Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • Steam Next Fest - Day 3

    I'm back with more first impressions of game demos made available during this Steam Next Fest. This one is longer than yesterday so I hope you're not doing anything for the next little while.

  • Interface Equivalence: doas vs. su

    Another question from a chat is whether doas(1) is equivalent to using su(1), assuming both calls do the same thing and that you don't care whose password is being supplied. And the short answer is, no. There are (at present) interface inconsistencies on OpenBSD.

  • Dialectics and “Artificial Intelligence”

    A while back I explained why I was very skeptical of “Crypto” hype on a Marxist basis.¹ I want to try something similar against “Artificial Intelligence” hype.

    Of course, we ought to begin by making clear what we mean by “intelligence.” It’s a controversial subject, and definitions abound: Advocates of I.Q. tests argue that intelligence basically boils down to pattern recognition and endeavor to represent it with one single score; advocates of “Multiple Intelligence” theories speak more qualitatively, observing for example that people who are good at puzzles are often very bad at noticing subtleties in communication or managing relationships. In my experience I’d say that the second camp aligns better with how I prefer to use the word, but there is something to be said for “fast thinking,” and so maybe the first camp still has something to contribute to our overall understanding.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • State of Gopher

      You saw that post on the State of Gopher, right?[1] This response provides some meandering thoughts on the subject, and should be taken with the lightness which ought to accompany participation in ancient internet protocols. I use gopher for pleasure and on my own terms, and am grateful that others do the same. It's more fun with more people! So in spite of the subject at hand, I hope you'll do whatever you like with Gopher; I look forward to seeing the results.

    • the world's awkiest irc bot

      if you've hung out around me long enough, you'll know that i have a bit of an unhealthy love of awk. some of that is because it's just a nice language, but a lot of it can be traced back to this one exchange i had on irc a few years ago: [...]

      [...]

      for reasons that were funny at the time, she ended up being named "qta", and she soon grew to a healthy 1500loc. she could set reminders, forecast the weather, produce fascinating insights with a markov chain dynamically trained on messages sent in the channel, control an mpd server which i'm pretty sure only ever played metallica because look i don't know, and a bunch of other small things i ended up wanting her to do [...]

  • Programming

    • First Argument Among Unixes

      This question came up in chat somewhere: do the arguments to a program on unix start at the 0th or 1st index of the **argv list? The answer involves "it depends" and heavy doses of opinion.

      Some languages take **argv apart and place the program name into a distinct variable from the subsequent arguments; various so-called scripting languages come to mind. Here the arguments have been split off from the program name in some way, which will make the arguments more distinct.