Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: EINOSTX Wordo: IMBUE

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Emperor Palpatine #3157

• Technology and Free Software

  • Chatbot the ultimate social media feed

    And some people do say that. I think both sides are right here in that yes it is a useful tool and you get to avoid a lot of the bad parts of the web, but also, it is addictive and like how many silo social media sites it adapts to you to keep you hooked, and also, the environmental and economic impact is huge. The increased wealth gaps and increased concentration of ownership of means of production is an undeniable ginormous downside of the current slate of LLM and ANN tech. Our economy was already a broken buggy system even before the gigaton wrench thrown into it by ML. 😭

    They in some very real semiotic senses are different, yes. But the similarites are that they are these huge data center machines that take all the input from what people post online and chew it up and push it back to you in a way that they control and can profit from. AI is in someways even worse, an even more purely distilled version of the idea of The Algorithm.

  • StarGrid has arrived, a Brand-New Palm OS Strategy Game in 2025!

    No Palm OS device at hand? No problem, just play it on your browser thanks to the CloudPilot emulator.

  • Quick guide to build Speedata Publisher PRO on Devuan 5

    Even though Speedata Publisher is available as a Debian repo, you may want to have need of the PRO version, while the recommended way to get it is to pay and support the project there is also an alternative possibility: to compile it by yourself. Here the instructions tested at October 10th, 2025.

  • Programming

    • Comparing json 🛠️

      I had two large sets of json output that should be the same. Do they match?

    • The fix wasn't easy, or C precedence bites

      For the past decade now, I've done a Christmas release for mod_blog [1] (only missing the years 2019 and 2023), just beacuse. I was poking around the codebase looking for changes I could make for Christmas this year, and well, I got a bit impatient and have just now released a version in time for Halloween. And it's scary—I'm removing features!

      I've removed features in the past, like no longer supporting “ping servers [2]” when it became clear it wasn't worth it, or automatically updating Linked­Tik­Face­My­Insta­Pin­Me­Gram­We­Tok­In­Book­Space­Trest when Insta­Pin­Tik­My­Linked­Face­Me­Trest­Book­Gram­We­In­Space­Tok changed how it works often enough to make it annoying for me to continue. But this time … this time it's different. This is removing functionality that has existed in the code base since the beginning!

    • It worked, but it failed

      In posting the previous post [1] I encounted an interesting bug!

      It wasn't in mod_blog [2] per se, but in the hook [3] running after an entry has been added, and therein is the bug—the entry was successfully added, but the hook failed.

      The hook program failed due to a compilation error that was only triggered when it ran. I took the email notification code from mod_blog and turned it into a program. I also linked to the bloging core [4] of mod_blog to avoid having to duplicate the code to read the configuration [5] (the email notification block is now ignored by mod_blog itself), and because the configuration format is Lua [6], a compiler option is needed to support Lua modules written in C—basically, -rdynamic to allow C-based Lua modules to call Lua functions (which I allow, and need, to support my particular configuration).

    • How I learned to love static types

      Last year, I took a shot at doing advent of code in Lua. Because text is a universal interface, AoC provides inputs as text files that need to be parsed. when using a dynamically typed programming language like Lua, this can create issues when trying to compare values if you don't explicitly call type casting.

      In one of the problems, I needed to compare two numbers on the input, which were space-seperated. I began experiencing a bug where some comparisons weren't evaluating "properly"; the case I remember was 10 < 9 was evaluating to "true." It took the better part of an hour for me to debug this - the issue was the 10 was actually "10", and the 9 was actually "9", and for some reason the string "10" is less than "9" in Lua. It was especially a pain because I was debugging with print statements - it's exceptionally difficult to see the difference between 10 and "10" in a terminal on it's own line.