Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Hospital

    The weird reality of hospital life. A room, a bed, a nurse, two, three, friendly, smiling, people dressed in white, rooms in beige, and then the passage into the underworld where the surgeons and the other nurses work, where lights are bright and people are dressed in blue, with gloves and masks, and to pass by the various halls, and stand in that in-between space where a nurse dressed white hands you over to the nurse dressed in blue, the repeated questions of your name, your birthdate, the reason for being here, everybody wary of making a mistake, to catch a peek of the operation theatre where doctors are at work, patients covered, like objects, and feel the intravenous needle and the cold salt water in your arm, the pads that monitor your brain waves, the pads that monitor your heart beat, the machines and the beeps, the oxygen mask, the dizziness, turning into an object yourself, wondering whether you’ll be a good object for them to work with, to pass out … and to open your eyes again, to hear your name, to hear whispered conversations, to be brought back into those upper levels, to see a familiar face, to regain a voice, a face, to be a person again.

  • the moon alone

• Technology and Free Software

  • Nerf AI

    Sil also is rumored to have had an AI nerf, though finding an actual reference to that claim exceeded my motivation quotient. There are likely more games where the AI has been nerfed? Or really expert systems, as both these games were free, so using AI (in the John McCarthy sense, to get money) is likely invalid.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Large feeds

      As I'm importing nearly 5000 feeds, I find that a single SQLite writer is in fact a bottle-neck; that my simple "select foo" if found "update foo" else "insert foo" isn't very fast. Sadly, I cannot use UPSERT because full text search is implemented by a virtual table which doesn't allow constraints or indexes and UPSERT requires a constraint to work.

      I also discovered that some blogs come with a gazillion pages going back to the beginning of the century. There's one blog with over 12000 pages in its feed. Short pages, for sure, but still. There's one blog with over 4000 pages; one with over 2000 pages; six with over 1000 pages. What the hell!