Gemini Links 28/02/2024: Groupthink and the 'Problem' With Linux
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Bullshit assumptions
We live in a world where humanoid creatures discovered ever more, some discovered more then others and others took over the assumptions of some who believed they discovered something while their assumptions were merely a fantasy.
These ass-umptions we can call bullshit. Humans are in fact bettere at ass-uming bullshit then actually observing nature and reason what they observe, as reasoning for most people is nit reasoning at all, but more a game of constructing fantasies that make them feel smart when they tel these fantasies to others who then believe the bullshit.
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2024 a clickbait society
The internet is dead.
The internet a place where humanity shared its knowledge.
The internet connected people.
The internet where everyone was addicted to.
The internet where one MEME told us more then an entire day of TV shows.
The internet where shitpost lost from fake news.
The internet that had more porn then actual knowledge.
The internet that turned clever kids into vicous crypto crooks.
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Pimsleur: The Duolingo of my youth
I spoke Italian until age four. I have good stories about what happened after that, but they're mostly made up, and I did not grow up fluent in Italian. I took French-language courses in school until the end of highschool. Other than that, no real foreign-language experience on my part.
Post-grad school, I had an opportunity to study Italian in Italy. I moved to Florence for a couple of months, where I went to classes in the morning and walked around the city in the evenings. The lessons helped, but not much. I started looking for supplements.
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Leaning on art
It's really rare for me to find the actual motivation to do basically anything. Especially something that takes effort like thinking about words.
When I get in this state, which I've been it basically since August last year, I tend to fall back more on directly expressive things, mainly art.
Mostly, my art is just playing my instruments. With my extreme executive dysfunction, it's whatever I can do immediately in front of me. That is often guitar since it involves me reaching to my right about 2 feet and then flipping a switch on my amp. This can all be done without leaving my chair. But if I have a bit more brainpower I might grab my drawing tablet and doodle.
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If you're going to lie to people, at least make the lie believable.
I've been reading about a controversy at University of Waterloo, students there have discovered that M&M branded candy vending machines on campus are equipped with cameras and facial recognition technology.
The part of the story that really made me shake my head though was a statement from the vending company to the student newspaper: "what's most important to understand is that the machines do not take or store any photos or images, and an individual person cannot be identified using the technology in the machines. The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface -- never taking or storing images of customers."
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Stargazing: Corona Borealis: Fairbanks, AK, USA: 2024-02-26 (publ. 2024-02-27)
Yesterday morning the sky cleared up, so I went to the boat launch, starting about 4:30am AKST. I got in about one hour of naked-eye stargazing. I was intending to use the binoculars for a few minutes toward the end, but just before I got my chance, a big sheet of clouds rolled in.
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embarking on a cosmic voyage.
I had writers block for over a month. I just couldn’t find inspiration in anything, nothing I wrote felt good. And for so long I had been enjoying writing in this cool style of short fiction with detailed environments.
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Politics and World Events
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Schizopolitical society.
When politicians have a special agenda, a financial pipedream so unrealistic, un-hinged and with the physical propperties of a financial black hole. And on top of that they invested all their money into all kinds of illusions they themselfs take for real. Convinced of their fortune investments in corporate institutions they are not affraid to gamble with even bigger amounts of money, tax money that ain't their money, so if one of them is wrong thats no big deal, they can't all be wrong, can they? Or can they?
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Anarchism works
There are not a lot of "anarchists" in my life. I have found myself surrounded by progressives, and even a few socialists, but in a room of people I spend my life with I am, quite often, the only self-proclaimed anarchist. People who get the vibe that the prison industrial complex is a Bad Thing, but when pressed on the subject, would probably ask questions like "what about the really bad people though?"
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Leadership in a nutshell.
After I wrote my article about the Putin interview and sharing my views with others I noticed that many, or most, people are more closed minded then I expected. I learned to not have discussions with closed minded people, so I try to let go once I see that i'm dealing with a locked brain. And dig deeper there where I don't have to waste energy.
Today I clicked on a link on the first apearance that Tucker Carlson did after his Interview with Vladimir Putin and to my surprise it dealth with a bunch of the topics that the locked brains can't handle.
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Trust in a groupthink society.
Trust in a groupthink society.
Who do you trust, and why would you?
Everyone who follows the herd walks in the shit of the leaders, leaders who themseves are lead by groupthink of a slightly higher class of bullsitthers.
