Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 17/09/2023: The Rehearsal and AuraGem Music Bugfix



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • In Which I Finally Meet Spaghetti Pete

        For years we've been hearing about one of our friends' infamous former roommate. They became roommates, the story goes, when our friend answered a classified ad for a roommate that ended, "must like beer." He responded back with, "Hey, I'm looking for a place to live, and I like to drink beer." And this is how he became roommates with the guy that became known as Spaghetti Pete.

        Spaghetti Pete is the sort of guy who likes to have a good time: when he's not working, he's either at a party, or throwing a party. You'll always be offered a beer. And every now and then Spaghetti Pete gets ideas about something that sounds like fun.

      • where's bartender

        I've ordered a tea 6 months ago and still didn't get it. Have you seen ~bartender recently? Is he doing okay? If he's on a vacation, then we need to urgently find a replacement. What kind of pub is it without the most important person, without whom people cannot get drunk?

      • TV Showcase: The Rehearsal

        The “mockumentary” has held a place in my heart since “Borat” (2006).

        A mockumentary is a humorous production in the style of a documentary; “real life” participants interact with, usually, a very smart comedian playing a character.

        As a format it goes places nobody else can go, gently—or sometimes not so gently—poking fun at life with deadpan humour that I find immensely entertaining.

        More recently the UK series “Cunk on Earth” took a few episodes for me to get into, but left me convinced that the production is a work of genius. It’s worth watching the whole thing just for one scene about nuclear weapons—and ABBA.

    • Politics and World Events

      • Beangate

        The trick here is to make something old sound like a modern political scandal. Anyways, the foundation of modern Western mathematics is (or was) wrapped up with a number of, uh, strange views. The rational mind may put these rules down as "woo" or "humbug", but here we are. Here's a sample.

    • Science

      • stream 5

        i think there is something important even though it seems like there's not. it seems like everything is either important or unimportant, but if everything is equally important, then it also feels like every thing must be unimportant. I think there is a lot of beauty in the subtlety of sometimes adding line breaks and capital letters at interesting times and places to tweets and like that things. I think it matters to every character. every char. characters as people as letters and numbers and symbols inside of strings. what beauty what love what mystery is encoded in the strings of us our DNA or our actions logged in coordinate maps through all time through all places.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Ennui Institute

        I've been thinking about smol.pub all day so figured I'd give it a go. "For the price of a cup of coffee," and cetera. I've spent the bulk of my life, adult and otherwise, On Line and sweet peaches does it suck for the most part these days, a few small circles of community notwithstanding (1). I'm enamored with the idea of a simple posting platform, and have experimented a little bit with markdown-generated static sites (2) for accessible text-first tabletop role play adventure writing, which I've enjoyed, but I want to go simpler. This dovetails with a vague plan to Raspberry Pi Zero myself a markdown editor hobby PC, one which should really sputter under modern web conditions by design.

      • ChatGPT Writing Gamebooks and Pangamebook 1.6.0

        The new algorithm for shuffling gamebooks that I implemented yesterday caused all sorts of bugs in Pangamebook. It also revealed one or two old bugs I just had not noticed before.

      • Kvetching - Tech - The Machine Stops

        Once a month or three I do Fediverse. Tried to-day. Within 7 minutes, I was physically ill, my gut contorted, my shoulders tense. And this, not from reading bad news or uncouth disagreement. No, sick just from the biotic effect of the technology, even with pleasant pictures of pixelated kittens and amiable company. Within 20, I was writing irate re-replies to autie reply guys. 25 minutes later, I shut it all down with a sigh of relief.

      • Nothing much ...

        ... to say today. It's been a great weekend after a couple of quite crunchy weeks, but now I'm staring down the barrel of another few weeks of serious knuckle-down. All good, can't complain, I love my job! But I'm looking forward to things easing off a bit at some point.

        In the spirit of directionless rambling, I noticed just this afternoon that I'd received an email from the FSF advertising the upcoming 40th birthday of the GNU project. Amazing that it's been that long! Amazing also, that one of the two events they're hosting will be in Switzerland, and just a bit over an hour's train journey from where I live. There's even to be an RMS keynote!

      • Internet/Gemini

        • AuraGem Music Bugfix

          The bandwidth throttling of music files was on a global basis by accident, which meant that it was throttling bandwidth for the sum of the bandwidth of all connections. Now bandwidth throttling happens per connection, which means there can be concurrent connections of 320 kbps streams running.

        • Language log no word for x archive

          A list of articles documenting claims that some language has some amount of words for some concept.

