Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Rewatching The X-Files now that the series and I are both middle-aged

    So I decided to re-watch the series, but in this list's order, starting with the top-ranked one ("Jose Chung's From Outer Space"). I watched "Beyond the Sea" last night; "Paper Hearts" is next.

    (The list puts "Fight Club," "Teso dos Bichos," and "Schizogeny" at the bottom. This is fine. I won't cry about not watching those if I decide not to finish the list.)

    Some wee reviews:

    Jose Chung's From Outer Space: I did not like this episode when it first aired. I'm pretty sure I was too young and impatient to understand it. I disagree that it outranks "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose," but I do agree that's a close matchup. Despite my not liking it when it aired, Darin Morgan remains a bloody genius.

  • What else but mom

    Evy wanted someone who could take care of her. I'm not good at it. The house is cluttered with toys, projects, dishes, laundry waiting to be washed or folded or put away most of the time. Evy mostly prepares her own food, I don't think enough about what she likes when I cook for daughter and I. She pays the rent and credit card bill almost every month, all while rising to the challenge of a grueling accelerated nursing school program.

    I give my daughter a structured life, full of friends, variety, care and discipline, math and stories, music and wilderness, good food and good memories. Almost all my thoughts are about us. I only have brief flashes of me as a singular creature, or us as me and Evy, a marriage.

  • Close Enough

    We do trivia once a month at a little microbrewery tucked away in the city's French Quarter. It actually runs every other week, but half our team is in a curling league. But we try to go whenever schedules allow, and curling was cancelled yesterday, so we went.

    The trivia's not usually very hard, and we usually finish in the top handful of teams. We've never won, though. We didn't win last night, either, but we did place second (the last category was "musical instruments, so between my partner and myself, we got 10/10, and our team had the highest score in the third round).

• Science

  • Analog: Integrator, Capacitor Tolerance (publ. 2025-03-27)

    I added another integrator today, bringing me up to three integrators. I need four integrators for a particular simulation I am looking at.

    I noticed today that the 500 nF capacitors I am using — I put two of them together to get 1 uF — have a 10% tolerance. This seems quite significant as that affects the charging time of the capacitor, and therefore the speed of summing on the integrator, for a given input signal. As far as tolerance, I had been focused on the resistors, using resistors that were 1% or better for input and feedback. But it bothers me that the capacitors could potentially have a difference of 200 nF.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The ultimate twilight of creativity [Ed: The need to vet sources is hardly new; anyone can spew out anything, anywhere]

    A quite absurd thought has been on my mind for quite some time. It’s a fact that since the dawn of Anthropocene, humanity has accumulated so many stories, books, music and later films, games, animations, videos, that a single person couldn’t possibly consume all that media over their lifetime even if they wanted, much less remember all of it.

    To put this into numbers - you’d need to read about 4700 books each day, starting at birth, in order to read all the books published so far [1] or watch about 52 movies/TV series every day to catch up with all the productions [2]. This is absolutely staggering, even without mentioning all the other forms of media. Granted, not everything produced is of high quality, but my point is that if you can think of a story, there is a big chance that it, or something similar at least, has already been told.

    What’s more, this process of constant publishing is not stopping and with the rise of AI it’s actually accelerating rapidly. Nowadays everyone can generate texts, images, videos using AI, with barely any effort, skills or knowledge. Fortunately, the AI is not there yet to completely take over, but I keep imagining this distant sci-fi world where *everything has already been made*. There are no more interesting stories to be told, people drown in the ocean of entertainment (would be cool to see a sci-fi story set in such a world one day).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • NOSTR moderation?

      Good review. My first introduction to NOSTR gave it a little bit of an unfair impression. One of the worst harassers on the internet was pushing NOSTR as “so censorship proof and so awesome” so I was like “uh nope, the fact that on ActivityPub, there is instance level moderation is actually awesome”. And it is. Being on a mid-size ActivityPub instance where there are caring and good moderators seems great. All the users can benefit of those moderators’ hard work. (Overly big ones are often undermoderated so they're no good. On small ones, like mine, you need to do everything yourself which is bad but the upside is you're responsible for the welfare of fewer people so that lessens the burden.)

      Anyway, what I got wrong, or so I hope because I haven’t triple checked, is that there still are relays and the relays can still censor. But you get the union of posts from the relays you’re on. Whereas on ActivityPub you get the union-of-intersections. On ActivityPub, posts that are legal on your federated instances and your local instance, those are the ones you see.