The herd for some reason 'trusts' those who walk up-front but should they? On what exactly do they base that trust? In a way we all have a brain that 'goes with the flow', however all those who flow along never do really lead any of those who walk in line behind them. It seems to be some kind of spell. Hypnotized drones who go along to get along, just fit in with the masses to earn a kind of status belong in the group, even if that group doesn't really support them, they merely support 'the group' it's a baseless 'trust'.
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World News: The Putin Interview.
Yesterday the Putin interview became available. And here is my take on it.
As all the mainstream media went 'Putinsane' there was no way that I'm going to mis this. And BOY what an interview!
In the span of 2 hours the sweater of the west unravelled, and left all of our leaders standing in the cold. Don't get me wrong, Russia has many problems that should be solved. But that aside. Vladimir gained A LOT of my respect.
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Technology and Free Software
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And So, It Ends
SO THE JAM ENDED A DAY EARLIER THAN PLANNED. That's fine, it's all good. I didn't have to rush to implement one final thing when already past the deadline leading to me dropping it with loads of bugs that meant I had to then spend more time trying to fix it akjsdg.
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Self-Hosting a Search Engine
I've lately been playing a bit with a self-hosted instance of SearXNG[1], an utterly-unpronounceable privacy-respecting open-source metasearch engine[2].
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The problem with Linux
Linux is awesome, and no I wouldn't like to be without it. Now, i'm a techie and I like to play with this stuff, but that's not for everyone. Then when I think about the amount of work it is to get everything re-installed and reconfigured on a fresh install with the latest and greatest version of my favorite distro, ...that comes with version that are very different then the last time I went down that path. Well with that in mind I genuine feel sorry for the non techie people who have to fight this uphill battle.
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The search for the ideal 'dumb' phone.
For some time i try to create a mental image of what kind of phone I really want.
I'm exhausted by the feature rich 'smart' phones that funnel all your privacy to the corporate data brokers. For a long time, about 8 years, my old Samsung S3 mini has been sleeping on the window sil, always attached to the charger. And it worked like a virtual landline. If I'm not at home I don't hear it ring, nobody will answer. Once I get home I eventually look if somone has called, and eventually I'll call back. Or I don't... More often then not I don't even look at it. The logic is: If it is really important they'll call back a around dinner time. Just like in the old days when we couldn't have a landline in our pocket.
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Used Hardware
This page is not about my homelab, because there are dedicated pages for that. This page is for my daily drivers which I use. At first the hardware configurations, then the environment because it's nearly the same on all PCs. I have 3 machines which I use daily: dopey, grumpy and sneezy. They're named after some of the dwarfs in "Snow White".
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Internet/Gemini
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Which gopher daemons have been patched to fix the hURL issue?
So if you've been following my phlog, you'll see that I discovered that most gopher daemons implementing the hURL hack have done so in a rather haphazard manner, both failing to produce proper URLs (certain reserved characters MUST be percent encoded) and to produce proper HTML (reserved characters MUST be HTML entities less they are interpreted as HTML).
Here's where we stand right now with various servers:
bucktooth - fixed, breaking change
geomyidae - fixed, breaking change
gophernicus - fixed
pygopherd (python3) - fixed
motsognir - NOT fixed (yet?).
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Distributed dreams
I'm dreaming of a small distributed internet that can be hosted in my browser.
In a way that already somewhat existed, and it went by the name BeakerBrowser that used the dat protocol. Yet at some point the devs put it on the shelf and *poof*, gone was my dream. Well my dream was not the dream of the Beaker devs, as they wanted to make an interactive thing that works like facebook but then decentralized. All fine with me as long as I'm allowed to keep things small, but it was not supposed to be like this. As i said, they decided to put it on the shelf and that was that. Moebius had to find another solution.
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Notifications
I made a little post yesterday, and that got me thinking about notfications. You get none posting here or to a static blog on the web, but I am used to it from various social networks. What is your behavior with those? I like to hoard them, to let that number on the bell or the icon of the app get as big as it can before I check them. Is this a healthy way to interact with the apps? Is there a healthy way other than simply ignoring them? That's very hard. If I didn't care about how people were reacting and responding to what I'd said I would be a very strange human. If I thought it didn't matter how people reacted to what I'd said would I have said anything at all?
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.