Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • concept ASCII

    for a poetry corner at The Midnight

    like The Place in downtown SF in the 1960s or The Cellar (again, SF, 60s) - a dark cavern for words and expression

  • 20240918_125247

    i think this picture illustrates nicely the idea of sub-composition i've been rambling about for a while. quick exposé: there's multiple compositions in this picture. the main ones are 1. the square composition, fairly cold, "amateurish" some might say, and 2. the 3:4 composition, that takes the top 3/4 of the picture (imagine i had cut the overexposed grass), giving a more classical feel and considerably more space to tree&sky

  • London Docklands Museum

    I went to the London Docklands Museum this weekend for the first time. It is housed in one of the West India warehouses making the museum structure part of the collection. There are several floors and it is probably more of an all-day visit than the afternoon we spent there.

    The exhibits cover from the 1600s to the early 2000s (it says the present but sadly that is something that is always marching on and it ends with the pre-pandemic heyday of the Canary Wharf finance boom) starting really with the construction of the docks on the Isle of Dogs. I thought the docks were an expansion of an existing lake so the first thing I learnt is that they are all man-made with a canal added later to help avoid a massive meander in the Thames.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The idea of prompt engineering bugs me

    The "engineering" part of it feels like it's suggesting that is this is akin to something like software engineering - also a less than solid use of the term "engineering" but one that I can cope with.

    As @xgranade says in the thread, the prompt to an LLM is input and not the program itself. I rather like their definition of programming:

    "the careful management of the state of a computer, including both ensuring the initial state of a computation and the mechanisms by which that state evolves."

    You can have evolutionary process that explore different spaces. You can have stochastic processes - Markov Chains are one such. The act of "prompt engineering" is that of defining the initial state only. There's nothing in the term prompt engineering suggesting that there is any knowledge or control of how the state evolves. Which makes it all seem a little batshit insane to me. I don't think that I can currently accept that carefully crafting the initial state of a stochastic process, with no control of how that input is transformed, and most of the time without even an abstract knowledge of how the processes that do control how the input is transformed are constructed, can be called engineering.

  • retrober - RS 1987 issue (XX anniversary)

    I wrote this in GNOME text editor, and copy/pasting here. Fun flip through. WAY more cool shit in this magazine. Got it free at a laundromat donation shelf in South County. Mint condition, wild.

  • How do I feel about the MNT Pocket Reform?

    I learned about MNT Reform on fedi. I had bought a Purism laptop in 2017 and I wasn’t happy. On a blog post in 2021 I mentioned the MNT Reform laptop for the first time. I mentioned the MNT Pocket Reform in 2022, on a blog post from 2020.

  • Mir libraries on "BetterC" dialect of D

    There, I failed to get a simple string datatype test to work in the variant of D without a runtime. This could be very useful as a way to extend languages that have their own runtime, e.g. Lisp and Prolog dialects. However, when I tried this again, I got it to work this time.

    There are a few things I did differently. And more importantly, my aim has changed in the meantime. My interest now lies in coding "hot loops" of programs written in higher-level languages; I don't find rewriting systems in a procedural/OO language very interesting.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • i fought the web and...i won

    • Configuring Oddµ via environment variables

      1. Oddµ is a **wiki** – a website that can be edited on the web, using a regular web browser on my phone, for example. Only I get to edit the wiki these days and there is no way to leave a comment. Send me an email, instead. I love getting email! 😍 2. Oddµ is a **static site generator** (SSG) so that I can in theory write a bunch of Markdown files locally, run Oddµ and upload the result to the web. The reason I don't use it like that is that this disables online search. If you don't need online search or you're using some other software to handle it, static files are a great option. Static files are also a great option if you need to archive or export the whole site for offline viewing. Anybody will be able to browse the HTML files offline.

    • ROOPHLOCH and tempering excitement

      I've only been in Geminispace for a bit over a week now and when I read about ROOPHLOCH, I thought "next year".

      However here I find myself in a graveyard, early in the morning, listening to churchbells. I'm on my phone, in Nano, inside Termux, writing to my downloads folder, uploading through sftp on the dying 3G network. It's a bit cold out, with the late September air finally hitting, after months of scorching heat.

      This was actually written on the morning of the 29th, but that is what tempering excitement is about. I don't want to spam Gemlogs, I want to spread them out, to also not fill up aggregators with my musings.

      So when I want to write something new I think of, I write it for the next day or the next day, or whichever Gemlog is next, one a day is my self imposed rule.