Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 15/08/2023: UTF-8 and Newsboat Over SSH RSS



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 🔤SpellBinding: AILOPSU Wordo: TONED
      • Rel-Phil - Pol - Comsiderations of the Hawaiian Caste System as Exemplar of Empire’s Demonic Aetiology

        Snapshot of pre-KamehamehaIII caste system in Hawai’i. The presentation of the high Hawaiian system’s etiology is muddy because its generative conditions aren’t readily appreciable by Hellenistic Weltanschauung - the “modern secular” dead-materialistic gaze has massive blind spots. There was likely no external causus to yoke communities to serfdom in Hawaii. No barbarians at the gate, as the commenter notes.

      • The Whole World is Sleeping On Mr. Gnome

        So much energy, so much heart, such a unique sound. Their other album Madness in Miniature, is also incredible.

        Thank you for coming to my microblog.

      • Stretches

        I was more physically active when I was a kid, engaging in sports like basketball and going on hiking trips with the Boy Scouts. I also did gymnastics for a short time, but I didn't have much interest in the sport and I dropped out after one season. In the aftermath I quickly lost much of my flexibility.

        Today, after working desk jobs for almost seven years, I can barely reach my shins without having to bend my knees. My legs in particular are very stiff, with my back not far behind.

        I was recently recommended a self-care app called Finch. I love Finch--as I've been going through some touch mental work lately, it's been a big help for me--and I'll write a review of the app eventually. But one of the self-care activities Finch can prompt the user to do is stretching, and I've tried to take advantage of it in recent weeks.

      • Twilight at the Airport (Fairbanks, AK, USA, 2023-08-15)

        I realized today might be one of my last days to catch the sunrise this season, before sunrise starts overlapping with my shift schedule. After reviewing direction and timing, I decided to try the south side of the airport again. The skies were too murky to capture a sunrise proper, but I got a few nice twilight photos.

    • Politics and World Events

      • I Want To Wear A Dress!

        So, I am a very 'cis' male, perfectly happy in my body, without any alphabet leanings (not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld said). I am sick of _everything_ being sexualized (or genderized). My male toddlers were always referred to as 'she' because of long hair or maybe a doll-in-hand. One of my kids had to literally escape a mob of children in the playground at 3, a mob screaming "Get her, she has a penis"! My female dog is always called 'he' because she's big - and well, she lifts her leg and pees on everything, so maybe she is gender-queer, but anyway.

        My neighbor came to our morning-coffee-ritual wearing a simple yet fantastic Comme De Garcon dress. He wore it well. I was extremely envious.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Toby's tinylog

        I wanted to find out what the minimum hardware for running a reasonably good Large Language Model at home would be, so I bought a refurbished ThinkCentre M715q with AMD Radeon 5 PRO 2400GE CPU. It's a 2018-era machine costing only around $200. With no upgrades, I was able to run llama.cpp in CPU-only mode on the smallest Llama 2 7b model (q2_K) generating 5.2 tokens/sec! Very impressive! I can also run Vicuna 13b (q4_1) at over 2 tokens/sec after upgrading the RAM to 16Gb. All this while consuming around 40W of power. One trick I had to employ is to use "LLAMA_AVX2=1 make" to compile, as it doesn't detect AVX2 by default. Anwyay, I love this ThinkCentre machine, it is amazing bang-for-buck and will be my main dev machine for the forseeable future.

      • Is it UTF-8?

        Another method is to brute force the problem with a Monte Carlo simulation, which at best will waste lots of CPU. However, where Monte Carlo is practical this may help confirm that a better approach has not gone off the rails. Or, that both the Monte Carlo and the better approach are wrong in ways that produce the same results, which maybe isn't so likely? Richard Feynman said things about actually verifying results in his 1974 commencement address at Caltech.

      • Dotfiles: You're doing it wrong

        When it comes to managing dotfiles, people like to come up with all kind of different and complicated solutions: bare repositories, git submodules, self grown bootstrap scripts, symlinks. Let me tell you: you're doing it wrong!

      • Some explanations about OpenBSD memory usage

        I regularly see people reporting high memory usage on OpenBSD when looking at some monitoring program output.

        Those programs may be not reporting what you think. The memory usage can be accounted in different ways.

        Most of the time, the file system cache stored in-memory is added to memory usage, which lead to think about a high memory consumption.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • How to run newsboat over SSH

          RSS is dead, isn't it?

