Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CJYORUN Wordo: ZINGY

  • What's happening?

    Doors and windows wide open, a hurl of the westerly wind will sweep scraps of deleted message notices everywhere. A wolf is sitting in a corner practicing their howling, it seems. Strange. There is dust pretty much everywhere, and ~bartender seems to be somewhere else. Sigh.

  • new beginning

    i finally got sentenced for my dui thankfully it went about as expected probation (2yrs) and outpatient it's still a bit bittersweet for me i had just been in jail a few months before and had luckily avoided the courts up my ass only to get this charge and have them firmly up my ass my freedom is very important (as if you all couldn't surmise)

• Technology and Free Software

  • The failure of 'better' text-to-speech

    The Android document reader app i've been using has a text-to-speech function that I like, but the $20 price to enable listening with the screen off is too steep for me - so I went looking for others that I could use while walking or doing chores.

    There's a frustrating phenomenon with these apps though, and it corresponds to how 'advanced' the app claims to be: the more the reader tries to guess at the flow & cadence of a passage, the harder it is to understand it.

  • Efficiency is exciting

    Tech companies are always chasing something. Usually they're chasing trends, trying to cash in on whatever the latest fad is to prove to their investors (who I can only assume have the attention span of toddlers) that they're keeping up with market trends and definitely deserve more money. This has led to some truly embarrassing and costly outcomes. The full-throated support of blockchain and NFTs long after they were proven to be scams and the current trend of trying to force generative AI into every single product on earth are two such outcomes.

    One thing that strikes me as strange is that nobody seems to be focused on the much more achievable and much more useful goal of improving efficiency. I don't just mean process efficiency, I mean power efficiency. I mean a company moving its datacenters to infrastructure that is entirely powered by renewables, or moving away from computationally heavy software such as Jira and Slack to lighter alternatives that have a lower impact on the environment. Why isn't this something companies want to push for? Why isn't it the thing that, at the current stage of climate collapse, is going to be best for the company's image?

  • Re: Efficiency is exciting

    I think that pretty much sums it all up, corporate greed. There is a continual focus on growth and "market potential" in companies.

    Even companies who quite literally have no way to grow, if you own 90% market share, wtf are you gonna grow into? How will you increase sales by 15%? There isn't 15% left.

    But that is how it goes, growth for the sake of growth, there is no plateau in business. This is usually where mass firings come in, cos that decreases cost and heightens income...

  • Pebble Bed

    Okay, so even though the whole molten-salt debacle was a rust-laden flop, there is hope: pebble bed reactors!

    [...]

    So for all the “lol nukez are great and gen IV will solve climate change” on Slashdot 25 years ago we now have… one reactor!

    On one hand, that’s more than I thought so in some ways this is good news.

    I still resent all those delayists who were like “we can keep blasting with impunity because we will have awesome nuclear power really soon” because during these past 25 years the Earth has gotten really messed up and it’s gonna get way worse while we’re trying to turn the ship around.