Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • introduction to the snow

    hi there, everybody. i'm isabelle (it/any), just popping in for a quick hello to you all! not gonna spend a lot of time talking about myself here, but i'm a proud upstate new yorker - i may hate new york, but i also fuckin' love it. good drinks, a decent music scene, and some pretty awesome people if you know where to look. plus, we've got some of the best hot wings in the whole united states of "america" (read: turtle island). i'm a pangender/genderfluid latiné (mixed white/puerto rican) with autism, adhd, and a whole score of other malicious mental maladies. also a spooky-wooky leftie with blue hair, pronouns, and a bunch of barely-touched marxist literature lying around.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — FGHILOT Wordo: CLAMP

  • critter in the brush, creeping so quickly

    I step outside, a neighbor in their SUV smoking out (weed), so I decide to give them their privacy, not stand in my doorway like a *square* and puff a cigarette. Hell, then *I* may be the butt of a few jokes! (pun and pun!)

    So I step to the end of the building; a building neighboring a 1 square mile field, beyond that, an abandoned hospital and then tons of farmland. Cattle to boot.

    I see two glowing-in-the-dark eyes, larger than a cats, and an odd hiss as they turn and run from the picnic bench I go to smoke at. I wedge the partially smoked Edgefield into my new (and very nice) cigarette holder, much better than the holder I had previous, and strike a light.

• Science

  • Unconscious Consumption

    Our overuse of energy, and of the fossil fuels that power it, are a legitimate problem. I see discussions all over the Internet about the need to use less power and limit ourselves for the sake of the planet. There are several ways we can reduce our energy consumption, from allowing wider temperature ranges in our thermostats to precooking food to reducing our screen time. However, there are several other ways we can conserve energy that I see many people ignore or even fail to think about.

    The United States passed a bill called the "Americans with Disabilities Act" in 1990, which prescribes that various commercial and public spaces provide accommodations for handicapped people. These accommodations might include doors that open automatically, elevators and escalators, and other powered equipment. Of course providing such facilities is a kind thing to do, and I don't advocate for their removal.

• Technology and Free Software

  • When a file doesn't exist, yet it's right there

    For reasons, I'm downloading a file from several hundred different domains.

  • Firewall Autoban

    Firewall autobans may not be a good idea as modern IPv4 networks and ASN can be traded around a lot, or due to cgNAT someone can use a random cellphone to maybe get large ranges of IP addresses automatically blacklisted should the auto-ban code be not very clever. There may also be forged packets; blacklists based on random SYN packets may be a bad idea, especially if an attacker can figure out how to make your system denial-of-service itself. Memory limits may be a problem on smaller systems: is there enough memory to run all the services and to hold all the blacklist IP addresses in memory, or will a maybe slower filesystem lookup be necessary? Without bans, however, remote addresses can be nuisances or worse to public facing services.

    One opinion here is to "block drop" by default and simply ignore most of the noise—how many stress points do you have free to worry about firewall logs? "block drop" for OpenBSD's packet filter will hang legitimate connections for a while, though I favor drop by default as the various "return" forms run afoul legitimate yet buggy client systems sending—hypothetically, of course—6,000 packets per second at the firewall which then replies to each packet (whoops, 12,000 pps) and maybe you have logging over syslog, and now the excess traffic is spilling over and degrading or failing other services? Misery loves company. Rate limits on connections, rate limits on logging, doing aggregation of logs, etc. may help. I may configure "block return" for particular internal addresses if there's a client that needs a faster response (maybe it's latency sensitive?) when something is blocked, and I know that there are not chatty and buggy (e.g. Windows) systems on the network.

  • in the direction of ascii freedom methinks

    sometimes stark borders which is what punctuation is seem stifling the way lines in drawing do the reality is closer to smoother transitions between shading regions but again those regions are a sort of laziness of mind a grouping of similar as though the same the mind sees lines conceptually which is to say closer to digitally than analogly because of the stark zero one contrast at the root of it all but then even kinds of words are laziness are a sort of moving mathematical mean what with nouns and verbs and adjectives and i cannot even remember all the categories because i did not pay english nearly as much attention as i did math and science back in the youthful learning day in fact i consistently received as as in the letter grade in everything but english and gym year in and year out yessiree someone else writing in the absence of punctuation and uppercase letters was the motivation here but also was pondering how to draw nothing therein the mythicality of lines defining regions of similar shading yay of the notion of separate objects at all

  • Slides for April talk at NSYSU for AI inference

    I was invited to give a talk at National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU) in Kaohsiung, Taiwan on April 26, 2024. The talk was about AI inference, invited by my Prof for master's degree. I totally forgot to upload the slides, so here they are.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • For Here To There

      Do you ever have one of those days where you just can't figure out how to start a post? This is one for me. Blogs are cool. I like blogs. I mean both web blogs and gemlogs of course. Most likely anyone reading these words will agree with me in wanting to curate an experience of the internet made more of small, weird sites.