Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • My Digital Legacy

    Morning spent outputting my 15+ year old blog to one large PDF file. Why?

    What sort of digital legacy do I want to leave behind when I'm gone? These thoughts have been inspired by my own father and grandfather's written notes that they left behind.

  • fainter than a whisper

  • mothers and sons

    i'll admit that i've never read more of "the bell jar" than this excerpt. it may be time to change that, because even this short segment is moving and beautiful, and i find that so much of the literature that i give my time over to has little ability to be awe-inspiring, provoke self-interrogation, or confront the sublime. yet this little snatch of text does just that.

    over the weekend, i went with my sister to housesit for my parents so they could go to their employee's surprise birthday party a couple states over. on the way we got to talking about our mom, as we often do, and complaining about her. if you could know her, you would know that she is a person that is strongly-opinionated and unafraid to voice those opinions. over the course of my life she has seemed like an unassailable force, impossible to wear down. one thing that she passed down to me was a love of argument, something that we often do about most anything, just as a way to pass the time. one thing about loving to argue is that you need to be able to remove yourself from the thing you're arguing about, else you risk leaving feeling worn down and upset. it's something my mom and i have mastered, so we are able to spar, but that my dad and sister never have over the last 30 years, so they wade into one of our sparring sessions and get left feeling depleted after because something deep, and core, and personal to them has been assaulted while for me and mom it's never that personal. our opinions are, of course, truly held for the most part, though occassionally we might take a devil's advocate position for a bit of fun, but there is a difference to us between holding an opinion and having it be a deep truth of our selves. my mom was studying to be a lawyer before she married my dad and left that behind to move here, meanwhile my dad has degrees in electrical engineering. he's a bit more prosaic and straightforward than my mom and i, who hold multiple, sometimes competing truths with equanimity. we like to toy with and tease out our ideas and see which ones win, whereas he and my sister adopt a method that works and never deviate.

  • The Occupation - Day 41of60(?)

    Day 41of60(?) of The Occupation.[1] The first wave left the other day and the second wave is here until the end. Unsure when that will be since my father-in-law ended up in the hospital and might have to go for extended play.

    I'm pretty worn out and have been in NPC (Non-Player Character) mode. It can be exhausting being an automaton, but is the path of least resistance for the time being. I just need to break character at regular intervals so I do not get stuck there, like before.

• Politics and World Events

  • Chat Control, here we go again

    It makes it explicitly legal to break individual privacy on a massive scale (by the EU governments, law enforcement, military personnel, etc)
    * It decreases individual security on a massive scale (by everyone, not only the EU governments, law enforcement, military personnel, etc)
    * It exempts politicians, law enforcement, military personnel, etc
    * It WILL cause innocent individuals to be incriminated and criminalized
    * Its enforcement entails a human review layer of flagged content
    * It does not guarantee ethical handling of flagged content by this human review layer
    * It does not technically prevent authorities from indefinitely storing and maintaining access to already reviewed content (whether legal or illegal)
    * It will negatively affect all citizens, the vast majority of which are law-abiding -- EVEN IF criminals DO NOT switch to secure means of communication
    * Once criminals switch to secure means of communication, it will only affect law-abiding citizens (negatively), and will not positively affect anyone
    * It does not technically prevent human reviewers from leaking review content (whether legal or illegal)
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • need for password

      AFAIU, this functionality in Bubble is to add additional cert while signing off with current user cert.

      So my question, likely to @skyjake is: is there any reason _NOT_ to allow user to manually add cert via fingerprint?

      I'm asking as I'm planning something along the lines and am curious if there's something I might be missing.

    • Everything's simple until it aren't

      I had a few free moments to revisit Bubble, thinking I wanted to comment in a specific thread, but soon noticed my Bubble id no longer seemed to be able to do much in Bubble, then noticed the domain seemed to have changed (prepending "bbs." to what it was before). So I created a new certificate for that, updated config.toml to point to it, navigated to bbs.geminispace.org in amfora, went the "Add alternative certificate" path, specified 'textmonger', followed this redirect:

  • Programming

    • A week with Elixir: what I understand now and what still don't

      Most of the time, the terms "industry-grade" and "pleasant to work with" don't combine in a single programming language. There are several pretty valid reasons for that, but there also are several notable exceptions to this unwritten rule. These two qualities can be combined in one of the three ways. The first and most common one is, a language that's inherently pleasant to work with becomes widely used in the industry AND (that's an important part) its quality increases to the level that can be trusted by the industry. An example of this is Python, which already is reliable enough and just works for most engineering domains. The second and a rarer way is when a language already used by the industry for a long time becomes more pleasant to work with over time. This situation is quite rare because the industry loves backwards compatibility and whatnot, but I could think of something like Tcl or Lua that are getting more and more useful features in the core with every major version. The third, final and rarest way of this convergence is when the language designers make things right from the first stable version available. Of course, to do so, someone already had to do all the legwork for them, so such languages usually piggyback on some existing, well-established runtimes whose only problem is the lack of a human-friendly language to make use of them. And, without a doubt, the first thing I understood throughout this week is that Elixir definitely belongs to this third class.