Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • changing story/Re-writing my story

    Memories are re-created each time you remember something. They are not hard-coded into your brain like a hard drive.

    Each time you remember, there is more connections being made in this neural pathway. This is due to neuroplasticity, the brain form itself around what you do most. These memories become easier to remember the more you remember them.

    If/when I remember a story, each time I tell myself that story, it re-enforce that pathway. I can decide if I want to re-enforce it or if I want to change it.

  • Wish I had a hotel breakfast

    Things are well. I caught myself wishing I had a hotel breakfast, which is something I've never wanted before. The last time I had one was on Pascha this year, I sang the liturgy, slept a few hours, ate a hotel breakfast of biscuits and gravy, coffee, and a cinnamon roll, and drove 5hrs home. I think I had hash browns too.

    I'm moving soon, and I'm looking forward to it, albeit with a little melancholy.

    I've been trying to do more things by hand than by machine. Lots of handwritten notes at work, trying to pipe text streams rather than use binary files, using tools for what they're made for rather than contorting myself to fit a machine. It's sometimes more trouble than it's worth, but ultimately it's satisfying.

  • The wonderful adventures of Bitchy and Scratchy

    I’m going to tell you about Bitchy and Scratchy. But mostly about Scratchy. Scratchy is a hen. A chicken. “She’s made of chicken”. She lays eggs, eats scraps, and doesn’t do much more.

    In the last iteration of “having chickens at home”, my mom went and bought several chicks. Some of them turned out to be male, others female. Under different circumstances, and for different reasons, most of them have passed to a better, perhaps, life. Right now, there are two hens: Bitchy and Scratchy. they live in a pen with Pavo. (Pavo is a turkey. Someone gifted him to my mom, because somehow she had ended with a female turkey, and… well, we have a turkey now too)

    Scratchy got her name because she appeared with her back de-feathered and scratched skin. And Bitchy got her name because she would be a bitch and peck at Scratchy’s wounds. Not cool, Bitchy!

    When we saw Scratchy’s back, and Bitchy pecking at her when she walked by, we thought “well, that bitch is bullying Scratchy”, and decided we had to do something. At first we thought Scratchy got scratched by walking under a metallic part of their pen, possibly escaping Bitchy’s bullying attempts, so we moved it. For a while, Scratchy’s back got better. Scabs fell, no more redness/blood. We thought that was it.

• Politics and World Events

  • Fighting against the news

    The world is so terrible that I'm lacking words now that I'm back from the holidays and have more time to read it. Somehow I also feel that it's not OK to just post about random stuff at a place where I see too much stuff that's upsetting me. I can't counteract the terror of reading about the state of the world by posting about the flowers I see when I go for a walk. Instead, I'd better go for another walk, I think.

  • unjustly justifying the lack of justice in a supposed "justice" system

    been awhile 
    since I've pulled up
    a stool
    here
    mental exhaustion 
    has been plaguing
    this wolf
    got caught up
    in the 
    "justice" system
    for the last
    nine months
    dui
    yeah
    shouldn't 
    have been driving
    but
    nine months
    of doing everything 
    they want
    and they're 
    still dragging
    their feet
    on releasing
    me from
    supervision
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • AI is Dehumanization Technology

    AI systems are an attack on workers, climate goals, our information environment, and civil liberties. Rather than enhancing our human qualities, these systems degrade our social relations, and undermine our capacity for empathy and care. The push to adopt AI is, at its core, a political project of dehumanization, and serious consideration should be given to the idea of rejecting the deployment of these systems entirely, especially within Canada's public sector.

    At the end of February, Elon Musk - whose xAI data centre is being powered by nearly three dozen on-site gas turbines that are poisoning the air of nearby majority-Black neighborhoods in Memphis - went on the Joe Rogan podcast and declared that "the fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy", describing "the empathy response" as a "bug" or "exploit" in our collective programming.[1][2]

    This is part of a broader movement among Silicon Valley tech oligarchs and a billionaire-aligned political elite to advance a disturbing notion: that by abandoning our deeply-held values of justice, fairness, and duty toward one another - in short, by abandoning our humanity - we are in fact promoting humanity's advancement. It's clearly absurd, but if you're someone whose wealth and power are predicated on causing widespread harm, it's probably easier to sleep at night if you can tell yourself that you're serving a higher purpose.

  • Shell Pipes

    Complications arise in that < or > file redirections can be moved around within the command, to some degree; the following are all equivalent, to put "foo" into the file "bar", though the last is the typical form seen, and the others might get you frowny faces on a code review.

    [...]

    . Various programs on unix do treat no arguments as an excuse to read from standard input, though other programs do not. Some will require an explicit "-" argument to indicate that stdin should be read from, while others will not read from stdin, or do not take filenames as arguments. Check the fine manual for details.

  • Lisp Indentation

    I've had the code snippets and links of this post in my drafts a year with no accompanying writing, because I don't really have an actual point I'm making. It's just a mildly annoying obversation I've made and then wrote a macro to mostly resolve it, and I explicitly am not asking some “official solution” (something new Lispers are prone to do). But I guess I'll post it anyways.

    [...]

    Semi-related: it's probably brainworms from writing Lisp, but in C-like languages I have picked up the habit of (in my own projects) introducting blocks to scope variables instead of letting unused variables hang around until the end of the function. I guess it could be argued that if a function is long enough to need that then you should split it up into multiple functions, but also sometimes things in the real world just gotta be long and it doesn't make much sense to split it up.

  • No One Can Stop You From Making a Toy VM

    There was no real goal here, except to practice a bit for an upcoming technical interview. I remembered vaguely how to do this sort of thing from college, but it wasn't until I sat down to try it again that I realized something:

    Making a toy VM is really fucking easy, and you can do it too. I'll walk you through all the required pieces here, and link you to my implementation so you can see how it looks in practice. Mine is in rust, but you could use any language really. Let's do it!