Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • I hate my boss

    In Robert Greene's book "The 48 Laws of Power," the First Law states to "never outshine the master." The natural sociological order is them in control, you submitting. Both of you benefit from the dynamic being that way.

    However, I've found one fatal flaw in this wisdom: my boss's incompetence is too great for me to act dumber than them. On some level of a competence or work ethic gap, it becomes necessary to work unbelievably smart and hard just to pass off as less capable than your boss. I'm not worried about handicapping myself to the point of getting fired, I'm worried that no level of handicapping myself could actually work.

  • End of Year Sleeplessness

    First up, you may notice in the head of the file that I'm back on my MacBook. That's due to a weird bug I keep running into on my Dell laptop with the LAN and WiFi drivers. Somehow, it just /stops seeing them/, and nothing in dmesg or the other logs gives me any idea what's going on. It's as if the hardware itself just stops existing, though this doesn't happen under Windows 7. And it's /always/ a sudden thing. It can happen on boot, or coming back from sleep, or even in the middle of a download.

    I've been troubleshooting it for multiple weeks now, and I can't be arsed to do so anymore while things are happening. I kinda need to be able to /use/ my machine, not constantly worry if I'm gonna be stuck without a productivity laptop when I need one.

  • Ocarina Music?

    Something that has been missing from my life, since I started having children, is music. What I mean is that I used to play musical instruments, but I haven't for several years now.

    In high school I took piano lessons for a year or two. In theory I could pick it back up again, but we don't have a piano, and keyboards tend to be unwieldy or unsatisfying.

    I also played guitar for many years. I never achieved a great level of skill, but I could do basic chords and finger-picking. The problems I have with guitar now are: (1) it is very hard to play a guitar when small children are around, as they are irresistibly drawn toward playing with the strings and knobs; (2) guitar can be hard on the wrists, and also they are hard on the fingers if you don't practice enough to keep your callouses hard.

    For a few months I played the flute, and I still have one. I still like the flute, but flute sheet music tends to be rather complicated. Also, it is a surprisingly loud and somewhat shrill instrument, or at least it seems that way, and I never quite feel comfortable playing one inside a crowded apartment building.

  • A hill to die on: "conspiracy" is not the same as "conspiracy theory"

    Many will have Noticed the tendency now being pushed to conflate "conspiracy theory", i.e., a claim that a conspiracy existed, with the term "conspiracy" itself. As such claims tend to be unevidenced, the term has further taken on a sense of "unproven allegation" and indeed "falsehood" itself.

  • [music] 2024-12-27

    Festral Yong's Haunted Suites is bananas. energetic, lo-fi, abrasive, crunchy, catchy blackened pop punk with touches of dungeon synth. it offends my ears but also kinda slaps? Swampwater Chalice Draught is my fave off this.

    Mother Engine goes down a lot easier, evocative industrial-tinged trip hop with beautiful bluesy guitar lines. especially loved Glory, Billy's Dream, & Porte Sosie. driving down a desert road at night kind of vibes.

    i've gone off grind a little bit in the past couple years and the Gate side of the split doesn't change my feelings. the Tomb Warden side leans more into deathgrind territory, i might check out their other stuff but i'm not in a huge rush to do so.

    the Alacrity split was ok. didn't dig The Grand Myth's tracks at all but the others balanced it out somewhat.

  • December 27, 2024, Into the Future

    Here I am coming up on yet another year, and I am trying to think of ways to be more creative. I took Christmas week off from my job, so that I can spend time with my family. That's is really a blessing! This Sylvan has also have been working with a friend on a supernatural mystery story. "Lantashi Chalice" is a character in his story :) Hopefully in a few months we can reveal it!

    One thing I'm trying is to continue simplifying my tech use. I want to use less "techie" tech, if that makes sense. I don't want my computer throwing video at me all the time - "Pay attention to me!" I want to use my computer less, and when I do use it I want to be creative.

  • Looking to the New Year

    This was a huge year for me, both personally and professionally. I got called to the bar, I survived a horrible articling experience on my way towards that call, and I got a new job not too long after my call. I'm definitely still feeling the new job jitters and get overwhelmed at times, but the work is rewarding and really interesting (also doesn't hurt that it pays quite well lol). After years of unknowns and instability in my career and professional life, I'm hoping 2025 will build on the foundations I've created this past year and I find some stability.

  • i'm not about to de-solder and yank up traces

    I found the small alley. And the sign "The Midnight".

    Smol Pub is sweet.

    Was hypertext a mistake?

  • sweetallergies

    I’m sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy let's invent our own koo koo zone then instead.

  • Fantasm

    It's true that phantasm is better than reality. But reality is so much better than phantasm

    Don't fear the phantasm it's just a though located in time and space outside of reality.

