Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — XEILPTC Wordo: WISES

  • Surviving the casino world

    I visited family over the winter break—family who watch a lot of news. I read the news sometimes from some sources, but you couldn't force me to use a web browser without an ad blocker today and it's easy to forget how it feels the gaze into the pulsating mass of commercialism that is most media today.

    One thing that stood out to me, something I'm convinced is much worse than it was even a few years ago, is the gambling ads.

    It was non-stop, flashing lights, coins flying everywhere, annoying music, abstract tokens of fortune and wealth… Images of people leading normal lives before they pull out their phone and are immediately enveloped in this fantasy realm of riches and prestige, as though online gambling isn't the deeply depressing thing you've been (rightfully) lead to believe it is.

  • Behaviorism gets a bad rap

    One thing that all behaviorists agree on is that a science of behavior is possible. The behavior of humans and other animals can be described, explained and adjusted, just as chemists describe, explain and adjust reactions. "Radical behaviorism" is the variant proposed by B. F. Skinner, even states that a science of behavior can be a natural science. Pretty radical indeed, given that psychology is usually considered a "social science". However, Skinner's work has shown that this is indeed possible if you work within a few fixed boundaries:

  • Visits

    When I was growing up, I heard a lot about my dad's old friends: Robbie Lawson, Kenny Watson (who died, my dad said, after throwing gasoline at a fire); Julian and Leo, his closest friends before he left for Canada, the latter of whom joined him on a hitchhiking trip across Europe in his late teens. After that, his friends from university: the three Johns, Anne, Georgine, Ken, Joe, Uwe, and others. Many others. Too many to list, the joy of group housing in the 1970s.

    One day, when I was a teenager, he mentioned, almost as an aside, but I could tell it was something that had been bothering him for a long time, that whenever he went back west, he always made a point of calling on old friends, and they had a great time, but nobody ever seemed interesting in coming east to visit. I remember only incident, when one of the Johns, who was very close with my dad, and who passed a couple of years ago, came out to visit one summer when I was eleven or twelve. And that was it. And now, a little older than my dad would have been then (oof), I can easily say, "same", and understand how easy it is to fall into the same old traps, the same old loops.

  • A movie review - Transformers Rise of the Beast

    As always with transformers movies, this was a hilariously bad mess from start to finish.

    This time around we are joined by new good guys the "maximals" (what a stupid name) and new bad guys, the mega bad guy called Unicorn (really Unicron). I know Transformers lore was made to peddle toys to kids, but a lot of it is still beyond ridiculous.

    After the intro we are taken through some racial stereotyping, some racist innuendo and in Michael Bay fashion, explosions. In fact the movie has Michael Bays big fat buttprint all over it. From the ooraah attitude, to explosions and over explaining the movie plot, because Hollywood considers the average American too dumb to understand moving pictures.

  • It's been a hot minute since last I posted! Trust me, it wasn't because my ADHD drove me into the brink of insanity with more doomscrolling.

    It's been a hot minute since last I posted! Trust me, it wasn't because my ADHD drove me into the brink of insanity with more doomscrolling. At some point, in early November, a pipe burst in the first floor bathroom and flooded the garage. For two days, we went without water until someone was able to come by to fix it, and then my mother decided it'd be a good time to renovate her bathroom (which was true). It wasn't until this past weekend that we were finally able to finish the construction. It looks fine, and will be easier for her to shower in, given her condition. And on top of all THAT, my own shower stops working because, for reasons we haven't figured out, water simply stopped running upwards to my shower. For these past few months, we had to make do by going to my aunt's house to help my mother shower, and I had to start washing my hair in the kitchen sink! I felt so gross.

    For whatever reason, the whole situation made me feel... weird. Almost unsafe in my own house. After two years, I had become comfortable in this house, but then the pipe burst, and it felt almost like I was treading into someone else's house, you know? I didn't feel safe or secure. It didn't help that, despite it being cheap, having to fix and renovate ate a good chunk out of my savings.

  • Sunday

    My wife and son are across the strait visiting family, so it's a batchelor weekend for the cat and I. A quiet weekend for both of us, it turns out, as befits our advancing years. (I can't say for sure just how old Mister Fluffkin is, as he was already getting on when we adopted him, but the going estimate is approximately 107. I myself am not quite that old, but getting there).

