Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Presumptuous Neurotypicals

    When I was younger, people scolded me probably hundreds of times for "not paying enough attention". No matter how hard I tried to pay attention though, it didn't help. When I told them it wasn't helping, they still kept insisting that I wasn't paying enough attention anyways.

    Eventually, I got to the bottom of my "attention" problem. Surprise surprise, it had nothing to do with a lack of attention. I found out that I'm autistic, and other factors were at play.

    One of which was an overwhelming environment. I was unable to keep my attention narrowly focused on what I needed to focus on because my brain can't filter out distractions as easily as neurotypical brains can. What I needed was a calmer, quieter environment with fewer people. No one ever suggested that a change in environment was part of the solution though.

  • Opatija, Crikvenica

    We stopped in Opatija. The settlement along a lake along a steep hill reminded me of Lausanne or Neufchâtel in Switzerland. There were hollow ruins as well as fancy new Grand Hotels, some with an ancient Viennese flair. To me, that’s weird. To chase the colonised past for tourism cash? 🫤 Didn’t the Austrians use Croatian troops to out down Italian revolts and the like? Well, after the Austro-Hungarian empire fell apart, the Italians took over Opatija but then the communists pushed them ought.

  • Tumbling and Whorling in the Tomb

    As the brussels' sprouts bake, I play with the "cat". Though before I went to the lengths it takes to actually play with the "cat", the "cat" joined me in the so-called office. Why is it called the *office* and why was I in there? The room is dubbed the *office* because that is where my grandmother, hereafter known as *Katie*, did all the paperwork pertaining to the so-called *farm* and other parcels of land that were in her "care". To this day, in the *office*, there are reams of paperwork stashed in grey, towering filing cabinets - the same type that I locked myself and my brother in when we were children.

    These days, my mother is (mostly) in charge of examining and shuffling the paperwork pertaining to said parcels of land. One day, portions of those parcels of land - well, let me clarify here: they are not actually parcels of "land" as most would imagine, but in reality, they are the "minerals" that lie below the surface of what most humans would imagine when the phrase *parcel of land* is voiced or scribed - yes, as I was saying, or scribing, portions of those parcels of land, or, rather, the minerals beneath, will be mine. Though my ancestry will tumble and whorl in their tombs, I shall immediately sell every one of them. Fuck um.

  • Re: Writing My Story with Inspiration from Notable Lives

    This got me thinking about my own relationship to family history.

    For starters, I used to *work* for the family history industry, around the time of the release of the UK's 1911 census under the hundred-year rule. But I'm not particularly interested in my own. Quite a few of my relatives are/were, and my father would send me copies of his research in the post.

    One of his quests was to find where the family (and its name) had come from two centuries ago. It was known that the male line is from County Armagh, and he and some cousins had narrowed it down to two or three localities. But the supposed placename that bore our surname sounded somewhat incongruous and fanciful.

  • Stream of consciousness

    I'm thinking that I need to use my tools more. I've made some recent steps to take back control of my digital presence. I've gotten off of Windows and onto Linux, I've deleted all of my social media, I'm taking steps to reduce my reliance on Reddit, I've installed add-ons that outright block the existence of youtube shorts, and I've been learning more. All of this is to say that I believe technology, in the mainstream sense, was hindering me before. The constant bombardment of advertising, tracking, generative AI, dopamine hooks, and general time wasters was overwhelming. I'd sometimes find myself after work doing nothing but watching shorts, too tired to even play games that I previously loved. I felt it, for lack of a better term, slowly suck the life and personality out of me. I yearned to be more mindful about myself, my digital presence, and by extension my future. I put something down originally into midnight pub about this, but I do look at the current iteration of technology not as a black box of learning and adventure, but as a corporate mechanism of self sabotage. It used to be that technology was an avenue of identity, like as a kid it was a hobby for learning, a social marker that you were a tinkerer, and a means of meeting new people and learning new things. Now though, it just feels different, it feels insidious - I don't like it. That might be one of the reasons I'm trying to journal more, or utilizing the smolweb more - or do any of the other things I'm trying to do. I found that if I don't act deliberately towards my tech that it will happily take advantage of my passivity and allow corporations to act deliberately towards me. I fear that the cyberpunk dystopia is upon us and it's nowhere near as interesting as we thought.

• Slop

  • New Antenna submission - Participatory Interface Theory [Ed: LLM slop now makes its way into Gemini]

    Just added a new antenna post for gemini://gem.refahs.com/pit.gmi. It is a transcript of a chat I did this evening with Claude Sonnet 3.7, about a new interpretation for Quantum Mechanics I've been instigating with the LLMs. The process itself has been fascinating. This doesn't show it all, but it shows some of it - I have been having the AI threads talking amongst themselves quite a bit, these last weeks, and that's not shown hardly at all here. This was just a demo thread, really.

  • Quantum Indeterminacy and Emergent Futures

    This is a copy of a chat between Claude and Bob. Content may include unverified or unsafe content that do not represent the views of Anthropic. Shared snapshot may contain attachments and data not displayed here.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Status update May 2025

    Hello there, how are you? It's been a while right? Let's write a lot of "I" sentences \o/

    If you've been reading my previous post, knows that I haven't beat my PB, but that I recovered just fine, without too much of too bad moments. I feel fine, and wanna beat the world down! Am frustrated at my current professional situation. Still wants to do more open-source, rather that working for capitalists…

    Even if I used this time to recover, I still did things for the LOSS ecosystem, as usual. Let's try to remember major milestones.

    The most signifiant step probably is my work on the wlvncc project. This is a Wayland VNC client, that has been developed firstly to test wayvnc, its server counterpart. I've been using it for sometime to take control to my tablet/laptop, from my main workstation. But had multiple issues with it… Let's write code!

  • mind traps

    My time as an IT teacher has given me a sobering look into the role current technology is having in the development of today's youth. As a kid I remember technology being a black box, always offering a new opportunity to learn something new. It was an open challenge, waiting to be unlocked. It simply doesn't feel that way anymore, at least in the broad sense. It just seems like a window to advertising, dopamine, and skewed standards of self and others. I just worry what a world looks like to a person after a mind has grown up surrounded on all sides by these predatory technologies designed not to inspire but to instill dependency. I wish there was a way to reset things a bit, but I'm not sure we aren't past the point of no return.