Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • EVERYTHING I WANT TO DO IS ILLEGAL

    Like regenerative farming pioneer Joel Salatin said, everthing I want to do is illegal. The way I want to live is illegal. The way I want to build a house is illegal. The way I want to send packets from point a to point b is illegal. The milk I want to buy is illegal. The beef I want to buy is illegal. The way Id like to responsibly recycle waste is illegal. The way id like to use the water on my land is illegal. The plants Id like to grow for fiber are illegal.

  • JESUS HAVE MERCY

    My wife had a dream last night where a person she trusted made a mistake that caused a chain reaction of destruction. She watched as peoples homes were collapsing one after the other. She cried out, "Jesus! Have Mercy!". After she did, the collapsed houses stood back up. The chain reaction, or the concequences were still happening, but the Mercy of God restored what was lost.

  • unravel

  • Canyon

  • Christina's questions

    I love when Christina writes five questions, and look forward to reading answers from across the gopher net.

    1. Has a self-help book helped you?

    Moral philosophy is my krummes Holz (Kant's crooked stick to lean on). My two favorite papers are Athens and Jerusalem, a tale of 3 cities by Gillian Rose (published in Mourning becomes the Law), and The shame of trauma, the trauma of shame by Agnes Heller.

    http://agk.sdf.org/docs/athens-jerusalem.pdf http://agk.sdf.org/docs/shame-of-trauma.pdf

    I'm a few weeks short of 18 years sober. Together with fellowship and sponsorship, the Alcoholics Anonymous basic text helped me. But it's ultimately more of a "help each other" text than self-help.

• Technology and Free Software

  • in our AI sycophancy era

    "When humanity is faced with a digital text extruder, it concludes en masse that the only option for its survival is to fellate the machine."

    I doubt anyone could sell this as a premise for fiction outside porn. Yet it's us.

    Again and again, I encounter examples of humans responding to generative AI with utter sycophancy. Article after article quotes Sam Altman saying nonsense as if that nonsense is concrete, evidence-backed fact, with nary a follow-up question asked. The other day a friend sent me a link to a Reddit thread filled with advice on how to describe how one uses generative AI to "boost productivity" for the beneft of prospective employers. Said employers increasingly describe themselves as "AI-first" companies with zero concrete guidelines to what "AI-first" means, metrics to track whether and how the AI is being put "first," or evidence that "AI-first" does anything except waste pixels in their job descriptions. The "two sides" of the "AI debate" are one side, and that side is breathless bootlicking: will the AI usher in a human golden age if we suck its metaphorical dick just right, or will it kill us all if we don't suck its metaphorical dick satisfactorily?

    What is this shit? Why have we collectively agreed that the only right, natural, and sane response to a probabilitistic plagiarism machine is to brown our noses all the way up its metaphorical ass?

    I don't think sycophancy is the actual human consensus on generative AI, though. Lots of people have uninstalled or deactivated the generative AI that large tech companies are now shoving into everything. Or we're trying, at least.

  • xpolitical

    Back when I was studying visual arts at University - more than 30 years ago, it was - the phrase "everything in political" was much in vogue. Generally followed by the caveat "but not everything is critical", one came to anticipate its utterance at least once in every seminar and crit one had the privilege to attend. I will confess that in time I grew a little wearied by it, even once going so far as to ask my peers how the politics of my painting would have been different had I chosen a lighter shade of cerulean blue for the sky.

    I was reminded of that phrase, and the concept it embodies, by recent news of a titanic struggle between two divergent visions for the future of old-school window management in Linux. Truly one of the most important battles of our times, I hear tell the forces of light and darkness are lined up in opposing camps: one aligned with a fork of Xorg called "XLibre", and the other with an enhancement to Wayland called "Wayback". [1]

  • OCC25 Start of the OCC 2025

    The 2025 edition of the Old Computer Challenge started today.

    The theme for this year is "There Is No Challenge".

    In order to give as much people as possibe a chance to participate, the rules quite relaxed. The OCC website mentions for example "using an alien operating system".

    My system of choice for this year is an Apple Power Mac G4 (AGP graphics), a machine with a 400 MHz PowerPC G4 and 704 MB RAM memory, from around 1999. It is running Mac OS X 10.3.9. The is a system that is tuned towards control by the mouse.

    Normally I run systems with the Ratpoison window manager, the Emacs EXWM window manager, or no X at all.

