Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Some Circumlunar responses

    My wife and I celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary last year. This is a length of time that I genuinely struggle to process the reality of. It doesn't feel like it could possibly have been this long. 17 years is not an awful lot less than half the time I've been alive, and that seems unreal. I don't think this feeling has anything to do with what it's been like to be married all this time at all. Rather, it's the fact that it highlights that everything that happened before we met, highschool and my entire time as an undergraduate student, experiences which still feel at least somewhat "foundational" to me in terms of who I am, are in fact, by now, a relatively small and relatively distant parts of my life. "Objects in temporal mirror are further than they appear", so to speak. Guess I'm just old. Insert obligatory Pink Floyd "Time" quotation here...

    Zaibatsu old timer yargo is on a quest to free up time and lighten his mind by using Gopher and friends and a weekly printed newspaper as his only source of news until the end of February at least. He's calling it GOWNPONIE, for the Gopher-Or-Weekly-News-Paper-Only News Ingestion Experiment. Where on Earth did he get the idea to use such a ridiculous name?

  • Some circumlunar responses

• Politics/Games

  • Neoliberal simulator

    For a good while I have wanted to make a smulation game, and I have never managed to get past a certain very general notion of what I wanted to do. Yesterday, however, talking with the partner, we came up with an idea for one such game, and I thought it would at least be an interesting thought experiment to flesh it out, if only just a bit.

    [...]

    The basic idea is to make this a sort of "number go up" game, like the kinds of games one finds in the android play store which are just about growing a number exponentially. While some are presented in various guises, there are some in which one is simply presented a number and a few options of exponential functions, and a button to "upgrade" to the next order of magnitude, so to speak, to keep growing indefinitely.

• Science

  • Mental Locomotion Part Two (not really)

    In "Mental Locomotion Part One"[1] I seem to recall saying that here in Part Two I would more fully explore a laundry list of sustainable, bicycle-like qualities I would like to see in computing. But I'm not going to do that. Really, I have little to add to the wealth of existing literature on the topic of sustainable computing, written by folks who are way more committed and knowledgeable than I am.

    In fact, it's possible I really only wrote part one because I thought the observation that AI (really, LLMs) were like "internal combustion engines for the mind" was kind of clever, and I wanted to work it into a phlog post somehow. (Hey, now I've done it twice!)

    And it may even be that I'm not really into sustainable computing so much as I'm just cheap and don't like to buy new computers very often.

    Case in point: I really, really like what I've seen of the new MNT Reform Next laptop.[2] I like that it's all modular, that it uses standard batteries, that it has a mechanical keyboard and a bunch of different ports and is easy to take apart and that it actually asserts an existence as an object with a physicality that is totally lacking from the boring corporate slab that I'm forced to use day to day. It is in many ways, the laptop I was hoping someone would build and didn't think anyone ever would.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Trampled By the Elephants

    Where do the mice find shelter when the elephants trample every square inch of the forest?

    Last week, while making some changes to my capsule, I discovered that it was loading extremely slowly. Often I would time out just trying to request the homepage. An examination of access logs revealed the capsule was being flooded with requests from a well-known Gemini proxy on the Web.

    Fortunately, the operator of the proxy was quite responsive and helpful. I e-mailed him about the issue, and he quickly identified and banned the IPs in question. Unsurprisingly, they all originated from Alibaba Cloud.

    I'm not the only one dealing with this issue. I've recently seen many posts on Antenna of site operators, both Gemini and otherwise, dealing with extremely aggressive crawlers and bots. Several originate from Chinese cloud hosting providers, but they come from all over the world, AWS also being a common culprit. Of course, the mainline Internet has dealt with flooding issues from cloud providers for years, and the problem shows no signs of getting better. But I haven't seen the problem this pervasive in the small Web before.

  • Sending and receiving files with Profanity using OMEMO

    Jabber is a great instant messaging protocol. It supports the enhancement of the privacy of your chats with encryption.

    Depending on the client you can choose between several encryption methods. The clients at both sides (your client as well as the client of the person you are chatting with) have to support the use of the choosen encryption method.

  • On Media Formats

    The Free Thinker writes about media formats in 2025 [0]. I wrote about a related topic last year [1], mainly how the streaming services have gone to shit and I rely more on DVDs and self-hosted streaming solutions like jellyfin. This is still the case, and is so convenient and superior in every way that I can't see going back at this point.

    I don't have lots of VHS tapes anymore, I left them to sit too many years, and bitrot has consumed them. I do have a blueray player, but I have only one blueray disc. The rest are DVDs, which I prefer.

    On my mobile device, I've removed the stock youtube app that likes to intercept youtube links from firefox, and replaced it with newpipe, which seems to be able to keep up (so far) with google's anti-ad-blocker/downloader crusade.

  • Domain-Specific Languages

    One of my take-aways from "Software Design for Flexibility" is that in the debate between implementing a domain-specific language or a library, a DSL is the correct choice.

  • Programming

    • Simple Game AI

      With that glowing review of GOAP out of the way, what's a simple AI for NPC in games? That's right, Dijkstra Maps! Now in one dimension! (Or, technically, two.)