Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 27/07/2023: Communal Fragmentation, Launching Gaming Sites/Companies in Gemini

Links 27/07/2023:

Links for the day

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Red Sun (Fairbanks, AK, USA, 2023-07-27)

        I read yesterday in the News-Miner that 30 new forest-fires had started recently in Alaska, due to lightning. This morning, there was enough haze that I was able to look directly at the sun without any pain or discomfort. So, I took a few photos on the way to work.

    • Politics and World Events

      • Real Everyday Activism

        I encounter many people who _think_ they are doing the right thing, because it makes them feel good. They tell acquaintances to boycott Kevin Spacey after "cancelling" him because someone said something on Twitter. They yell at the old Asian guy for packing their fancy take-out in styrofoam (after paying with Venmo or Apple Pay). They buy a Tesla because it's "green". They get angry about the Supreme Court for undermining gay rights, even the 'right' to support a fascist business!

        [...]

        Avoid giving money to fascists and megacorporations.

        Maybe it's convenient to venmo money to a friend or pay with paypal, but you are directly supporting a fascist billionaire. Surely you don't want to do that.

        Housing costs are through the roof because of AirBNB. You don't have to extract every bit of value out of your apartment, like some horrible capitalist you like to criticize. And you don't have to make them richer by staying at such places. There are alternatives.

        "Ride sharing". That misapproprioated term means sharing rides with friends and neighbors, not extracting money with demand-priced algrothims to maximize profit.

        Don't drive. Buying an electric car and making Elon Stench another billion is not green. That "man" is responsible for more pollution and suffering by miners than anyone else I can think of. Put your money where your very large mouth is and get a used bike, the kind without a motor. Or walk. Move somewhere where you can live without a car, or as my LGBT friends like to say, "Just shut the fuck up, it's not for you to talk about this".

        Avoid ultra-capitalist startups that raise millions to extract every bit of profit from anything standing. You can live without some app that rents out your driveway while you are at work.

    • Science

      • National Ripoff

        The “numbers game” is type of illegal lottery that was common in the United States, and there are two interesting things about it.



        [...]

        The first interesting thing is the problem: if the whole thing is illegal, how do you generate a random number that everyone can trust, and without it being an obvious event for law enforcement to target?

        It turns out to be not that hard: the games used some well known published random number: the last digits of the balance of the US Treasury, or middle digits of the number of shares traded on a public stock exchange.

        So, everyone could easily agree on whether some individual had won—and in a way that was obviously fair.
    • Technology and Free Software

      • Just kinda here

        I’m at a conference this week, and honestly I’m just kinda here. I don’t have a lot to do and I’m uncomfortable in this environment, but I’ve reconnected with some friends I haven’t seen for a long time. I’m practicing my Byzantine music at actual church services, and it’s about 110℉ (about 43.33℃ for my eurofriends).

      • Thumby goodness

        I was given a Thumby for Christmas. It's a ridiculously small gameboy-style console. It's so small that it's hard to believe it works. It's also hard to use because you have to press buttons with your thumbnails. There are pre-loaded games, more available on line, and a web-based IDE for writing your own in Python. I've started on a mine game based on one that I vaguely remember playing long ago as a coin-op. So far I can scroll around the mine (taking no notice of walls, floors, etc). It seems pretty straightforward to deal with the Thumby API. My issues have been with figuring how to implement the game concept and my lack of Python experience.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Communal Fragmentation

          It feels to me that the Internet is fragmenting at a surprising pace. Twitter, now rebranding to X, is losing more users by the day, as is the traditional Facebook site. Alternatives, at least nominal alternatives, are gaining more and more users: Threads, Bluesky, the invasion of Mastodon, Substack, Rumble, the list is endless. While many alternate services are still owned by major Internet companies, the individual users of separate platforms don't communicate with each other. The result is still a splintering of the global marketplace of ideas. More and more people, beyond simply not wanting to talk to each other, now simply have no opportunity to talk to each other.

