Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Toxic individuality

    Is there anything good about individuality?

    Isn't it just a fancy word for mental illness?

    Don't all the other species function just fine without self concepts, yea without concepts at all?

    Isn't what some teachings call "sin" simply putting the idea of a free-willed self above biological reality (call the latter "God" if you wish)?

  • 10″ of schadenfreude is better

    You’ll have a lot of filling left over if you only use a 9″ tin. Do yourself a favor and make it with a 10″ pie tin. Don’t have a 10″ pie tin? Buy one or have fun making mini-pies in a muffin tin and guessing how long you’ll need to stick them in to fully cook filling with raw eggs in it.

  • Treading the Paths

    What is it like to explore a new area of study from the beginning? What kind of questions and difficulties a new student may have when first approaching the subject? For a subject which is, in a way, obscure, how does the interested layman find their way in a strange and unfamiliar land? These are all questions which may not receive much attention. When learning about a subject -any subject-, authoritative information, from people who already have some expertise and deep knowledge are, of course, the best source. The writings of a neophyte are of little value for those seeking to learn from the masters. And yet, the path from beginner to advanced is all but evident. One sees the product of those with experience, but seldom does one get to see the course they may have taken to get where they are. In many cases, more and more as information disseminates freely, interested people have had to hack through the overgrowth of both information and misinformation, to clear a path between fancy and falsity and seek the light of the truth that lies behind the mesh of folly.

  • Movies

    I started watching movies again maybe to rot less on youtube as I thought watching a 2 hour movie is better than spending those 2 hours watching shorts or reels and stuff.

  • Hermeticism Specifically Isn't Esotericism Generally

    It's just so common (and so tolerated by so many) to see "Hermeticism" used in so expansive a way that it becomes effectively meaningless, whatever it refers to being up to anyone's whim despite that it actually can—and does—refer to something independent of individual whimsy. This is only made all the more annoying when such a delineation and demarcation is helpfully and explicitly provided in such a forum's rules or description, which one would think would be instructive about the topic and scope thereof! Alas

    Like, there is much that can be considered "esoteric" without it being "Hermetic". There is far more to esotericism, whether in a Western context or beyond, than just Hermeticism. Likewise, Hermeticism is not the origin of esotericism, whether in a Western context or beyond. And all that is totally okay! It's beautiful, really, because there is so much out there in the esoteric world, so much vibrant variance and delightful difference, coming from so many cultural and religious backgrounds. Why try to force it all into one origin, one hole, one template? You don't have to call something "Hermetic" for it to be meaningfully esoteric or workable. Truly! It's okay! Free yourself from that bad preconception. Slapping on labels to make something seem more official or spooky is a problem for everyone. Don't fall into that trap!

• Science

  • Stargazing 2024-10-25

    This last week was challenging due to a mixed rain and snow storm that left a lot of people without power, and made it difficult to drive and to get out of the driveway. But we have had better weather now for about two days, and the snow plowing has been able to catch up so that it is easy to drive again. It was mostly cloudy or hazy during this time also, but the night before last, the clouds started to open up. And then last night it was clear all evening.

  • My talk at ETH Zürich

    You know, the kind of thing where you are supposed to write a long-ish speech, create many slides and, in general, practise enough to not appear a complete idiot in front of your audience.

    Smart people start from local venues: a computer group, a small conference, maybe they push themselves a bit more and deliver a presentation online or, more often than not, they do it at the company they work for.

    Idiots like me, choose the computer science department of one of the hardest, most selective and prestigious technical universities in the world.

    It started as a joke. My employer, sent an e-mail around about the usual talk it hosts at ETH, two or three times a year, asking for volunteers to be speakers at the event. The classic: "would you like to deliver a talk to a bunch of smart students?" thing. You send a proposal evaluated, in the end, by a committee formed by the ETH students and they say "yes", or "no".