          Well, not at all, not for me. I've been an rss user ever since I've made my first step into the world wide web. When Google Reader still has been a thing and the world has been ok. I just like the idea to keep up to date with all the things I'm interested in, without any algorithm predicting what I'm going to read.

          After g'reader died, RSS feeds felt more liken an on-off relationship. I tried different alternatives and even stopped using them altogether. But there was definitely something missing. Someone told me about ttrss then, while others moved to feedly, a free as in pay-with-your-data software-as-a-service solution.

        • Easing back into gemspace

          Hey, it's been awhile. I've had a long, long year and a lot has happened. The good thing though is that I'm going to have some stability soon for basically the first time in my life.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Rudeness and Vulgarity Won't Stop Journalism About Free Software
we seem to be on the right path
IBM Plans for Layoffs Becoming Clearer With "Employee Reviews"
Of course this impacts Red Hat as well
If You Don't Want "Linux" to Become "Windows", Then Follow GNU
GAFAM isn't a friend of Linux; it's only a user in the same sense clients are "users" of a brothel
 
Windows and Slop Declining While Microsoft Silences Critics
Microsoft tries to suppress facts while faking 'demand' by imposing slop on everybody, everywhere
openai.com Traffic Said to Have Fallen 50% in the Past Three Months, Reports Say It Nearly Ran Out of Money to Borrow
After the slop frenzy all we'll have left is environmental destruction
IBM Kills OzLabs, Signalling An Attack on Free Software (a Sign for Red Hat)
ibiblio also appears to have died (or experiences critical issues)
Red Hat Vice President Leaving After Nearly Two Decades
IBM's culture of secrecy is not compatible with Free software
Links 20/01/2026: "ChatGPT Health" (Latest Distraction From Being Insolvent) Flops and Raises Concerns, "The U.S. Military Faces a Reckoning on Greenland"
Links for the day
Readers Pleased With Layout Changes
Two days ago we began improving clarity and accessibility in the site
IBM is Outsourcing Red Hat's Fedora to Slop to 'Save Money'
If IBM cared about quality rather than alleged "cost savings" (cutting corners), it would assign more IBM staff to Fedora, but instead the exact opposite happened, with the likes of Cotton and Miller removed from the project
European Patent Office (EPO) Industrial Actions Formally Start in Two Hours
As per the latest (revised) action plan, today workers will slow down their work and limit patent grants
Microsoft Under Fresh Investigation by the Italian Competition Authority
In 2025 we kept a running tally of 30,000+ Microsoft layoffs, so 40k this year would not be unthinkable
The "Alicante Mafia" - Part VI - More Strikes Planned at the EPO, Starting This Month
Yesterday we said that friends of Berenguer or inside Berenguer's circle may have left
Gemini Links 20/01/2026: New Tea, Using a Roku at a Hotel, and "Voltage-Based Power Management for Any Raspberry Pi"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, January 19, 2026
IRC logs for Monday, January 19, 2026
Links 19/01/2026: National Broadcasters on World or Local Affairs Up to a Week Ago
Links for the day
Gemini Links 19/01/2026: Game Boy and "The Lounge" (IRC) for the Elderly
Links for the day
Slopfarms in Google News (at Least Three Today) With Fake 'Articles' About "Linux"
Google itself is trying to promote its own slop ("Overview") at the expense of original and credible sources
Links 19/01/2026: ChatGPT’s Defects and The Guardian on Why So-called "AI Companies Will Fail"
Links for the day
This is What the Slop Bubble Popping Can Look Like
Maybe not an overnight collapse, but getting there gradually
IBM Quiet About Its Plan for Red Hat Amid Accelerated Bluewashing
Something is going on at Red Hat
The "Alicante Mafia" - Part V - It Seems Like Some People Are Already Leaving "The Mafia"
they have a rough idea of what's coming
Microsoft Means War, Microsoft is on the Side of ICE
Microsoft, people-ready
More Confirmatory Rumours Regarding "Massive" Red Hat Layoffs
Ecosystem and sales said to be targeted
Proprietary UNIX is What We'll Have If IBM Red Hat Gets Its Way
IBM Red Hat wants to control everything, even if that means killing everybody
Free Software in Times of Peace (and Times of War, Too)
GAFAM and IBM are war companies
Founder of GNU/Linux (RMS) Speaks in US University (College) This Week
