Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • How do you pronounce 'Nat'?

    A few years ago, I came across this website by a guy named Iain, almost certainly lost to time. On his front page, he had a hilariously angry paragraph about how people constantly and confidently asserted to him that his name was Lain. He seemed dumbfounded that, even though Iain might be a slightly less common variation on the name Ian, people would conflate it with the considerably less common name Lain, which sounded completely different. Of course, when I read that, a million neurons fired in my brain all at once as I realized he must have never heard of Serial Experiments: Lain, which is, besides this guy, fairly well recognized among computer nerds. People go by the name Lain on the internet all the time in veneration of her. It certainly didn't help that his website used a font that made a capital "I" look identical to a lowercase "L".

  • Maturity

    Maturity is kind of a flimsy word. I often talk about things like "emotional maturity"--a phrase I take to mean one's aptness to deal with and navigate the complexities of social relationships. I suppose there's other kinds of maturity, but that's the only one I'm really concerned with. It's the only one that meaningfully affects other people.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Thoughts and logs after messing with Tenstorrent Grayskull

    I got my Tenstorrent card last week or so, and I set it up and gave it a test drive. My end goal is to develop it's software stack and applications such as it can be used as a replacement for Nvidia GPUs, for cheap and at a lower power consumption. But for now, it's time to get my hands wet and see what it can do as it is.

    [...]

    I'm an Arch user and I really want to use it for my Tenstorrent development rig. Mainly because Arch is a rolling distro so I won't need to care about upgrading the system and breaking stuff all at once. But, of course, Arch is not officially supported by Tenstorrent, so I had patch their code to make it work. And wrote PKGBUILD packages for it. Stuff will be gradually upstreamed as I get more familiar with the codebase and wrote higher quality fixes.

  • We're asking the wrong questions about AI

    As AI fans and apologists will point out, those people were freely offering their stuff to anyone with an internet connection. All they did was download publicly available information.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Silly computer things

      I've been writing a lot on my capsule these last few months. If you're not familiar, a "capsule" is like a web site, but instead of being on the "web," that is, the network of all the pages you browse online using the familiar HTTP protocol, it's on what we call "gemspace," or, a network of pages using the Gemini protocol:

      Project Gemini

      It's kind of like the web for hipsters. You need a special piece of software to browse it, and so as a project, and more broadly, as a sort of ideology, it has detractors. Today, I came across this article from a few years ago:

      Gemini is Solutionism at its Worst

      And, of course, it felt a little disingenuous to publish my thoughts on this piece criticizing Gemini on my capsule where only geminauts can see it, so it's going to land here as an article on my website instead.