        • slow updates

          I’ve been thinking it’s painful to update the main page and I’m pretty slow to push updates. I’m imagining I can solve this with a new tag, that when present, will automatically get added to the index and I can grab all the files that match this year. Or maybe the last N posts… I’ll try for the current year to begin with.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

IBM is Rotting With "Zero Internal Jobs" and Many PIPs (Performance Improvement Plans) on the Way, Typically a Fast Track Towards Layoffs Without Severance
At risk of giving air(time) to tribal sentiments, the internal joke at IBM is that to IBM "AI" stands for "All Indian"
The Gerstnerisation of Microsoft: Seventh Wave of Microsoft Layoffs (Over 20,000 to be Cut) Allegedly Going to Start Shortly, Probably Start of Next Week, Microsoft Spreads Chaff and Noise Before the Big Axes Fall
we might be looking at about 50,000 people that Microsoft gets rid of this year
GNU (and the FSF) Still Changing the World
Today, in 2025, GNU powers almost everything
Military-Grade Anti-Linux Microsoft Propaganda Using Microsoft LLMs in Fake 'News' Sites (Slopfarms)
This is part of a pattern
 
Rust Propaganda Now Amplified by Slopfarms Powered by Microsoft LLMs, Encouraging the Outsourcing of GNU/Linux Distros to Microsoft/GitHub/NSA (and a Shift Away From GPL/Copyleft)
Moving to Microsoft GitHub and adopting unfinished, untested code for highly critical bits
Links 09/05/2025: Inflation Rising and Rights to Protest Curtailed Some More
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/05/2025: Good and Evil, LLMs Made the Web Worse Yet Again
Links for the day
European Patent Office (EPO) Faked "Revenue Expansion" by Granting Loads of Invalid, Illegal Patents; Staff Still Wants to Know Where That Money Went
Only about 30% of the EPO's patents are for EU entities/people
Links 09/05/2025: TeleMessage Blunder, More Distractions From Impending Mass Layoffs at Microsoft
Links for the day
Links 09/05/2025: Analog Computer and First time at FOSDEM
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 08, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, May 08, 2025
Links 08/05/2025: Mass Layoffs at Google Again, India/Pakistan Tensions Continue to Grow, New Pope (US) Selected
Links for the day
"Victory Day" - Part I: That is the Day Microsofters Who Assault Women Pay for Their Actions in Foreign Land (Using "Guns for Hire" Who Attack Their Own Country for American Dollars)
Adding a friend from Microsoft to the docket didn't help
Rust is Starting to Seem More Like Microsoft-hosted "Digital Maoism", Not a Legitimate Effort to Improve Security
Maybe this is very innocent, but they seem to have taken a solid, stable program from a high-profile Frenchman and looked for ways to marry it with GitHub, i.e. Microsoft/NSA
Gemini Links 08/05/2025: Practical Gemini Use Case, Shutdown of the Blanket Fort Webring
Links for the day
Links 08/05/2025: "Slop Presidency", US Government Defunds Public Broadcasting
Links for the day
Lasse Fister, Organiser of Libre Graphics Meeting, Points Out the Code of Conduct is Likely Violated by the Same People Who Promote Codes of Conduct (and Then Bully Him Into Cancelling a Keynote)
I am starting to see Lasse Fister as another victim
LLM Slop Attacks Not Only Sites of Free Software Projects But Also Bug Reporting Systems (Time-wasting, in Effect "DDoS")
Microsoft, the leading purveyor and promoter of slop, is a cancer
The Richard Stallman (RMS) "European Tour" Carries on In Spite of the Nuremberg Incident
Some people spoke about how they saw yesterday's talk
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 07, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, May 07, 2025
The CoC Means the Founder of GNU/Linux Cannot Talk and a 72-Year-Old Man With Cancer is Somehow a "Safety" Risk?
Those who don't like RMS are not forced to attend his talks
Gemini Links 07/05/2025: A Shopping Spree and Digital Gardening
Links for the day
Links 07/05/2025: Pegasus Guilty and a Path Towards EU Without Russian Energy
Links for the day
People Used to Talk
If pets can live a measurably happy life without gadgets and "apps", why can't humans?
Outsourcing GNU/Linux to Microsoft GitHub Promoted by Microsoft LLM Slop and Army Officers
Something doesn't seem right
Weaponisation of For-Profit Dockets - Part III: No More Media Lawsuits From Brett Wilson LLP This Year, One Can Only Guess Why
People leak a lot of material to Techrights because they know, based on the track record, that the sources will be protected and whatever gets published will stay online, in full, no matter how stubborn an effort (even lawsuits and blackmail) will be sent its way
Gemini Links 07/05/2025: Adopting GrapheneOS, Further Enshittification of Flickr
Links for the day
Links 07/05/2025: CISA Gutted, Debt-Saddled (Likely Insolvent) 'Open' 'AI' (Proprietary Slop) Faking Its Financial State Again
Links for the day
Finland, Lithuania, and Latvia Fortify Their Digital Border With GNU/Linux
This month's data from statCounter is particularly interesting near the Baltic Sea
The European Patent Office (EPO) Has a Very Profound Corruption Issue, Far More Urgent an Issue Than Pronouns
a rather long document
Richard Stallman Gives Public Talk at Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic
"For programs that you could run, and for network services that could do your own computing, under what circumstances is it reasonable to trust them?"
Today We Turn 18.5
The eighteenth "and a half" anniversary
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, May 06, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, May 06, 2025