Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 28/06/2023: Many Net and Technology Musings



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 🔤SpellBinding: CHUOPTN Wordo: MILER
      • The Pictorial Key to the Tarot by A. E. Waite

        The accepted meanings of tarot cards can't be deduced just by looking at them. Let alone their "true" meanings.

        Nor can you uncover their secret significance through philology. Claims by people like Court de Gebelin, Eliphas Lévi and Dr. Papus that the cards originated in Egypt or some other ancient repository of lost wisdom hold no water whatsoever under historical investigation. What educated guesses we can make as to the original designers' intentions are disappointingly mundane; "The Tower" representing the defeat of the De La Torre family in medieval Italy; the "Strength" card commemorating the victory of a friend over a clan whose crest was the lion, etc. I hope I'm not ruffling any feathers by stating outright that the land disputes of long-dead bourgeois Italians hold no cosmic significance to me.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Fedran Infrastructure Redux

        I know I said that I was going to work on writing after working on the previous post[1], but I tried to speed up the pipelines because an hour was overwhelming and bothered me.

      • to these services

        because they insist that I register first sending me links to these is pretty much telling me to fuck off

        * facebook * instragram * spotify * discord

      • re: Leadership and Managemen

        Wow, this has been an appealing read.

        A bit of context: I'm 36, and I studied Engineering first, followed by Management of IT Systems. I enjoy management but also appreciate working on the technical stuff. And I've been a professor in college fo the last 5 years.

        [...]

        However, when working with people, it's rare to achieve those same percentages. Anyone can fall ill, conflicts can arise between team members, and people can become tired. In sales, the percentages can be even lower. Closing 33% of deals is often seen as an ideal number, but sometimes it can be lower than 5%.

      • re: Useless things?

        Well, as usual, it depends on what we 'define' as useless. I'm thinking of something like "unfinished stuff that doesn't even do a single thing well yet".

      • Reduced Site Functionality

        I somehow managed to introduce a bug into this site's configuration. It manifests as one of processes serving the site eating all the CPU resources. Every day there seems to be about zero to three of these.

        As I can't debug such rare events, I need to rely on logging but my efforts so far haven't been successful. So now what I'm doing is that I'm disabling part of this site's functionality, piece by piece. Let's see whether I can pare it down to a set that no longer runs into the problem.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • I'm on Lemmy

          I haven't had a reddit account in a while, but I do read a number of subreddits. Well, I guess I should say that I *did* read those subreddits, since I used gopherddit and Libreddit to do it and they depend on the soon- to-be-very-expensive API.[1]

          Like a lot of people, when the reddit moderators' strike started, I checked out Lemmy. Yesterday I took the plunge and actually signed up for an account (it's @visiblink@lemmy.sdf.org).

        • Defederate Meta?

          I haven’t made my mind up and I’ll keep editing this page until I have.

          I’m leaning towards “no” on the block, but it’s not an easy call and I haven’t made up my mind yet. The block side has two big arguments in their favor:

          1. Google federated to XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) and we were like “OK cool” and I and many others federated with them. Then they shut off federation and moved all their users to their own closed network. 2. Meta had a big part to play in the Cambridge Analytica debacle. Not only is Meta the enemy (although I generally prefer to follow the Kumbaya Doctrine — if I truly believed they were reformed), they’re scary to deal with in case they’ll start data mining Fedi stuff.

        • Neutral Progress

          A couple of posts recently have talked about how to make progress on the Gemini spec.

      • Programming

        • Starforth: A Minimal Self-Hosting Compiler

          I've always been vaguely aware of Forth. It's the language that works with only a stack. Which also means it uses reverse polish notation, that is, instead of `2 + 2`, you write `2 2 +`.

          My (inaccurate) knowledge of Forth ended there. But then recently I was reading up on Forth and I realized something.

        • Done with comments

          Same here. For me it's mostly text-processing scripts/utilities, and almost always in Lua.

          And call me insane, but I stopped including blank lines and comments years go: the blank lines so I can see more of the actual code lines together, the comments because somewhere along the line I realized that over time they too often became misleading unless so verbose as to make it impossible to see sufficient code together. Plus, I'd rather study what actually executes when trying to re-understand how something works.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Hopping From One Set of Buzzwords to the Next
Rotating hype and vapourware
Currys PCWorld Hates GNU/Linux Even Though It Runs the World
If more and more people choose to remove Windows, then Currys PCWorld will feel the financial impact of its dumb policies
The Register MS Takes More Money to Boost Slop Hype, This Time From Snyk, a Notorious FUD Source
At some stage or at some point they might even decide to stop doing so
"AI" Hype or LLM Slop is Not About Efficiency, It's About Lowering Standards
It does not seem like IBM is genuinely committed to the same goals (or commitments) as the original Red Hat
If Free/Libre Software is Adding Trillions in Value to the European Economy, Then the European Commission Must Crush Software Patents
Further to what we wrote yesterday
 
