Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 16/09/2023: Practicing Counting in Chinese and Hashnix Radio



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Practicing counting in chinese

        When i was in china and surrounded by people speaking all sorts of different languages, i started a cruel experiment whenever anyone started counting in english, by saying unrelated numbers at the same time. The point of this experiment was to confirm that people will always fall back to counting in their native language. It was very unscientific but happened every time.

        My friend recently said that they might consider maths a sort of language of its own. In some ways i agree, but i think at least that something about the way that we develop mathematical or counting ability ties itself more firmly to our native language than other things.

      • 🔤SpellBinding: ACKYTWR Wordo: BEADS
      • D&D at the drop of a hat

        I can drop ‘em right into my ongoing campaign, plenty of stuff for them to do and explore there, and I have many ways of making characters that are all compatible up with the big 5e game down the line. From pregens or the Essentials Kit to something in the middle like Dungeonesque and if they’re really non-nerdy and just wanna dip their toes, I have my own “Searcher” class. I don’t use it if I think they are serious about getting into full D&D but it’s nice because it only has two stats and those are both derived straight up from level. So in short, if I think they’re future nerds I’ll use the Essentials Kit and if I think they’re pretty set in their non-nerd ways I’ll use my searcher class, and it’s no big deal if I guess wrong because it’s easy to switch over.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Ansible no more, moved all services to containers.

        As the title, I have abandoned Ansible in favor of containers. My setup still uses Terraform to deploy and configure Hetzner Cloud as always, but I have updated the cloud-init bootstrap to install Docker instead. I then deploy my infrastructure via Docker Compose.

      • New dumb phone at last, it cost €£11.50 but came with €£10 credit.

        I have been on the search for a true dumbphone for a long time now [0], the best I could achieve, without spending a small fortune, was running a Nokia 2.3 smartphone with a minimal launcher which I paid €£60 for.

      • Of Unity, childhood and making games

        As a child from the 90s living in a small city in Mexico, playing video games was something out of this world... from the future. Having an Arcade machine in the neighborhood, paying a few quarters, and enjoying 15 minutes of the latest game was amazing. I remember the release of Nintendo 64 with stunning 3D graphics, and having change to play for a few minutes in every store. Also, sound cards and 3D graphic cards were more accessible, so we could play in our family computers.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Hashnix Radio

          Hashnix Radio open mic is now available to gemini! You can find the announcement post in the link below, as well as the link to the radio stream + details.

        • Hashnix.club Open Mic

          Hashnix Radio Open Mic streaming is now available to the geminispace! There's a gemini-compatible stream + the icecast details made availble via the links below.

          Feel free to use this subspace as a way to coordinate when you stream in, or take turns trading off with someone else requesting to stream, or even to see if anyone else is streaming or might want to join in on listening and broadcasting.

      • Programming

        • TDD in C (make is all you need)

          There are a few things I used to think I'd miss going back to C from a more "modern" programming language. Lately I've been writing a lot of C again and finding that not to be the case, either because I just don't actually miss the language feature or because it's nowhere near as hard to simulate or manually implement as I thought it would be. Take sum types (tagged unions) for instance. At it's heart all that's required to add some type safety to a union is to associate it with an enum tag. In C this can be as simple as stuffing an enum and a union into struct fields and providing functions to access them only after checking the tag field.

          One thing that I think languages like Rust, Go and Zig have put to the fore is including a nice test framework right at language level. Going back to C, I thought it might be even more beneficial to do test driven development than in "safer" languages, but the tooling doesn't really exist out of the box. So on one of my recent scribbles I set out to see how hard it would be to do some TDD using just what you might have on any POSIX system - namely the compiler and POSIX make.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part I - Getting the Word Out About What the 'Alicante Mafia' Did to Europe's Second-Largest Institution
Can't everyone in the European media agree that letting cokeheads run Europe's second-largest institution is a terrible idea?
 
