Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • On things this week

    It was mainly productive at work. As with all corpos now we're being targeted on how we can get our teams to use AI more, so as a senior manager I'm stuck between really disliking generative AI and having to set an approach for using it. Anyway, I'm a "the enemy you know" kind of guy so I've been making modules that should save a tonne of time on menial garbage.

    We're probably all getting made redundant when this big buyout goes through anyway. Fuck corpos.

  • Travelling again

    It have became a norm that I have to travel by train. Usually 3-4 hour rides, often with working WiFi. This in good as I usually can do some work done.

    I have been using the MNT Pocket Reform there. I'm used to its orthogonal keyboard and like its trackball. It's almost normal Linux computer, just an ARM one (and a bit smaller than others). So things work as expected here.

    The Reform have had some issues, of course. The non-working suspend is still the one (moreover, it is not going to be fixed for my CPU model) but the WiFi one has been solved by a new WiFi card (the build-in one is ignored now). Surprisingly, I have no noticeable speed nor RAM size issues (8GB with no swap).

  • 🔤SpellBinding — GIWLNRK Wordo: MYOPE

• Technology and Free Software

  • Life, Death, and BS

    I never liked Steve Jobs as a person. I liked Woz. As a geek, I could relate to Woz. But Jobs, he just seemed like a power-hungry business asshole.

    Don't get me wrong, the world needs people like that (I think) to do the jobs that people like Jobs do. Say what you will, the man was driven. And he drove people to build amazing things. I just don't personally care to hang out in that crowd. And people like me wouldn't be invited to those sorts of parties, anyway. I can't talk that talk.

  • "Thought Leader"

    I tend to get annoyed when I see the term "think tank" or "content creator", as it's difficult for my feeble mind to see how things can happen without at least some level of thinking or things being created that aren't to some degree content, but there is a term that REALLY bugs me whenever I see it written out unironically, and that term is "thought leader". Heck, I hate that term somehow more than "Influencer", which is by far one of my least favorite "job titles", and that's after realizing "sandwich artist" is something Subway assigns their employees. Heck, there are also "programming ninja" and "full tech guru" positions, and somehow "thought leader" takes the cake for what I hate enough to write a post about.

    Did that "thought leader" lead me to think a particular way? Probably not. They tend to just be a multi-millionaire who wants to feel like they have more ACTUAL impact on society than they actually have because they can throw enough money into social media to trend a bunch...

  • Internet/Gemini

    • gopher is better than gemini

      A bit of a controversial post here. I believe 99% of Gemini users use Gopher as well. I've critiqued Gemini before: it's more complex than necessary. I recently looked back into it, looking at a tutorial to start a Gemini site... It's more complicated than just publishing files. They have to have the correct format to display things. You can argue that gophermaps have the same limitation, but I'd rebut that gophermaps are entirely optional in Gopher.

      Gemini uses a Markdown-like formatting language. That's fine, but constricting. Why can't I just format using regular text? In my brief experience, a .gmi file is basically a gophermap with Markdown instead of the goofy gopher syntax. I have a bit of a different idea of what Gopher should be: navigation separate from content. While some do glog with gophermaps instead of regular text files, I find it easier to just keep things separate. If I need to post a "link", I can just paste the text at the end as a citation. While it's nice to have a "clickable" link, it's also nice to have tables and videos and all other sorts of Web 2.0 junk, too.

    • Long time, no posting

      I got fired in January 2024 and hired only 8 months later but just able to start working on November. Moved from Brazil to Thailand so you can imagine that my life and my head was kinda in a crazy state. Now it's almost all settled in and I can get back to my personal projects and rants.

      I will start by saying that I'm glad that Gemini (the protocol, not the shitty AI) still relevant to me, it is always a breath of fresh air among those all other batshit crazy stuff going on in Meta/X/Google.

    • Random Weird Things - Part Ⅱ

      Every so often, I come across random, weird, and unexpected things on the internet. I thought it would be neat to share them here from time to time. This is the second run.

    • That Constant Wish to Make a Fanzine

      I've made fanzines before. Been part of a couple of really seriously fancy fanzine projects even. Made several submissions to a really fun print-on-demand RPG fanzine, and edited another that was printed and stapled on an office printer. It's been awesome.

    • Have AuraGem Crawl Capsule On-Demand

      You can now have your capsule crawled on-demand by submitting the URL to your capsule to the below link: [...]

  • Programming

    • Different ways to represent ADT in json

      Until recently, I considered these two representations equally viable, but after having to write validation code both in Go and Python, I claim that representation with optional objects is better, since validation only needs to check for value types and presence/absence of keys.

      For representation with constructor tag validation code must consider the value of "tag" key to be able to validate whatever is associated with "value" key, which is usually less convenient (or just impossible) with declarative validation libraries, like Aeson or Pydantic.