• Technology and Free Software

  • Pinephone paperweight

    I recently bought the Pinephone. I was thinking this would be an underpowered phone, which I don't need my phone to be a PS5. I don't need more than 3GB for a freaking phone. But my God, the Pinephone is a disaster.

    This is stated as a "beta" device, which means it has already been tested by developers and is ready to be tested by consumers. This is not how I would describe the Pinephone. I would define it as a piece of shit that has the hardware I want without the software to make use of it. My God, it's horrible. First boot was tough. That's a great introduction. But I finally got... Manjaro-arm with Plasma to boot. Yay!

    After seeing how laggy and buggy it was (seriously fucking slow. I don't think Macs from the 1990s were even this slow), I decided to try Mobian... Or at least I tried to? I can't even recall if I got it installed because I was logjammed by the fact that I basically needed to use Jumpdrive just to flash an OS on the little bastard. Again, I'm not even sure I installed Mobian, but my latest/current OS on it is Postmarket OS. This was touted as the "best" solution (Top 10 Best Linux Distros - For Phones!), but it's still a sack of shit.

  • Dreadful DAW

    A problem is that Digital Audio Workstations are complicated software that allow you to do complicated things, and with that comes complexity. Another problem is the learning curve required, where you probably should spend some amount of time first learning the software, which I mostly have not done. That being said, all the DAW I've tried annoy me in various ways, so a more ideal DAW might be bits from here but not those bits from there. LMMS is usable, but probably lacking in features. GarageBand and Logic make entering notes and playing and repeating the music difficult (compared to, say, FL Studio), and for both these and especially FL Studio trying to setup automation runs along the lines of "what? arrrgh! no, no, no" as you fiddle with a line to try to get a volume drop but instead it combines the points or draws a curve with lots of points. LMMS is much better on automation: curves or discrete steps are easy to enter and manipulate (though does set inappropriate zoom levels for different automation types). Reaper I totally bounced off of, and could not get it to do playthrough of a synth nor record from a synth into a track. Maybe Reaper is more like Audacity than a sequencer? Yesterday FL Studio had gotten a gap before a pattern, and "snap to beat or line or whatever" retained that wee little gap, so I had to zoom in on the pattern, disable snap-to, and manually move the pattern to start on the beat. Snap-to hadn't ever been disabled (pretty sure about this, but maybe I clicked on something or hit a wrong key?) so where had that wee gap come from? Maybe there's a key combo to "move pattern, removing any wee offset from the start" or I don't know. Logic meanwhile started repeating a pattern as I tried to drag the pattern next to it away from that now repeating pattern, the two had gotten stuck together somehow. And so forth.

  • Write an NES game...

    I've done a bit of 6502 programming, and as a teen, wrote some game code snippets on an Atari800 and an Apple ][... By the time the NES came out I was busy dropping out of high school, hanging out with the wrong people, etc. Eventually jumped back into coding 68K machines, and entirely missed the NES until my kids started gaming.

  • Traveller Subsector Mapper

    The main reason I'm doing this is so that systemd can limit the memory available to the app. I'm hoping that this will force Perl to garbage-collect more often and that will show me if I do in fact have memory leaks in the code. I suspect I do, to be honest.

    This is what I'm talking about: The web app uses up to 300MiB of RAM. Sure, no problem, there's no need to garbage collect if nobody needs the memory. I still don't like it, though. Probably irrational.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Hello world

      How did I get here? I'm honestly not sure.

    • An empty pub ++

      For me, "a bit too negative" seems a tricky line to find in the sense that I've preferred sad songs to happy songs most of my life. There's just something about what seems like wistful melancholia to me. Or maybe call it thoughtful resignation to some realities of which we're typically must not speak.

      And I think that "must not speak" part has to do with varying abilities in being able to navigate that line without hurting themselves on it, as it were. Many are capable of "going there" without collapses, but some seem predisposed to want to dive over it and/or bash themselves in the face with it to their own ongoing ruin.