Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • John L. Godlee — Bike tag

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ADELURQ Wordo: TEASE

  • Pumpkin Carving

    My dream came true, a crisp autumn evening spent on my stoop carving pumpkins with the kids. My son really took a liking to it but it got a bit late, so I'll finish up the middle pumpkin tomorrow evening.

• Technology and Free Software

  • AI Canada

    Again, I am begging you to understand two things: that any computer anywhere in the world can be operated remotely from any other computer anywhere in the world, and that landlords are a dead weight loss to society.

    If you want to foster Canadian innovation and champion Canadian companies, any approach to this that involves business incentives and lets the rentier class thrive is – inevitably, mathematically – a race to the bottom.

    If you want a new Renaissance, you have to build the new Vienna.

    If you want innovative new technologies to exist, you *need* to create communities where it is safe to fail. You need to create a society where the opportunity to, the ability to, and the tools to experiment are not the sole domain of already comfortable and already privileged. We know what those experiments look like already, they look like Mark Zuckerberg spending eighty billion dollars on the Metaverse and another eighty billion dollars on pretend chatbot friends and it doesn't matter at all and nobody cares.

  • FreeBSD 15.0-BETA2 VM-image in Qemu

    FreeBSD not only publishes images for install media, but also VM-images.

    I downloaded FreeBSD-15.0-BETA2-amd64-zfs.qcow2.xz

    Which is the qcow2 image of the FreeBSD 15.0 BETA2 VM, with ZFS as file system.

  • Another buzzword debunked: workflow orchestration

    What I especially "love" about tech buzzwords is how they make really simple (and obvious) concepts sound complicated and important. Recently, we've been forced to use a particular "workflow orchestration" tool at work, which, to be honest, only has added more complexity to the codebase without any real benefit. My personal attempt to tackle the same problem, on the other hand, took under 20 SLOC of a shell script, but first, let's determine what the problem is. According to IBM:

    Workflow orchestration is the practice of coordinating multiple automated tasks across business applications and services to help ensure seamless execution.

    If you consider this definition vague AF, you're not alone. However, what it usually translates to is:

    1. Your processes are divided into isolated tasks taking some input and returning some output.

    2. These tasks are chained together using workflows, which, again, take some input and return some output.

    3. The "workflow orchestration" tools just provide a "standardized" way of writing and calling the workflow and task code.

  • Steam Next Fest (October 2025) — Day 7