    Phantasm doesn't have a before or after Only a tiny sliver of time without a cause without an effect.

• Politics and World Events

  • Christ

    On Epiphany, three wise guy figurines will ring our doorbell. Before then I guess we'll install the holy family in the playmobil house. The beasts' time will have passed.

• Technology and Free Software

  • TIL: Elisp function `set-process-sentinel'

    While working on an Elisp program with Gijs [1], he used an Elisp function called `set-process-sentinel', which I was unfamiliar with. I was focused on other things, but made a mental note to dive into the use of this function.

  • I Don't Like Docker

    Me when the installation documentation for a project only includes instructions for Docker

    The main reason I don't enjoy how integrated Docker has become with a lot of projects is the lock-in that comes with that. If software that I use more-or-less requires Docker to get it running, I am basically stuck using Linux due to how tightly coupled Docker is to the Linux kernel. If I don't like changes that the Linux kernel or the various Linux distributions make, I just have to eat it if I'm reliant on Docker.

    Users should not have to stick to only one operating system kernel in order to use the software they want. There isn't a legitimate reason why they should be forced to. There is plenty of software out there that runs on just about any OS you can imagine. I shouldn't be locked into Linux distributions to use your software (just like I shouldn't be forced to use Windows to run games or other popular software).

    There have of course been efforts to add Linux compatibility layers to other operating systems. One of the main motivations behind those projects is to enable running Docker containers on those other OSes (e.g., lx-branded zones in Illumos). But those efforts are inherently fraught, in my view. Those other OSes have to constantly stay appraised of any changes in the Linux kernel that software may start to depend on, breaking their Linux compatibility layer. That seems like a Sisyphean task to me, especially with how much churn there is in the Linux ecosystem. I would rather software just not depend on Linux-specific functionality at all.

  • Bored but also discouraged

    I really wanted to do some creative work today. Pulled out brutaldon and started working on converting my most recent personal patch to a patch request on gitlab, only to get discouraged by gitlab being so user-hostile. Went to take a look at my own list of bugs and issues, and tried to get cracking on one of them, but really couldn't. Kind of the same for writing, there's really nothing I'm in the mood to do.

  • The shortcomings of LLM or generative AI

    Here are some links related to my contention that LLM or generative AI is not as amazing and wonderful as many think it is. More specifically, LLM is not some intelligent being that has some somehow surpassed the capabilities of mere human reason. Some of the links below were pulled out of the gemini post.

  • TIMEWARP TOOLSET

    I stick to my old computers, mainly this average mid-90s desktop and an average early 2000s laptop. They can do everything I want, so (as examined here before in vastly more words) why upgrade?

    Well one reason is that the rest of the world doesn't agree and finds niggling ways to make it difficult to keep using a PC from the 90s or 2000s with the products of PCs that other people use today. With my 'Internet Client' system on its low-power modern(ish) SBC, I cheat by running software like Firefox on it remotely using X over the network. But also I can use it to convert documents into formats that are more suitable for old computers to handle directly.

    Converting formats is generally pretty basic stuff, but picking the right formats and settings to suit old computer hardware/software might be just about obscure enough now to be worth documenting, so here are some notes on doing so from a modern Linux environment:

    VIDEO

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Little Notes: Small Web and Post-Christmas Edition

      * I just became aware of Nekoweb as another small web hosting site. Maybe the only actual neocities alternative? It does however, if you go to the Most Followed section, seem to have an overwhelmingly anime vibe (great if that's you're thing, a pass if it's from me)

  • Programming

    • On Ada's Dependent Types, and its Types as a Whole

      I just love the juxtaposition of the highly formalized academic/research/for-fun languages with a very bureaucratic-feeling language whose design philosophy is very similar to COBOL's.[3]

      But then I'll usually get one of a few functional programmers/type theory people that follow me to ask about Ada's dependent types, and this time I felt the motivation to write a big post explaining dependent types in Ada. And I really want to illustrate how how the designers were really just trying to achieve a specific goal, and coincidentally their solution meets the formal definition of dependent types.

      Note that I'm really not knowledgeable about functional programming or type theory at all so I can't really speak much about it, although I am fairly skilled with Ada.

    • On the Ada Secondary Stack, and Allocation in the Real-World

      This serves as a loosely-related addendum to my post on dependent types in Ada, since it's notable as being the only normal-ish imperative language with dependent types.

    • RE: Failing at Ada Again: Things Are Looking Better!

      I should note that all my experience with Ada, save for one course in college in the 1980s, has been with the open source GNAT Ada compiler and the open source Ada ecosystem. I suspect that the situation for commercial Ada users has generally been better than the situation of the open source ecosystem.