Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 21/07/2023: Gemtexter 2.1.0 Released, Birth and Death of the Yesterweb



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

    • Politics and World Events

      • Neoliberalism, Co-Production, and the Social Factory

        Understanding the problems around care requires us to look back and more nationally than just Maine. Many of the other elders I interviewed seemed to agree with Emma [pseudonym] about the importance of community and “care networks,” sharing a nostalgia for times when local communities and extended families cared for each other over and above both state welfare and corporate market consumption. 69-year-old Lucy (pseudonym), a core organizer in the Hour Exchange project and one of my interviewees, spoke to me about how “society used to work very much on this kind of basis of mutual aid but since modern capitalism and especially globalization, people are more isolated from one another.” Similarly, 64-year-old Peter (pseudonym), a long-time member of Hour Exchange I also interviewed, outlined how

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Automatically checking for new iris messages on ^C - 2023-07-21

        One of the unique features of ^C is iris, the message base written by calamitous. It's relatively low-traffic, and while I could keep it open in interactive mode and issue the 'f' or 'freshen' command occasionally to check for new messages, I don't want to.

      • Using AI to Generate Images for Articles

        Let's start with the basics. You might be asking yourself "what is a meta image?". It's the image that shows up on LinkedIn, Facebook and other sites when you post a URL. It's usually accompanied by the title and a summary of the website being posted. These images are defined in the code of a webpage using a "meta tag". This might be an OpenGraph tag (Facebook) or a Twitter card tag.

      • can i say something mean?

        disclaimer upfront: i have no qualms with synthetic images themselves. quite the contrary lmao i've been interested on "ai art" for a couple years now. i've used a lot of digital ink on it. also physical ink and acrylic paint and stuff on my thesis. i am critical of several things, yes, but that's just what art is like. not gonna go into it rn.

        anyway all this to say i don't mean this as an attack or whatever it's nothing personal i'm literally just being annoying online because i hate the ubiquity of useless stock images <3

        anyway i find meta images (and hero images and stock images within articles in general) *fascinating*. they're so so useless but also not? what does a stock photo of a guy in a suit communicate? it's just filler, a waste of everyone's time and bandwidth. but also it communicates very well that you're not really trying to say anything. like brightly colored poisonous animals. [1]

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Gemtexter 2.1.0 - Let's Gemtext again€³

          I proudly announce that I've released Gemtexter version `2.1.0`. What is Gemtexter? It's my minimalist static site generator for Gemini Gemtext, HTML and Markdown, written in GNU Bash.

        • The Birth and Death of the Yesterweb

          When I started out, I was looking for some HTML resources. I wanted to make a simple, clean site - pleasant colours, a little CSS to make things easier to read, that sort of thing. And around then, poking around neocities and seeing what Google would give me that wasn't outright SEO bait or spam, I found sadness' site.

          There's a particular segment of people for whom personal webpages imply a particular aesthetic. Pixelated images, garish, dithering artifacts, that sort of thing. And sadness, the alias of a woman now in her thirties, seemed to be someone around to whom the adherents of this aesthetic flocked. Her site is retro, in a way that carefully hews to expectation. It has all the right accoutrements of a particular kind of 90s website: shrines, a webring, an About page, a chatbox. Themes. In a way, her site represents a distillation of the GeoCities aesthetic. And while there are a lot of aesthetics from that era (the unstyled, text-only academic web; the magazine layout-style web; the artsy, made-in-Paint Shop Pro web; the "Apple ][ green text/Tandy orange text" web; ...), people always seem to come back to GeoCities. I mean, I get it. I had a page there, for a couple of years. But I never quite got the allure because the vast majority of GeoCities pages were kinda dreck, and I absolutely include my own in this.