Links 14/08/2025: Data Brokers Hiding Opt-Out Pages From Google, "Fight Chat Control"
Links for the day
FSF Infrastructure Under Constant Attack
The disconnect (literally) has had an effect on credibility
Feels Like The Register MS is Trying to Diversify a Bit
If The Register MS goes back to being The Register US (or UK), that will be a nice improvement
Gemini Links 14/08/2025: Reading Journal and LLM Fatigue Revisited
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 13, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, August 13, 2025
Internet Relay Chat and Gemini Protocol Help Us Relive the Net of the Dial-Up Era
The kids were alright
"GPT-5" is Another Microsoft Dead Cat Trying to Bounce
The hype, the momentum (or the inertia) is wearing off
Microsoft Windows Losing Its Grip Near Turkey and Russia
The 'corridor' nations connecting Iran to Europe
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, Google News, and Serial Slopper (SS)
The slop, the bad, and the ugly
Links 13/08/2025: The “Incriminating Video” Scam and Corruption in South Korea
Links for the day
Gemini Links 13/08/2025: Movie Memories and Mystery Machine Bus
Links for the day
Links 13/08/2025: GitHub Trouble and Openwashing by Microsoft OSI With the Typical Buzzwords
Links for the day
Microsoft Swallows GitHub Losses
Only Microsoft knows how much money it has already lost on GitHub
Gemini Links 13/08/2025: Climate, Coffee, and Deploying Troops in Washington DC After Pardoning 1,000+ Insurrectionists in Washington DC
Links for the day
The Register MS Lowered MS Focus This Week
We hope The Register recognises its errors and tries to make up for them
Learning Ethics From Jeffrey Epstein's Enabler/Client/Ally, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft Accenture
Whatever merits vocabulary changes initially had are being tainted or obscured by later iterations, which tell us to avoid word like "normal", which apparently offend some people (so they argue)
Personal Attacks From Rust People Serve to Confirm They Have Lost the Argument
"The discussion I find around the net so far has no technical merit and centers around ad hominem"
Physical Meters and Purely Mechanical Meters Aren't Dumb; It's Dumb to Mock or Dismiss Them as Antiquated
I've learned a lot this week, both online and over the telephone
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, August 12, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, August 12, 2025
GitHub Will End Up like XBox and Skype
It is not likely that the XBox franchise will survive the next 5 years
Stones Thrown in Glass Houses
Projecting? You bet!
As Europe Gets Increasingly Serious About Software Freedom and Digital Sovereignty It Needs to Enforce a Ban on Software Patents ASAP
many councils in Europe move to Free software and US policy/companies cannot be trusted
Windows 12 in Bahrain (Microsoft "Market Share" Down to 12%, an All-Time Low)
They really ought to get away from Windows even faster
The Web Needs 'Pest Control' When It Comes to LLM Slopfarms
The goal is to discourage more sites becoming slopfarms
Microsoft Can Now Stop Reporting the GitHub Layoffs (Even When They Happen)
GitHub's original staff will see the true cost of becoming "b0rged" - something that Microsoft earned a bad reputation for
How to Get Very Bad or Even Malicious Code Into Linux? Write it in a Language That Linus Torvalds and Most Other Linux Developers Don't Understand.
One point nobody brings up is, what if code gets committed while evading audits and scrutiny?
Links 12/08/2025: Wikipedia Fails at UK High Court, Perlmutter Still Fights to Squash the Slop Lobby
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/08/2025: Field Recording and Digital Legacy
Links for the day
Links 12/08/2025: WinRAR Zero-Day, SonicWall Does More Harm Than Good
Links for the day
Links 12/08/2025: More Sabotage of Underwater Cable Ahead of Russian Alaska Summit
Links for the day
Richard Stallman Will Not Miss Microsoft GitHub, It Was Only Good at Harvesting a Lot of Code for Plagiarism-as-a-Service
investors are apparently willing to lose money for buzzwords
Slopfarms Slopping Away at "Linux" and Spreading Microsoft Misinformation
Slopfarms don't comprehend this as they lack actual comprehension, they're just parrots
Links 12/08/2025: Science, Hardware, and Ukraine Excluded From Negotiations About Its Future
Links for the day
GitHub the Company Has, in Effect, Just Died (Time to Look for Alternatives)
To Microsoft, what's left of GitHub after dismantling/folding it is some "training set" (people's code, without permission to "train" i.e. misuse under the guise of "GenAI" plagiarism)
Linux Foundation Says "Housekeeping", "Hung", "Normal", "Native Feature/Support" and "Girl/Girls" Are Offensive Words
Bombing people is OK, just use the right "terms"
It Looks More Like Microsoft GitHub Layoffs
GitHub is just losing loads of money
Gemini Links 12/08/2025: Meditation, OpenStreetMap, Smolweb, and More
Links for the day
Google News is Dying: Most of Its Top Stories Now Are LLM Slop With Slop Images (i.e. 100% Fake 'Content')
Google News has been drowning in this sort of stuff for quite some time
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, August 11, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, August 11, 2025
Our Predictions Were Right: GitHub Dying as Losses Pile Up (as a Company It Cannot Continue to Exist, It's Not 'Free Hosting')
GitHub always lost money