Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: UGHMOSE Wordo: BENCH

  • week 30 recap

    holiday! big holiday roundup! well, the roundup is big, the holiday was pretty small. but very nice. fancy hotel by the beach, room with a balcony with view of the sea. quite a big room too, plenty of space for armchairs and a coffee table to watch the sea and sunsets even with the balcony closed. drank our tiny teas and ate our cookies and stroopwafels there. and our snack-meals-from-home - cherries, dark bread, ham, babybels. the nearby store had loads of fentiman's, so we had two big bottles of that and a pine drink. there were also a beach-restaurant dinner and drinks and breakfast. plenty of bubble teas and one or two fast-foods. like the fries which got me head smacked by a thieving stinking (literally) seagull.

  • Yet another outburst of inner unrest

    How wondrously silly, all this!

    Reflections more real than the reflected.

    Ditto on shadows and their casters!

    Nothing has to be any particular way, but the notion of mind believed to be an active thing insists otherwise.

    And these words, too.

• Politics and World Events

  • Utopian ghouls

    I’m a huge proponent of UBI as soon as possible, it’s one of my main issues, but I’m at the same time scared of it and see it as not sustainable. So why am I so for it? Because I see it as a stepping stone to tide us over while we figure out new economics, new ways to handle tasks and give out resources, not as the be-all-end-all.

• Science

  • Automation vs Scarcity

    Scarcity is the enemy.

    The reason why we oppose capitalism’s version of growth is scarcity.

    It’s a reckless system that doesn’t pay enough heed to real limits like how many PPMs of CO₂E our atmosphere can handle, how much we can drill out from our lithosphere, and even the limited bandwith of “renewable” resources like wood and sunlight. The way capitalist growth causes scarcity, and even rewards creating scarcity, is killing the Earth.

  • News and Links (publ. 2024-07-29)

    Recent research reveals more details about how plants quickly up- or down-regulate photosythesis based on brightness levels.

• Technology and Free Software

  • 💾 All Software Is Shit - Updating the Shimano EP8

    I thought I'd flash the motor in my EMTB, over the weekend, after a chum sold me on some of the new features. Easy enough, right? There's an app. Push a button, bingo bongo. Except, I'm forgetting... All Software Is Shit.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Understanding the Gemini request and response (COSCUP 2024 draft)

      The Gemini protocol is a simple documentation transport protocol published by Solderpunk in 2021 and have gained some traction in the tech community. Users of the protocol, among others forms what's referred to as the "small web" or the "small internet". The protocol itself is described across 3 documents.

  • Programming

    • Chapter Nine: Xenofunctions

      Which is okay! This is a pretty good way to hack up a set, but it’s not perfect. We can’t iterate over the elements with `each`; we have to use `eachk`, which means that other functions that act on iterable structures, like `filter` or `map`, won’t work on our “set.” This is… slightly annoying, but ultimately fine.

      But! Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a proper, built-in set type that we could use? Don’t you think that would be useful? Just say yes; it’ll get the actual chapter started.

      So, as we saw in the last chapter, we can’t implement a proper set as a pure Janet type, because we can’t override equality or iteration. We’re going to have to reach for some C code instead, which is actually *quite easy*. Writing native Janet modules in C isn’t some weird esoteric difficult thing; it’s a straightforward and even rather pleasant adventure.