Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — BDKORWY Wordo: AVANT

  • Enough

    Sometimes enough is enough. I come home from a social occasion, it's past midnight, we're drinking tea, can't quite go to bed yet after so much activity. So many people. My ears are still humming from all the noise. I am hoarse because of the shouting. I am afraid because of infectious diseases and bad ventilations.

• Politics and World Events

  • Cynical optimism: A text on climate change

    I am not scared of or for the future. Climate change is at a point where this planet will be forever altered. Species have gone extinct, islands have disappeared and both animals and people are forced to flee their homes. We as a species have caused a lot of suffering on this planet, and there is no end in sight. Eventually we will eradicate ourselves, along with a multitude of species. But what comes after?

    We as humans are just one of millions of species on this planet, who have happened to get a bit too smart for our own good. We have caused suffering, but it is nowhere near unprecedented. What makes our little extinction project different from what happened 65 million years ago in Mexico? Species go extinct all the time. Sure, we are a contributing factor, but life will outlive us. The Earth will recover eventually. We might not be here to see it, and we really have no one to blame but ourselves. When we are gone, life will be able to recover and flourish just like it has after several previous catastrophes and extinctions. How long after we are gone will New York return to being a forest? 200 years? 2000? 20000? The timescale is a fraction of a second compared to how long and hardy life is. We have existed for a minuscule amount of time compared to life here, and we are making good progress on eradicating ourselves. We are but a small blight on an otherwise unbothered earth.

• Science

  • Manufacturing

    I like manufacturing. I really LIKE manufacturing. I spent over 20 years working as a manufacturing engineer in an auto-parts factory, first trying to reduce material costs then designing, modifying, or validating standards compliance of the control systems of the automated machinery used to produce the parts, eventually specializing in the computing systems that tested each manufactured part to ensure it would do whatever it was supposed to do.

• Technology and Free Software

  • OpenTTD

    When I still had a windows PC, I would play a lot of a game called Deadlock: Planetary Conquest. It's a proto-4x game that came out in 1996, and got picked up by GOG and refurbished. There's no linux build, unfortunately, and I haven't been able to make it work with wine, so I've had nothing to scratch that itch lately.

    The itch is sort of micro-optimizing a system, I guess? In order to do that, I need to know the system well enough to actually perform the optimization. In Deadlock, this took the form of allocating workers to job sites to ensure every settlement is optimally producing to meet its own needs and I'm not wasting money moving food and power around.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Decentralizing the IP Address

      How might you solve the problem of finding a network recipient anywhere in the world without needing to rely on information provided by an arbitrary standards body?

      [...]

      In these articles, the technology underpinning the Internet is hailed as a boon for egalitarianism and the downfall of the oppressive state, since the Internet allows ordinary citizens to contact each other and organize directly instead of having governments or corporations mediate and censor that communication. While I agree that this is a lofty goal, I also know that the technology underpinning the Internet is largely a product of governments and corporations convening together to build something quickly and deliberately - in particular, the US Department of Defense built ARPANet (one of the main precursors to the Internet) in order to allow its computers to be spread across all of the US's military bases instead of clustered entirely in the Pentagon (where a single atomic bomb could destroy all of them). As such, I used to worry about how well the Internet could survive if the state were to be dismantled - if anarchism used the Internet to take down the state, but could not subsequently maintain global communication through it, then the state could easily resurface to fill that void and we would be in the same place we were before.

      However, as the article above outlines, most parts of the Internet are indeed decentralized and anarchic, and it would largely be quite easy for a decentralized fabric of individuals to maintain it. All communication, after all, is ad hoc on the local level, and each node makes its own decisions about how to transmit data and get it closer to its intended recipient. Ethernet is especially anarchic in that there is no centralized source of permission, unlike competing technologies such as the token ring protocol. And on top of this, all of the Internet's protocols are layered, where, say, TCP streams or UDP packets can be transmitted over any set of underlying technologies you please. Choices of protocol, and choices within that protocol, are, of course, arbitrary, but as long as no one has a strong reason to choose one option or another without strong, independently verifiable empirical evidence to back that choice, I think that people can naturally settle on choices that work.

    • (very) dumb parser for rss and atom feed

      Yesterday, I open a rss feed in browser to grab a single url,
      I know where it is but the whole xml document is too noisy,
      I want something to parse that for me.

      There are many rss/atom feed reader out there.
      I have newsboat on my machine but from what I know,
      it cannot be use as single time parser/reader.

  • Programming

    • Lali Another Lisp Implementation release

      Since after 2 years ago and before 6 months ago, I made journey into making a Lisp implementation that would resemble the original Lisp, as described by John McCarthy's "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I" paper[0]. John McCarthy is to computers what Nikola Tesla is to electricity. Even if you are a developer, you may not have heard of John McCarthy, like few people today know of Nikola Tesla[1]. John McCarthy is the original inventor of LISP (among *many* other inventions, all related to computers).

      So, I made Lali, which is an acronym that stands for "Lali Another Lisp Implementation". Lali is a fork of the project tiny-lisp .

      Making Lali is a very much rewarding journey, I never made a programming language, and I am mediocre at C programming language. Yet, I made Lali possible, thanks to McCarthy's work. I also got *very much* inspired by Paul Graham's website of Lisp[2]. I recommend it.

    • Oddμ new

      I recently decided I needed a new `oddmu new` command so that I could quickly start writing a new page. I ended up writing a `fish` function instead of adding code to Oddμ itself.

    • Bobby Loot Tables

      This link from the old web has a code example for loot generation, though the method could also be used for vaults, monsters, or other dungeon features. Particular objects are constrained to a minimum and maximum level, so that your trusty (or rusty) starting dagger will no longer spawn below dungeon level 5, and the Sword of Ur-Slayåge only starts to spawn somewhere below D10, probably for game balance reasons. An advantage of this method is that the objects can be placed in a table. Adding new objects, what levels they spawn on, and their weights can be done quite easily. The tables can be stored in a database or text file which will avoid the risk of a loot table change also causing a random code change. Converted to Common LISP, a weighted generator might look something like the following.