Gemini Links 16/01/2025: Meta Has a Pixelfed Problem and Space Time Scoping
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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touch - revisited
It's a rather strange feeling, especially in the age of video calls and instant messaging: How close, yet how so far. The mind wanders to all those times you could walk hand in hand, head on the other's shoulder. Cherish those memories, they keep you two close when you are not. Physically anyway. They say "Distance makes the heart grow fonder." I think so. I can already feel so when I'm yearning to just feel her lips on mine once again.
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escrevir
~bartender, another whisky with tangerine juice, keep them comin'!
Oooh it's time to break the silence, the uh the sepulcral silence that I have been keeping. I am sure everybody's on the edge of their seats waiting to see what I have to say!
just kidding, I just so happened to be having a drink right now, and boy do I have a lot that I want to say these days!
But this is not the time... nor place. I'll be back on my fingers any day now, outputting reams and reams of text, kilobytes of er utf-8 I suppose speaking my mind out on all sorts of matters such as, eh, capybaras for example. That was a silly example, scratch that, I have nothing to say on capybaras. I have much more important stuff to say, about big issues like racism! and the like. Actually I have comparatively little to say on racism, only that it is not a science. Will I confuse matters more if I conflate biology with it? What am I saying, and why are you just sitting there and not offering to invite the next drink? ~bartender!
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Science
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Lunar Observing 2025-01-15 Fairbanks, AK, USA (publ. 2025-01-15)
The last few weeks have been very warm, with temperatures even jumping above freezing for several days. This is has been great for quality of life — we don't have a garage for the vehicles — but also the skies have been cloudy. This morning, temps were back down around 2 ℉, and the skies were clear again. I had about twenty minutes that I could spare before heading to work, around 5am. With a very bright, nearly-full moon washing out the skies, I decided to focus on the moon itself. I grabbed my old 60-AZ refractor and my lowest magnification eyepiece, and I observed for a few minutes out in the yard.
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Technology and Free Software
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Home lab
Over the holidays, I upgraded my humble home lab from a Docker/Portainer setup to a 3-node Kubernetes cluster using K3S. It's been a rewarding experience, with highlights like using Longhorn for storage, Tailscale for networking, and ArgoCD for GitOps.
This setup now allows me to test Kubernetes apps, host services at home, and reduce dependency on external SaaS solutions. If you're curious about building your own cluster, I’ve shared my steps, challenges, and solutions.
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Hojitas
We are all pushed toward growth — personal growth, professional growth, growth in our network and our societal status — and the terms of this growth are often set by platforms and media outlets that are, in turn, pursuing growth. And as I've discussed, the way the terms of our growth is framed is almost entirely through a digital ecosystem of warring intents and different ways of pursuing growth — some ethical, many not.
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Internet/Gemini
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Meta Has a Pixelfed Problem (But Really, a Growth Problem)
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, it was something of a testament to your brilliance as a developer if you interviewed with what we now call FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and got the job. A gold star on your resume, so to speak. I know a few people who made the long journey south; actually, most of the people I know who applied to one of those companies ended up getting a job. One guy at Amazon, a couple at Google, one of my university friends and his wife at Microsoft (which, granted, isn't in Silicon Valley, but you get the idea).
It was never for me. The only time I was tempted was at the very start of my degree, in the waning days of the dot com boom, when someone I knew from a forum said I should come down, he'd show me around, introduce me to some people. I thought about it - honestly. Defeated, coming out of a relationship ghosted and heartbroken, it seemed to me like it could be a fresh start. That fall, as I started my second year of undergraduate studies, and hit a wall, struggling with my studies, I thought about it even harder.
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How SIS Works Part I: Servers, Hosts, and Listeners
Leading up to the launch of SIS's beta, I wanted to discuss the design decisions of how SIS actually works. There are two main components that everything is built off of, Servers and request handlers. This part will begin with servers and their Host mappings first.
The most important component within SIS is the Server, which is defined by SIS as a collection of routes (resource paths) that send back a resource to the client (via request handlers), and which speak a particular protocol or multiple protocols (kinda, more on this in Part II). This resource could be a status code, an error code, a static file, or a dynamically-generated resource. Every server gets its own directory for hosting public-facing content, if desired, and a setting for its default language.
Most importantly, in SIS, this is all that a Server is. Rather than storing one bind address, hostname, and port for each server, SIS instead chooses to generalize a Server so that multiple hosts can be mapped to it.
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Tipping point card game 🃏
There are two players, and you deal hands - Wikipedia says 13 cards, but I always played 7. Then you turn up the first of the remaining cards. This suit is trumps. You play for tricks, and each time the winner takes the face-up card, the loser takes the face-down card, and you turn another card up. So in phase one, you want to win the good face-up cards, not the dross, but you also don't want your trick total to fall too far behind. The tipping point is when there are no more cards to turn up, and you're just trying to annihilate your opponent with your big cards.
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Programming
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Space Time Scoping
Ignore this if your language lacks scope. So how do places and time relate to variable scope?
First up is visibility, where you might think of variables as sitting in walled rooms, and so from outside the room (block, or file) the variable is not visible. The variables are somewhere, and if you're not also in that somewhere, the variable cannot be gotten to (well, easily gotten to).
[...]
which is more tedious (two lines, instead of one) and more error-prone as you have to remember to turn the variable off potentially lots of lines away, and the variable may not be turned off should the code throw an exception or otherwise return early. Some languages have a defer statement to help with this, where something like a "defer { $DEBUG = 0 }" could be put right next to the "$DEBUG = 1" line and guarantees provided that the defer will run come hell or high exception. This may also help those pesky humans who will be less likely to forget about the cleanup code that otherwise lives way over on the yang side of the subroutine.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.