Gemini Links 02/02/2025: Limits Pushing, Free Software Absolutism, and Why Gemini Matters
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Stargazing 2025-01-31: Cygnus (publ. 2025-02-01)
On Friday morning, I was able to get out for a few minutes of stargazing before work, starting around 4:15am AKST. The stars seemed very dim, but I could see Leo off to the south. I veered away from Leo, though, as I didn't have much time, and it seemed like in the past it was difficult to find much of interest around Leo, at least in bright sky conditions like this.
I saw a few brighter stars toward the SE and decided to focus in that area. I was looking at the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, but I couldn't recognize them at the time, because they were on the opposite side of the sky than where I am used to seeing them, and also they were partially covered by houses and trees.
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Dungeons and Wilderness and Politics
Brad J. Murray saw this and started writing a document, riffing on the idea. He invited me to collaborate, I wrote some more, but then it didn't go anywhere. I'm not sure what to do next. It's already much better than that vague idea I had, but it's not ready to be turned into a 20 page pamphlet. I feel that it's getting closer, though.
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F**k engagement, I don't appeal to you
I used to write a blog some time ago, doesn't matter if it was here or not it's been pretty much forgotten; but I wrote for the sake of engagement I realised looking back on it and just regurgitating what others said, preaching to the choir. Well certainly engagement can go fuck itself cause I'm writing for myself now to make sense of my own thoughts by putting them on paper, not caring who sees them or who replies to them.
There is a certain fondness in getting a reply and having a discussion (I like them a lot), but becoming easily pressured into writing for others, for the demand not what you want, is easy, and I have fallen into that trap more than once and I don't want it to happen again.
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Politics and World Events
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On Limits Pushing
I'm of the lefter political persuasion in my home country of the United States. And I have some friends who are righter. And we have spirited debates about the current state of affairs.
I think I use it as an opportunity to try to understand exactly what the heck people are thinking. And I think they use it as an opportunity to show how much more right the Right is. So... win-win. I guess.
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Technology and Free Software
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A Retrospective on My Free Software Absolutism
There's this problem one gets into when creating content about one's own life. I'll try to illustrate it with a few examples from past entries I've made.
[...]
In the end, those who suggested that avoiding doing harm by being a free software absolutist would cause harm in other ways, were spot on. I made some counterarguments to that specific point in "My Career Path⁹", but I now see why those counterarguments were wrong. I didn't end up starting a successful business in free software (I tried) or finding a more ethical career. All I accomplished was generating profits for corporations that retard the social movements I support, and relying financially on others who did the same so I didn't have to.
I think my heart was in the right place, but ultimately I was doing more harm than good and I may have subconsciously been using writing (along with other unhealthy coping strategies) as a way to escape that fact. Emotionally this has all been quite difficult to process, and it's hard to put into words the loss that I feel. I sacrificed so much of my time, energy, and happiness just to have the same impact that I could've had without jeopardizing my health, career, and future.
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Internet/Gemini
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Why Gemini matters
The first reason is the very low CPU and RAM usage. For example, the Qt-powered Kristall client (or browser) [1] uses about 40 MB when displaying midnight.pub and about 50 MB when displaying a gemlog on the Zaibatsu colony of circumlunar.space [2]. CPU usage is 0.00% on my quad core Kaby Lake Refresh based laptop when displaying that gemlog and peaked at about 3.5% for a moment when loading it. When scrolling Kristall does use 6-12% CPU on my machine, which is, however, comparable to what QTerminal uses when scrolling through some package manager output. A terminal-based/CLI client would almost certainly use even less RAM and be much more useful and pleasant to use than its web browser equivalents such as w3m are on the 2020s web. But why does this matter, you may ask? Even my fairly old Kaby Lake Refresh laptop, quite modest by x86 PC standards, still has plenty of CPU power and RAM to relatively easily handle almost all of the modern web after all. One consideration would be that it makes Gemini more suitable for use on battery and solar powered hardware as a result of lower power consumption. A valuable quality in many situations, such as when the power grid is generally unreliable or only functional according to a limited schedule as is the case in certain Global South countries (e.g. Lebanon [3], Cuba, Pakistan [4]). But even in the Global North events such as natural disasters can lead to extended power outages, which will only become more common as climate change progresses. Another consideration is being able to use "old" hardware (single core and low performance multicore machines with 2 GB RAM, or less, unable to handle most of the 2020s web). That both helps combat the rampant e-waste problem in the West and means low-income people unable to afford newer hardware (whether in the generally wealthy Global North or generally impoverished Global South) can access information through the internet that their devices would not be able to display if part of the 2020s web.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.