Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • A burnt candle

    Everyone knows what happens to a candle. It burns out. How quickly, could one ask? It depends on several factors: the size of the candle, the thickness of the wick, how many oxygen versus how many carbon dioxide, among other factors.

    You can try to make it last longer by cutting the tip of the wick, making it shorter. But there is a catch: cut it too much, and the flame goes off early. Similarly, you can try to limit the oxygen from the surrounding air, perhaps placing the candle inside a cup, but the flame still goes off.

    It's been a while I don't lit any candles. I felt like I have no proper place to do any rituals... But it seems like I've been feeling nothing at all. It all went off, just like the many candles I ever lit. It's not like I stop believing in anything at all, yet it feels like that: nothing is all I've been believing, and even my belief in nothing has been... _off_.

  • Rabbit

    Why didn’t I check?

    A rabbit must have snuck into the shed when the door was open, and I did not notice. Trapped and starving, she ate everything that was even slightly soft. Plastic bottles, patio furniture, the straps on my backpack leaf blower.

    I laid her body down in the greenbelt, where the scavengers can better do their work.

  • Strawberry Lemonade

    There's this girl who's apartment is neighboring mine, whom I'm forever grateful to the mysterious machinations of the Wheel of Fortune for crossing our life paths, though it is unknown to me whether if we were meant to be in a way that makes us more than merely friends, "sisters" if you will, as that's how she sees me (and my siblings) as. Still, I often times find myself yearning for a closeness much different, intimate than that.

    But at the same time, this admiration of mine is also plagued by some sort of melancholia quite bitter at the fact that I came to acquire such a lovely treasure that is my friend. It convinced me that I didn't deserved her love and companionship in the first place, and that I was just inconveniencing and burdening her. I know how much she has been wronged by others in the past, a fact that pains me still, and for that it pains me twice as much whenever she worries about my mental wellbeing, despite her own sufferings...

• Politics and World Events

  • Hope, a Gemini mission.

    The article chief point, if I'm not mistaken, is that Cynicism robs our will from us. In some sense, it enslaves us. Now, I'm not going to deal with anything else, how I agree or disagree with some bit of the article, because that's beyond the point.

    The point is to get up.

    And then it moved me to reflection and some action; beginning with this response.

    My reflection was about: what's the antidote for evil Lord Cynicism? Well, good old granny Hope. Hope might seem like a softie, but that's only when you don't see her at work. Hope is the spark for change. No work can ever be done without either hope or whip; and guess what sentiment provides a better "product", shall we say, from your hard work.

    The world has turned crazy. I believe you agree. It's February 2025, Trump is back in power he's running amok. Etcetera, etcetera.

• Technology and Free Software

  • notes: 2025-02-21

    gemstones is a comprehensive open-source dataset designed to study scaling laws in transformer models, focusing on diverse architectural and hyperparameter choices.

  • Introducing Fiss (Fiss)

    In a world where there are a lot of tools to manage tasks, this is one more. Fiss is a CLI-based tool that exposes issues from forges (such as Foregejo[1]) in a task-centric interface. This tool is inspired by Taskwarrior[2] and is designed from the ground up with the intent of using multiple forges, groups/organizations, and projects as the high-level organization.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Shorter lines in gophermap

      IanJ liked my formatting of the phlog titles in the gophermap and copied it [1].

      After that, he discovered that the length of the lines in it doen't play nice with the old UMN gopher client.

    • When FreeTube is blocked use ytfzf

      ytfzf seems to work even when my IP is blocked for use with FreeTube. So I completely switched to it and have no problems anymore. But be aware that ytfzf is not under active development anymore. The FINAL release of it was made in January of 2024. But it should still work in the foreseeable future.