just using the NeoVim official lsp support package to a new plugin called Mason which is supposed to make installing new language servers easier. Crap, here we go.

      • We need more of Richard Stallman, not less

        The Free Software movement has been mostly killed by the corporate Open Source. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its founder, Richard Stallman (RMS), have been decried for the last twenty years, including by my 25-year-old self, as being outdated and inadequate.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

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?
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
 
Techrights Has Dealt With More Potent SLAPPs Than Violent Microsofters Begging to Hide What They Did to Women
I became accustomed to SLAPPs
Links 04/04/2025: Fury in South Korea, Flight MH370 Remains Mystery
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/04/2025: Anger and Raspberry Pi CM4
Links for the day
Links 04/04/2025: LLM Slop Bubble Bursting and Korea Music Copyright Association Bans Slop 'Music'
Links for the day
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