Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • permafrost thawing

    the permafrost is thawing
    thick ice turning into splinters
    that cannot carry any weight
    but shatter under pressure 
    the numbing safety of the cold
    subsiding 
    bruises, wounds
    old and new
    throbbing
    limb by limb
    sensation returning 
    circulation renewing 
    is this where I bleed out
    or am I strong enough to scab
    

  • chicken blog: baby book

    I have really no other news. The chicks have taken over my entire life. I for one welcome our galliform overlords.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Dragonfly

    With my masters almost coming to a close (at least from the perspective of the courses), I am left thinking what should I do as a personal project. And I have to say that the Parallel Systems course that I did this semester inspired me; I want to do something with graphics again!

    For this reason, I am seriously thinking of restarting my Dragonfly project [1]. This time I will keep it "under covers" until I have reached an actually satisfactory state; that way, I won't make any actual "promises" or "guarantees" (not that anyone cares, to be honest). It's also going to be in Zig, instead of C++ (I have to fuel my Zig addiction somehow).

  • The missing bit - specifically from AI

    There's longer thoughts to be written on conversations and texts that miss important points and carry on blathering. Or rather, ones that sound like that to me.

    The one that's sticking with me of late is one of the conversations that keeps happening around AI taking over the world. You get commentary on the gushing uncritical reporting that the big AI companies get - criticism of this trend feels perfectly justified - more and more it feels like those who have drunk the cool aid have lost all ability to critically think when confronted with AI.

    That said, I feel like the that doesn't appear in almost any discussion (or maybe it does and I just haven't seen those conversations) is about agency. Though I feel like amybe agency isn't quite the right word here.

  • Getting More Out of my Analog Computer

    I've been busy during most of my lunch breaks, enjoying the beautiful weather and taking walks up by the Tanana, so I haven't had much time for writing gemlog posts.

    I figured out a way to get a lot more out of my analog computer. I switched the integrator "1x" ports to become a direct connection to the summing junction (SJ). Then, I use banana cables that have resistors soldered inline. This way I can have as many inputs as I want on the integrators, without having to build a bigger patch panel. Fortunately, I have a friend who has many spare banana cables, so this is an affordable approach for me.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Blogging platform agnostic

      I've found lately that I'm not a very loyal user of any one tool or service for writing. I used to be pretty hung up on keeping all my blogs and notes (short and long-form, private and public) in a structured single website, or digital notebook. Lately however, I feel like I am drifting away from that structure, and rather falling to whatever is under my nose at the time. I'm also quite enjoying this change.

      I think what has happened is I have just found some platforms that I really enjoy writing on, along with the communities with them, and I don't particularly want to part with them just to be in the one place.

      I hear the term Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE) thrown around a bit. I get that maybe that helps a bit with keeping ALL your stuff on your main site, while you spit it out to various other places. However I feel like a lot is lost in that syndication. I feel like the writing is separated from the publishing. Author separated from reader.

    • rust-gopher-server-rophy

      This Gopher hole ran on sgopherd for well over a decade:

      https://uninformativ.de/git/sgopherd

      I'm not happy with this approach anymore. The script itself might be acceptable, but especially Bash could have lots of security issues. I want to reduce the attack surface.

      I'm currently experimenting with a Gopher server I wrote in Rust, called "rophy". It uses OpenBSD's pledge() and unveil() before it reads a single byte from the client. Similar to sgopherd, it is run through inetd: My code never runs as root and never does any socket stuff, it just reads from the file system and communicates with stdin/stdout.

      This is highly experimental and I'm not good at Rust yet, because this language is super hard to learn. Time will tell if I'm going to keep it or not.