Gemini Links 25/03/2024: Microsofter Alleges "Misinformation" and Kålsupare Explained
-
Gemini* and Gopher
-
Personal/Opinions
-
🔤SpellBinding — EILMPTY Wordo: UKASE
-
Don’t strawdoll
One debate tactic is to make your opponent’s case look as bad and dumb as possible, to look for every way and angle to cast shade on it and really make it look like trash. Even if that means you might exaggerate or misrepresent the opponent.
This is called making a “strawdoll” or “strawman”. The opposite, making your opponent’s case look as strong and solid as possible, reading it as charitably and generously as possible, but still showing why you’re still not onboard with it, that’s called “steelman” (or "steel figure", "steeldoll", or just "steel" if you wish, IDGAF).
-
Kålsupare
I really like the Swedish work “kålsupare”. It means “someone who is just as bad as someone else even though they hypocritically present themselves as an awesome alternative”.
It’s pronounced “CAWL SOUP a rey”; the first part sounds similar to a British “call” or the first syllable of a “collie dog”, remembering that å is more like an o than an a) and both the “kål” and the “supare” part stresses the SUP part since the “re” suffix don’t count towards the penultimate stress count. The melody of the word is “DUN DUN dada”. High high low low; quarter note quarter note eighth eighth, the “a” in “-are” is barely heard.
-
Am I bored
I came to the conclusion that bored I am not, although apparently, that is, to others, I may look bored by my spiritual absence. I have also realised how often this has happened to me recently. The topics discussed rarely attract me. What is perhaps interesting are the reasons why the topic is raised. Mental tensions, unworked complexes, searching. But few people seem to be open to a shared exploration of their own psyche, it is better to remain silent usually. Then again, just as often the space for deeper exploration is not even mentioned. Conversations slide along the surface of reality, convention dictates that the statement exchanges are so quick that it is impossible to look underneath.
-
Covers and cubism
People don’t always get cubist art thinking it’s just a jumble of images deliberately goofy like a Potato Head gone wrong. But one of the original ideas was to show different perspectives at the same time; it kinda developed out of Muybridge and early motion picture attempts.
-
The endless sick
Ugh, I'm so tired of being sick. I took a trip to the US for a weekend and brought back the flu. It raged for a few days and then settled into my lungs. Now it's nearly a month later and I'm still working up all the crap inside me.
-
Darkness in my heart
Recently I finished reading about The French Revolution and some of facts made me think about nuances of human nature.
The Revolution started when oppressed people rebelled against their oppressors, but quickly spiraled into a blood bath. Why so many people took part in this madness? The same words can be said about many, many present and historical events. People suddenly becomes blood-thirsty monsters. Is it some general flaw of human nature? I think it may be. Let’s look around. Times before II Word War. The current polarized political scene. The hate against LGBTQ+ people. There are way too many examples.
-
depression
It fucking sucks. I am spending more time fighting myself than living. My brain continues to fight me at every little thing. No let's not wake up let's be sad instead. No lets not make coffee let's think about this time you were happy? Remember you used to be happy? And now you're not? Good, fuck you.
No, fuck YOU brain. Let me just be happy. Let me live my fucking life without worrying about everything, without thinking about my mistakes all the time, without thinking about her or her or that or fuck.
-
-
Gemini
-
How Misinformation Spreads
It worries me even more that they seem to think that my pushing back on a right-wing talking point about Israel presumably made me anti-liberal, when I am in fact liberal. It also worries me that they use Catholicism as a strawman and as an implied example of anti-liberal beliefs when 50% of Catholicism is liberal. The comparison of my fake "anti-liberal" stance that I never said and Catholicism is a very clear undertone of their post. It's stereotypical, it's not what I said at all, and frankly, it should have been obvious when I literally cited Dorothy Day, who was a very left-leaning Catholic. Seriously, while this is most likely just ignorance, this could easily pass as deliberate disinformation by politicians.
[...]
do not think Gemini is liberal-only or very liberal (in fact, one might think at first glance it leans farther left in some spaces), but I literally don't care, because **those weren't any of the reasons I listed for why I was leaving Gemini.**
[...]
I *do not* want to go back to the web in 1995. I want to go back to a web of rigorous scientific papers and intellectualism. That was not 1995. 1995 was a bunch of crappy people on BBSs and Newsgroups being rude to others and forming exclusive cliques where they talked down about normal people as if they were somehow superior. I have started my new protocol in hopes of detracting these sorts of people, because I do not want my spaces to become like the 1995 web. Sorry.
-
-
Technology and Free Software
-
Please just let me read things
I don't hate videos. I think they're a good medium when the visual aspect is actually utilized. I'd rather learn how to build a table by watching someone do it than staring at even the best-written description of the same steps.
But the internet at present is flush with stupid and useless videos. A 30-second Tiktok video would have taken me half that time to read, and I wouldn't have had to put up with all the obnoxious trappings of a Tiktok video. It's a waste of time and bandwidth. I tolerate video essays; if there's a topic I really want to hear about, I pray that it's been captioned by a human being and reluctantly go in.
-
2024 Week 12: Status and Photos
I currently use Syncthing for the majority of my file synchronization needs, but not all. Syncthing is a great tool, but it can use quite a bit of RAM at startup--on my ThinkPad T410, Syncthing uses more than half its memory at startup. It also spawns a heavy server that runs continually in the background, which gobbles up power on my low-end Gemini PDA and DevTerm UMPC. For some of my devices, I'm now switching to using NNCP exclusively, running daemons on my higher-end devices and letting the small ones pull updates as needed.
-
Unix-like elders
I remember sometime when I was in high school, Steam was doing this big sale on their old properties, pretty much everything for under ten dollars. I managed to get away with all the old GoldSrc games, like Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat... and Ricochet.
Ricochet is not exactly what comes to mind when people talk about Valve games. It's sort of like a sci-fi shooter, though instead of shooting guns, you shoot these light disks that bounce around.
-
Internet/Gemini
-
The Simplicity of List Nesting: How AsciiDoc Does It
Today we are going to talk about List Nesting, which Gemini deliberately excluded to keep the gemtext format very simple. I believe this was a mistake, because at the very least 2-3 levels of nesting would take care of most common uses for list-nesting. In fact, Gemini already has heading-nesting up to a max of 3 levels. The same approach can be used for lists.
-
How one second can change your life
When I received the key to this pub, I didn't know what to write about.
But then one second changed the whole structure of my reality, and it suddenly seemed the best place to share it, among internet strangers around a digital drinking session.
It is Iranian New Year. I travel from Tehran to my hometown, an annual tradition, to spend time with my family, both mine and my wife. Iranian New Year's holiday is also important for us because it is the birthday of my son, who coincidently was born in the 1st of the 1st month in the Iranian calender.
-
-
-
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.