The auditorium has very high capacity and this is his "college comeback" talk in the United States
Office Meetings Are Most Useful to the Least Productive Workers
In my "office life" days I really didn't like meetings
LinuxSecurity and Linuxiac Are Still Slopfarms, Even Anthony Pell Does It
We suppose waiting another month or another year won't change a thing
Claim That the Board of Directors at IBM Isn't Happy With How the Company is Run
IBM tries to project an image of strength to the whole world, especially to its clients
Links 18/01/2026: Legal Trouble for xAI, Climate Concerns, Data Breaches and More
Links for the day
'Vibe Coding', Chatbots, and Other Bots (e.g. "Agents" Disguised as "Superintelligence") Aren't Saving You Time
False marketing, FOMO marketing tactics
Gemini Links 19/01/2026: Analog Cameras and Plucker in 2026, US Losing Acceptability in Europe
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, January 18, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, January 18, 2026
Links 18/01/2026: The "Deepfake Porn Site Formerly Known as Twitter" and Turkey to Block Kids' Access to Social Control Media
Links for the day
Gemini Links 18/01/2026: Against English as Language of the Net, "Symposium of Destruction"
Links for the day
You Would Expect This Kind of Misleading Narrative Shortly Before Microsoft (or GAFAM) Mass Layoffs
misleading PR
FOSDEM 2026: democracy panel, GNOME & Sonny Piers modern slavery experiment
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Pump-and-Dump With IBM Shares, Courtesy of People Who Stand to Gain From the 'Pump'
"3 Reasons to Buy IBM Stock Right Now"
IBM: Spying on Staff Like Never Before and Implementing Silent Layoffs This Month, Say Insiders
what we heard from whistleblowers seems to corroborate
'Cancel Culture' Doesn't Work (in the Long Run)
Despite all the attacks, I'm enjoying life, I'm keeping productive, and our audience continues to grow
IBM is Not a Free Software Company (It Never Was)
Red Hat's main product, RHEL, is full of secret sauce and has 'secret recipes' (it is basically proprietary)
IBM Turning Up the 'RTO' (Stress) and 'PIP' (Fear) Heat on Workers, Rebellion May be Brewing
Sometimes it feels like today's executives at IBM view IBM workers as a liability
Links 18/01/2026: Indonesia Against Comedy, Media-Hostile (Censors Comedians) Convicted Felon in White House Defecting to Opponents of NATO
Links for the day
GNU/Linux Still up (statCounter Says to 6%) in Bosnia And Herzegovina
Let's see where it is at year's end
Making Layout Changes
Feedback can be sent to us
Behind an Economy of Fake 'Worths' and Fictional 'Valuations' or 'Market Caps'
They normalise white-collar crime and say "everyone is doing it!"
Links 18/01/2026: "South Africa is Running Out of Software Developers", Companies Spooked to Find Slop is a Major Liability
Links for the day
Eventually the Joke (and Financial Fraud) is on Microsoft, Stigmatised for Slop
Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide?
GNU/Linux Leaps to All-time Highs in Virgin Islands
it seems to have started around the "end of 10"
Place Your Bets: Who Will Die First? Microsoft or IBM?
Not even joking; make a guess
Making and Keeping the Sites Accessible
Sometimes less does mean "more" (or "MOAR")
The "Alicante Mafia" - Part IV - How Europe's Largest Patent Office Recruited Drug Addicts, Antisemites, and People Who Absolutely Cannot Do the Job (But Know the 'Right' People)
To better overlap industrial actions we might delay/postpone/pause this series for a bit
Restoring Professional Pride in the Tech Sector
Rejecting slop isn't being a Luddite
Benefiting by Adding Presence in Geminispace
As the Web gets worse, not limited to bloat as a factor, people seek alternatives
Google News Recently Started Syndicating Another Slopfarm, Linuxiac
Even if Google is aware that there is slop there, it's hard to believe that Google will mind
Slop Bubble "Is Worse Than The Dot Com Bubble"
Edward Zitron Says It like it is
Software Patents and USMCA (or NAFTA)
We recently pondered going back to issuing 2-3 articles per day about patents and common issues with them
IBM Sued Over PIPs
PIPs are "performance improvement plans"
Sites With "Linux" in Their Name That Are in Effect Slopfarms and Issue Fake Articles
We try to name some of the prolific culprits
Gemini Links 18/01/2026: Raising Notifications From Terminal and Environmental Sanity
Links for the day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, January 17, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, January 17, 2026
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day