          I fond this so interesting because it reflects how the world largely was before the rise of mass information in the 19th and 20th centuries. Before the telegraph, the radio, the television and the computer, people did not get news from very far away. They tended to stay within their own communities, becoming deeply and intimately familiar with those they communicated with every day. Conversely, they strongly distrusted and looked down on outsiders, preferring dissociation or even persecution.

        • Launching soon!

          My game dev company will probably one of the first to have a Gemini site. (Launching soon!)

        • Favorite Interweb Tools

          What are some of you guys' favorite tools for general computer use?

          F.lux is great for me, along with ventoy for my USB drives.

      • Programming

        • Permissions Mirror

          Someone asked how to mirror the permissions and ownership from one file to another, so here's a provisional script to do that. The question concerned OpenBSD so extended ACL and other such fancy things (such as selinux making your life hell) are not considered.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Speed of GNU/Linux
The media seldom speaks of the dangers of "proprietary software"
Proprietary Windows Versus "Linux" News (Trying to Keep People on Windows, Never Exploring GNU/Linux)
Good editors know better how to recognise threats and not give them lip service
Ensuring That Every Computer User Anywhere in the World Can Take Control of All His or Her Computers
We must fight the people who attack general-purpose computing, in particular those who push this agenda very aggressively inside Linux
Gemini Links 28/04/2025: Autism and Structural Navigation
Links for the day
What Happened to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Elections: The Purge, the Cover-up, and the Witch-hunts
OSI has gone "full Microsoft"
 
Gemini Links 28/04/2025: A Simple Task Tracking and Auto-Prioritization Tool and Other Programs
Links for the day
Links 28/04/2025: Canada's Election, Pakistan-India Conflict
Links for the day
Glue Inside Your Pizza (or Why People Will Get Fed Up With Slop)
People are given "answers" from non-intelligence word dumpsters
Links 28/04/2025: Cyberattacks Happening, Chatbots Disappointing, and "Free Speech Under Fire"
Links for the day
Phone Adoption Very Low in Vatican, Windows Usage Fell Nonetheless
Even in places where people still use desktops/laptops most of the time (and have access to these) Windows is gradually losing ground
GNU/Linux 9% in Cuba, Vista 11 Waning, Android Dominant
Microsoft has pretty much lost Cuba
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, April 27, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, April 27, 2025
In 24 Countries Observed by statCounter Vista 11 is Still Less Than a Quarter of Windows Users Despite All Other Versions Being 'Expired'
They ought to move to GNU/Linux
Links 27/04/2025: Pope Goodbyes, "Politics of Fear", Slop Redux and More Google Shutdowns (Google Debt Had Grown This Year)
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Serenity Dialectics, Hockey Jersey Ethics, and More
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Death of Nest Thermostats, Death of Metaverse
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Projects Workflow and Discovering Technology
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 26, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, April 26, 2025
Microsoft Isn't on the Map in USSR
To them, it's either Google or Yandex
In Central America Windows Became a Small Force
These are countries where Windows used to have well over 95% of the "market"
What's Very Vexing to GAFAM, EPO and Others Is That It's Incredibly Hard to Censor Us (and Nobody Ever Successfully Did That Before)
resist, do not capitulate
Site May be Even Faster Now
It basically takes less than a tenth of a second to serve the page
Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them)
Year of GNU/Linux on the Laptop?
It's not happening only in Lenovo
What People Must Understand About the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
some facts about the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
Many of the Scandals Are Interconnected (Overlapping People and Corporations)
We're only getting started
More Copyright Lawsuits Against LLM Slop Providers and Suppliers of LLM Slopfarms Would Benefit Society
It's not just bad for the Web and for society; it's also legally dangerous
Links 26/04/2025: General Assassinated in the Town of Balashikha, US Promoting Seafloor Mining
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: Facebook Layoffs Again, Remembering What's Real, and Say No to Mass Surveillance
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: NOAA Budget Cuts and "Dog Days Ahead"
Links for the day
In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 25, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, April 25, 2025