Links 04/02/2025: Birth of a Calf, FOSDEM, and More
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Birth of a lamb
Yesterday I had the privilege of experiencing a new first: I helped deliver a baby lamb.
I guess this story needs a bit of context: I’m not a farmer, I live in a small town that has rural areas, but I wouldn’t call “countryside” at all. There’s some “countryside” very close to us, but we are not. I work as a computersmith, so my life experience hadn’t led me to be really ready for this.
My family has had, remnant of a gone past, a chicken pen for I guess forever. We get some eggs out of it, that’s it. Before that, maybe not for 30 odd years, they even used to keep a pig, but not anymore.
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Fell Sleep
Instead of the template chosen specifically by the merchant's guild, my master used one of my templates.
While not my first master, he has expressed a desire to continue my instruction much in the same way as my last master: I derive certain inspiration from the way in which he does his work; he leaves the exact method of accomplishing it up to me.
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🔤SpellBinding — EIKLNUY Wordo: SWARF
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Technology and Free Software
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FOSDEM
I was at FOSDEM this past week - quite enjoyable, in fact more so than I expected. For some years I didn't go because I felt it was getting too crowded, and I'm not really good with people. I gave only a single talk - a lightning talk on a comparison of GPU backends - while my friend Niels gave an excellent talk on a programming language called rash. The highlight was a fellow in the audience asking a question that was basically saying that there is already a better language called rash.
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Degrowth
I posted a picture from our living room on fedi and noticed that the book Who is Afraid of Degrowth by Céline Keller was visible on the coffee table. And a bit later, @aimee@mastodon.nz shared a link to the International Degrowth Network, specifically to their values and principles: [...]
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Internet/Gemini
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Computing words about Gemini
I want to preemptively mention that, if you’re just starting out as a capsule author, feel free to ignore all this information-architecture haranguing.
If you only kind of want to write, the last thing you need to do is pay attention to how to make edge cases work better for readers that you don’t have yet, and may never have. You can always go back later and add these niceities for other people when it’s actually maybe worth it, instead of probably not worth it.
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Block AI Scrapers With a Caddy Plugin
Within the same day, not having put two and two together, I messaged betamike to let him know that his Gitea instance was unreachable, and he responded that he was also experiencing the same issue as Xe. I decided to check the logs of my own cgit, and lo and behold there I see AmazonBot over and over.
Xe's solution to this problem was to introduce a new service, Anubis, which acts as a reverse-proxy serving up proof-of-work (PoW) challenges. If a client arrives to the site for the first time (be it a bot or a real web browser) it will be served a simple webpage with some javascript on it. This is the challenge. That javascript will churn through random data, doing math on it and such, until it finds some random data that meets some criteria. The client then presents this random data to the server as a solution to the challenge, and the server allows the client through to view the real website.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.