    We both have our ways of (vainly) trying to stave off the depredations of time. Fluffkin, sensibly, prefers to nap as much as possible. I, on the other hand, will sometimes break out of my torpor and go to the gym, where I huff and puff, grunt and groan, and possibly even perspire. One can only hope that the undoubtedly slight health benefits outweigh the indignity of it all. I've long since given up hope it will do much to improve my appearance.

  • Conflicted Feelings

    A colleague in work died yesterday. It hit me harder than expected. This colleague, who I will refer to as G, is someone I have worked with for 12 years or so. G was my manager for many years and managing was not his forte. He was the sort who fixated on an idea and wouldn't listen once he had that idea. He is also the only person I have threatened with reporting to HR. Well, he shouted at me in front of others when if he would have listened, he would have the answers he wanted. I had a period of trying to frustrate him as revenge for the frustration he caused me. I was a knob at that time. Still am but not as vindictive.

    He also wanted the best technical soloution with the best business outcomes. He strove to maintain high standards and helped people reach them. Outside of work mode, he was an actual human who you could talk to and even have a laugh with. Learning to work with G lead me to explore Buddhism. Mostly to find ways to cope with his nonsense but every fire needs something to cause the initial spark.

• Politics and World Events

  • Fascism all the way down

    When I was a kid my parents were never explicitly against me swearing. As my father would say, the whole point of curse words was that they had a certain weight to them that other words don't—that's essentially why people feel uncomfortable using them, and why people feel uncomfortable when you use them. So the problem isn't people swearing *at all*; the problem was people swearing *too much*, or otherwise using swear words inappropriately. Inappropriate use of curse words devalued them, so when you really needed them they wouldn't carry the same weight as they otherwise would have.

    I think that argument made sense to me when I was younger. I don't really agree with it anymore for a few reasons, but I do think it's a good argument.

  • Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

    When I was a teenager and met the first US citizens talking about Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I was confused. I knew nothing about this guy. My step mother is from Angola, grew up in Portugal, and we never spoke about the fight for civil rights.

  • One Nightmare is Over

    It is really sad that after a spectacular loss, Democrats didn't try to look at what went wrong, but instead:

    * pardoned all cohorts guilty of treason;

    * gave away all the money available to foreign causes;

    * caused the first and rather amazing loss to the federal reserve

• Technology and Free Software

  • re: ctags

    ctags is a little program that makes a little regex powered database (a plaintext 'tags' file) in your project root so you can jump around between locations in a text file. Consider for example a large codebase. ctags lets you jump to a class definition or function definition regardless of where it is defined, across files. It does this automatically for a large number of supported languages when you run the `ctags` command.

    ctags support is deeply baked into vim. `Ctrl-[` and `Ctrl-O` for jumping away and back are how you navigate `:help` for example. And `:help ctags` has a bunch of info.

    ctags was obsoleted by exuberant-ctags, which was obsoleted by universal-ctags. All of which were obsoleted by Language Server Protocol.

  • Democratizing Tech Initiative!

  • rsync

    rsync, for some reason or another, has been removed from my workflow.

    [...]

    The other major use of rsync involved a virt in the cloud, and as such that virt may or may not be as trustable as those whose remote and physical access is better known. openrsync here deleted all the remote files, then did a sync of all the files, which is perhaps not good? Instead, a git hook was setup since the entire repository is also backed up to the virt, so that on push the site is updated from a local checkout of the backup repository. This is slightly more difficult than an rsync push to get working.

  • Theory vs. practice, again

    Today, I'm not gonna talk about anything specific in any depth, just some random and short musings united with a common idea, rooted back in the famous quote by Linus Torvalds: "Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time."

    In theory, Forth and OCaml programming languages are much superior to Go and Rust in every possible aspect, but in practice, most natively compiled software is written in the latter ones nowadays. Even I, personally, would prefer Go over other mainstream BS like Java or C++. By the way, in theory, compiled languages are the go-to choice for almost any problem, but in practice, interpreted (or at most JIT-compiled) languages are being used much more on a daily basis.