  • ytubing

    Recently, I've discovered just how to use MPV in conjunction with yt-dlp in order to watch Utube. It actually started on my Android device because I was looking for an MPlayer app on F-Droid but found an MPV port instead.

    As a minimalist, I like MPV: it plays media and doesn't have a ton of bells and whistles, but just enough so you're not going totally keyboard on a touchscreen. I've had issues with unexpected pauses/backgrounding of MPV with hardware acceleration on freezing it, but all in all, it's solid. I especially like the ability to edit the .conf files for it on Android. I'll also mention that it has made my Pinephone much more usable (though the battery life is still terrible).

  • 4K@60

    The middle of last month, I got a Switch 2. And a Pro Controller 2, and a microSD Express card.

    I don’t have an external monitor that does 120Hz, but my primary gaming monitor does 4K and some kind of HDR, so I set the thing up to prefer 4K@60Hz.

    I play Splatoon 3, so that’s one of the first games I started up on the new machine after migrating almost all of my games and saves to the new machine. Splatoon 3 got an update for Switch 2, so it’s not only enjoying faster load times but also graphical upgrades as well.

    After starting the game by pressing ZL + ZR, the animation sequence for Deep Cut starts. It feels like the first half second of the thing happens at 30 fps, but most of it happens at 60 fps. The smoothness is jarring — I’m used to 30 fps, and the change partway through kind of keeps the jarring happening.

  • Re: Help Me Find These Apps For Android?

    I was a long time user of gPodder. Had a bunch of MP3 players and even once I had a smart phone I stayed off of getting podcasts over mobile data. Sadly as the devices died on me and replacements got difficult I took the plunge. I now use Antennapod.

    Its a very high quality app. Looks as good as any commercial app out there. Subscriptions, queues, restrictions on when and how and how many espisodes you can get at one time. And there is even a nice graph that shows you just how much you listen broken down by subscription, year and downloads.

  • Fairphone

    I broke the display of my Android phone some time ago (I have to use the Andorid - or an iOS - due to some apps). I firs searched for the same phone as it was a Sony Xperia and it was a rather good device. Surprisingly - prices are on the same level as they were when I got my Sony some years ago. The battery is not user-replaceable so I was a bit unsure about that. Also the OS is old.

  • Leaving Github

    After having an account for nearly a decade and a half, I've finally decided to leave Github. With their move into the AI realm I prefer that my personal work not be included in their learning model by way of their service license.

    For the majority of my non pecuniary projects I have typically picked the BSD-3 license. The whole copyleft movement felt weird to me as it seemed like those licenses gave developers all rights except one. I want those using my code to do whatever they want with it, even find a way to make a business around it. The only caveat is you give credit to those whose code you are using.

  • f3s: Kubernetes with FreeBSD - Part 6: Storage

    This is the sixth blog post about the f3s series for self-hosting demands in a home lab. f3s? The "f" stands for FreeBSD, and the "3s" stands for k3s, the Kubernetes distribution used on FreeBSD-based physical machines.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Small Web July & The Old Computer Challenge

      I talked about installing Debian Lenny on a period-appropriate 2009 PC in 2023 [0], I still have that PC but have not used it much lately. It seemed like now was a good time to start using it again, given "Small Web July" [1] and the OCC challenge for 2025 [2], which starts today. I'm writing this post on that PC in GNU Emacs v23.

      The default gnome2 desktop on Debian Lenny is very stable, so I'm going to keep this as I actually used it years ago and am familiar with it. In that post I also mentioned upgrading OpenSSH to v7 (v7.0p1 specifically) from 2014, just new enough to compile cleanly and to allow connecting to newer hosts with ed25519 keys.

  • Programming

    • Elisping like it's 1998

      GNU Emacs has been around for over forty years, and it has evolved tremendously during that period. Additional functionality was added, and new packages were created. Elisp also expanded with additional features.

      I write my phlog posts as Denote org files, and use a home-made Elisp script to convert the org-file to my phlog format, add the post to the gophermap, and build the RSS-file.

      OS X 10.3.9, the system I use for the 2025 edition of the Old Computer Challenge, runs GNU Emacs 22.2, and is too old for this workflow. In the final preparation for the Challenge, I started working on a solution.

    • Why I Don't Like Go Channels

      I'm a big fan of the go programming langauge, this is well known. But when asked what about the language I don't like, my answer surprises people: channels.