Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Grounding myself

    The powerlessness when reading the news makes me think that perhaps I need to read even less news, shut it all out.

    I also find a new appreciation for all of my ancestors who bore children and raised them even though their world seems like a hellscape compared to what I'm seeing.

    Sometimes I wish I could just go to church and sing and pray and it would all be good again. Except it don't believe in it.

  • 2025-03-19

    I just got so frustrated at a piece of code for work I took 20 minutes and rage cleaned my windows. Then I made a cup of tea, sat back down, and immediately saw the issue. So now I have working code and clean windows 😎

• Politics and World Events

  • How Evil Men Come Into Power

    As Trump once said, “We will divert all power in Washington, and give it to you; the people.” Politicans like these, who parade themselves in facades of arighteousness will often use the argument that since the Democratic Party align themselves with leftist beliefs, that they are associated with the ideals that brought forth the Communist and Socialist parties that the US itself once fought against in wars past. All this while they reinforce the idea that being the conservatives they are, that they wish to “conserve” American values and traditions that have helped them maintain power, without once embracing the changes that helped the United States survive this long in the first place.

  • 2025-03-13

    Today is a sneak off to the office day. I love my kids and homeschooling them but man... their pre-teen attitude(s) is making everything 10x harder than it needs to be.

• Science

  • 2025-03-14

    I did set the alarm for 2am, hoping to see the lunar eclipse... but clouds had other plans. The kids were disappointed.

• Technology and Free Software

  • I Want the Future Back

    The future was stolen from us, and it started during the dot-com boom back in the late 90s. What happened? There was wide-spread manic investment in computer technology and computer networks. This was low-hanging fruit for the holders of capital. What did we get? Shitty websites. A surveillance panopticon powered by the locked-down and cloud-dependent computing devices in our pockets which we still ever-so-quaintly refer to as "phones". And now, artificial "intelligence". Which, by the way, is technically just machine learning. Oh, and while I'm at it, "AI" is another bubble that is fixin' to pop, just like the dot-com bubble did.

  • 2025-03-15

    This weekend I'm thinking about building a html quine (like Tiddlywiki) for a hexcrawl inspired from the dungeons and dragons expert rulebook. I envision something to play solo and explore 🤔

  • A Society That Lost Focus

    In the early 90s, after tweaking my MS-DOS computer, I was able to play games. One of those game was called "Battle Chess". A Chess game were pieces were really fighting against each other. It was fun. I was, and still am, a mediocre chess player. I was mate in less than 10 or 15 turns at the easiest level.

    For the sake of the experiment, I turned the difficulty to an harder level and started playing. Something strange happened: I was still losing but it took a lot more turns. I was able to protect my game, even to manage a few draws.

    Was it a bug in the game?

    Even as a young teenager, I quickly understood the reason. With the setting set to "hard", the game would try harder to find a good move. On my 386 processor, without the mathematical coprocessor, this would take time. Several seconds or even one minute by turn. During that time, I was thinking, anticipating.

    With the easiest setting, computer moves would happen immediately. I knew I had all the time I wanted but I was compelled to move fast. I could not take the time while the other side was immediately reacting to my moves.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • A skyrocket on a low gear

      Since yesterday, I've been working on something bigger to deploy here in the Geminispace. I am still brewing the idea, though. Maybe I'll split it in different projects.

      The Gemini protocol is very limited, and this is great, but it doesn't have to be an isolate experience for the users. Although we seek a slow pace for the interactions established here, I am thinking of creating a place for fast and unusual interactions.

  • Programming

    • How I vibe code

      Good Lord! If you thought software today was bloated and slow, this sounds like it would produce software that is gigantically glacial in comparison (and by “embrace exponentials” I think he means “accept code with O(n^2) [3], O(2^n) or even O(n!) behavior”).

      [...]

      Now that I think about it, this is pretty much how programmers wrote code on home computers in the late 70s/early 80s. Funny that. But just blindly accepting LLM-written code? Good luck in getting anything to run correctly.

    • CHANGELOG: Expanded Chapter 2 of How to Program Good

      I had previously published the first two chapters of my ongoing series, How to Program Good [0]. The second chapter deals with defining and describing the two fundamental building blocks of Good Programs: data and interfaces [1]. Chapter 3 is intended to cover the nuts and bolts of how components are composed together, using interfaces, as well as the lifetime of a component.

      However, there was an analogy I had planned to include in a later chapter, that of the marble run, which I realized would be helpful to include in chapter 2. This analogy gives a more concrete feeling for how components interact with neighboring components, using their interfaces, which I think would be helpful to have in-mind going into chapter 3.