Microsoft's Bing Down to 0.5% in Armenia
Microsoft does not want shareholders to see this
Libel by Bots: Unexplored Legal Area?
Liability can be traced back to the operator
Maybe Obvious, But Merits Repeating: A Lot of "Demand" for Slop is Faked, Manufactured, Fabricated by Dark Patterns, Bundling, Media PR (Deception/Hype) Campaigns
Over the past few years many products and services got rebranded as "AI"
xAI and X (Twitter) Live on Borrowed Time, It'll Get a Lot Worse Fast
Being associated with a child porn site formerly known as "Twitter" is odorous to say the least
Microsoft is Lobbying Brussels via Opensource.org and OSI
The new (GAFAM) management at OSI is not serving the OSI's original mission
Will Lockett's Newsletter: Microsoft became Microslop and Windows users are "flocking" to GNU/Linux "to escape the mess"
"Users are fed up and jumping ship from Windows to Mac or Linux. In fact, it appears that Windows has lost 400 million users since 2022!"
Photographic Collections
There are going to be over 100,000 JPEG, PNG, and GIF files by the time we turn 20
Norway Curbs Social Control Media as It Harms Norway's Society
A decrease from 11% to just 1.87% is possible to reason about
Accomplishments of Our Community
Why I enjoy writing in Techrights
Microsoft Invented a Slop CEO ("AI CEO") Because Real Interest in Slop is Waning, So It's Just Faking Its Prominence
It's noise
Google Promoting Slop, Not Journalism
The truth of the matter is, Google is part of this problem and it doesn't seem to care
Another IBM Company (Spawned by IBM) is Hiding the Scale of Layoffs, Just Like Red Hat and Kyndryl
Why is the scale of the layoffs there shrouded in secrecy?
Links 14/02/2026: Financial Woes in Hong Kong and "Hong Kong Journalists Face ‘Precarious’ Future After Jimmy Lai Jailed"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 14/02/2026: Fish Shell and Meta Slash-commands
Links for the day
Links 14/02/2026: "Bias and Toxicity in" Slop, Microsoft's Vista 11 System Update Breaks Systems Again
Links for the day
Links 14/02/2026: "Suppression of Free Speech" and "Climate Change Puts Winter Games on Thin Ice"
Links for the day
Richard Stallman in the United States - Part I - Huge Audience (Offline and Online), 'Cancel Culture' Attempted and Failed
the comeback of Richard Stallman (RMS) in the United States
GitHub Cannot Survive for Much Longer
Microsoft is trying to just hide the debt
Ed Zitron: Microsoft Is A Decaying Empire That Bet The Future On Making In Excess Of $500 Billion In New Revenue Within The Next 4 To 6 Years From AI — And It Hasn’t Made A Dime In Profit Yet
Microsoft bets its future on a bunch of nothing
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 13, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, February 13, 2026
Gemini Links 14/02/2026: "Throwback VR Headset" and OFFLFIRSOCH 2026
Links for the day
IBM's Accounting Claims Don't Add Up
IBM is an enigma. To Wall Street is claims to be doing extremely well, but insiders tell the complete opposite.
Links 13/02/2026: "Cofounders Fleeing MElon’s xAI" and IOC Opposes Solidarity With Ukraine's Fallen
Links for the day
IBM is Becoming "Garbage In, Garbage Out" (GIGO) "Just like Arvind and Krabanaugh." (CEO and CFO, Respectively)
There are some decent new comments about IBM this morning
Gemini Links 13/02/2026: Square Function with Diode Network and Calls Against Discord
Links for the day
Links 13/02/2026: SUSE Uses Microsoft Internally, MElon's Company Helps Turn Epstein Files Into Child Abuse (After the Pornography Scandals)
Links for the day
If Your Company Lost About 30% of Its 'Value' in 3 Months, Then Maybe It Was Never Worth What You Claimed
Does that make sense?
Pleroma is Dying
The last social control media that I joined was Pleroma
African Browser Choices Show a Growing Problem in the World Wide Web
World Wide Web (WWW) becoming little but a transport layer for a particular proprietary application (Google Chrome) [...] we're back to the late 1990s
Asia and Social Control Media
statCounter reckons it's down from over 10% to just 3% since it began tracking those things