      • Programming

        • Strings in Bash

          $ STR="0123Linux9" $ echo ${STR:4:5} Linux

        • Redefined

          Forth is a bit unusual in terms of word redefinition, which are something like subroutines in other languages. In most languages the previous definition is clobbered, and sometimes you'll get a warning to that effect.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

They're Very Jealous of Richard Stallman and His Freedom (or Simple Lifestyle)
Jealousy is toxic because it can cause rational people to act irrationally and even severely harm themselves
Akira Urushibata on GNU coreutils
new message
There's Nothing Funny About Lawbreaking
There's plenty of room in society for humour, but "hacking" the state by breaking laws isn't cool or hip
Gemini Links 26/05/2025: Intangible Stuff and Slop Issues
Links for the day
 
Microsofters Have, in Effect, Attempted Extrajudicial Action Against Us
Courts and Judges (or Masters) don't exist to facilitate this kind of "bro" culture
UK High Court Masters Are Not Your Jesters, Microsoft
Judges aren't there for "funny" spectacles, they're there to act as arbiters in critical cases, not SLAPPs
Links 27/05/2025: Mass Layoffs at Volvo and More Evidence of 'AI' (Slop) Being a Passing Fad
Links for the day
The Code of Conduct (CoC) Gaslighting Phenomenon
There are still many people and projects foolish enough to outsource their labour to Microsoft via GitHub
Anouk Rozestraten (Deputy Director) Appears to Have Left the Free Software Foundation
Let's hope Rozestraten is still using and promoting Free software
More Mass Layoffs Coming Soon to Microsoft, Just a Question of When and How Many
Numbers from Washington were close to 5% and judging by prior rumours, it would be 5% + 5% (total 10%) at a later month
Links 27/05/2025: Bikes, Ideal Computers, and BYO
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, May 26, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, May 26, 2025
Richard Stallman's Milan Talk (Public Presentation) Was Packed, Video Available Soon
Looks like they even ran out of seats
The Openwashing Shills Initiative (OSI) - Part I: Complaints to IRS or USDOJ Needed
If enough people do it, this will be more effective, more so if people who are based in the US do it
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Lobbying and the OSI's Status at Stake
At the end we plan to summarise all the issues in one very long article
Breaking Into Other People's Devices Without Authorisation Isn't "Funny" or "Research"
“Chaos was the law of nature; order was the dream of man.”
The Issue Isn't the Internet, the Issue is How People Are Taught to Use or Misuse It
The Web is circling down the drain. The Internet is not.
A Healed Reputation of a Movement's Leader and His Robust Message
The more aggressively you push against resistors, the more credibility they will gain
Links 26/05/2025: Deletions from Microsoft's GitHub, Telegram Blocked in Vietnam
Links for the day
Linux Released Last Night and There's Already LLM Slop With Slop Images
BetaNoise does not seem to mind this anymore
Links 26/05/2025: Walmart Layoffs and DRM Dumpster Fire ('Old' Fire TV Devices Lose Netflix Access)
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/05/2025: USB Camera Viewer and Fantasy Life
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, May 25, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, May 25, 2025
Links 25/05/2025: 15 Years of UK Legal Aid Applicant Data Grabbed and 2 Billion Discord Messages Leaked Online
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/05/2025: Farming and OpenBSD 7.7 on Acer Aspire ES 15
Links for the day
Fighting for Freedom is Much Better Than Fighting for Money
If life is about accumulation of money, then people will be "busy making money" till they die prematurely (with nothing to do with this money)
The Microsoft SLAPP Dossiers
A rather likely outcome is, they'll lose their licence to operate
Links 25/05/2025: Harvard’s Troubles and New Openwashing Examples
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/05/2025: Whales and Battery Replacement
Links for the day
Links 25/05/2025: Climate Action Ridiculed and "Tesla Executive Admits That Self-Driving Is Going Nowhere Fast"
Links for the day
The Next Two Phases of Our Open Source Initiative (OSI) Series
Whatever people used to think about the OSI is no longer applicable and its current acronym is a misleading misnomer
Richard Stallman Has Barely Changed
Collecting "estate" "assets"? That's not "success" in the eyes of Dr. Stallman
Public Talk by Richard Stallman (RMS) Tomorrow
Still advertised
Gemini Links 25/05/2025: Konsole Layout Changes and Capitulation to Surveillance World
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, May 24, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, May 24, 2025