If You Want Digital Freedom, Then Follow Richard Stallman, the "Linux" Brand Has Changed and OSI is Microsoft (GitHub)
If you want something stable and predictable, then stick with GNU, the GPL, and GCC
Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and SRA Failing to Curb SLAPPs Against People Who Expose Wrongdoing
We'll soon show messages that we transmitted to politicians
Beware the Latest IBM SPAM, IBM is Already Down "After Hours"
After a harsh day in Wall Street IBM's shares area already down again (after trading hours)
Radicalism in Our Communities is Mostly Corporate, Not Grassroots
Infiltration and systematic destruction can be shallowly painted as "inducing manners"
Anonymous Threats Against My Wife and Against Yours Truly
Promoting GNU/Linux and condemning people who attack GNU/Linux is not a crime
Decades-Long Microsofter (Darryl K. Taft) and TIOBE Conflate Microsoft GitHub (Proprietary) With FOSS in Microsoft-Sponsored 'News' Site
We do not intend to do a lengthy debunking because we covered this subject several times in the past
Life Gets Better After Social Control Media
Don't become part of these experiments
statCounter Suggests Americans Are Dumping Social Control Media
Are Americans getting fed up with social control media and quitting in droves?
Back Doors and Fake Security
They've militarised everything, even people's home computers
Cost-Cutting and Book-Cooking at IBM
It's like cutting salaries by more than 50%
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 12, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, February 12, 2026
Microsoft Cuts Continue, Visitor Center in Redmond Shut Down
This goes on and on, leading up to the next giant wave of mass layoffs
Mainstream Media Intentionally Ignoring EPO Strikes
“EPO on Strike!”
Jeffrey Epstein crypto disclosure: uncanny timing, Bitcoin demise, pump-and-dump, ponzi schemes
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 12/02/2026: Avoiding Coffee, Trying Ubuntu, and "Open Source Robot"
Links for the day
Microsoft Slop CEO Speaks of Layoffs
They will go along with the "replaced by AI" baloney
In Systematic Contempt of the British High Court, Brett Wilson LLP Spent Two Years Lying to Courts and Breaking Rules Against Us
We criticise Brett Wilson LLP quite lot because of its conduct
IBM Kyndryl as "Aggressive “Enron” Accounting"
IBM Kyndryl continues to nosedive today
Relationships evidence: Tiago, Tassia, Thais, Antonio & Debian favoritism, nepotism
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Debian pregnancy cluster: why it is public interest
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
IBM Bubble Deflating After James Kavanaugh's Accounting Trick With 'Toxic Assets' Comes Under SEC Scrutiny
If something goes up based on false speculations, bonus numbers and self-serving lies, then it'll come back down, eventually...
The EPO's Corruption and Violation of Rules is Spreading to the United Kingdom (Software Patents)
Yesterday a letter was sent to the chief regarding salaries while reminding him of the next strike, which is only 11 days away
State of the Slop, Slopfarms Containment
Slopfarms still exist this year, but their visibility is limited
IBM Continues Tanking Today, Already $58+ Lower Than Recent High, Insiders Explain Why
The same CFO from the inception of Kyndryl is still the CFO at IBM
Links 12/02/2026: Pushback Against, "NATO Is Expected to Step Up Arctic Security"
Links for the day
Links 12/02/2026: "Microsoft Just Forked Windows" and Windows Notepad is a Giant Security Hole
Links for the day
Put Criminals in Prison, Not People Who Report the Crimes
Can people be sent to prison for opposing crime?
Windows Has Become Increasingly Irrelevant
There's a very massive wave of layoffs coming Microsoft's way
Our Most Successful Year Ever
The hired guns in London are eager to turn the UK into another China
Slopfarms Waning, But Not Extinct Yet
Metrics show that usage of LLMs is declining
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, February 11, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, February 11, 2026