Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • How We Lost Communication to Entertainment

    A few days ago, I did a controversial blog post about Pixelfed hurting the Fediverse. I defended the theory that, in a communication network, you hurt the trust in the whole network if you create clients that arbitrarily drop messages, something that Pixelfed is doing deliberately. It gathered a lot of reactions.

    When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago, I thought that either I was missing something or Dansup, Pixelfed’s creator, was missing it. We could not both be right. But as the reactions piled in on the Fediverse, I realised that such irreconcilable opinions do not arise only from ignorance or oversight. It usually means that both parties have vastly different assumptions about the world. They don’t live in the same world.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ABGLUSO Wordo: COCOA

  • Magnificence

    Do you not feel it, the magnificence of our existence?

    Do you not feel the sun blessing your skin, the moon's light walking with you under the whooshing of the wind?

    What of the birds, their beauty and spriteliness and charm? Or of the leaves? The minerals, or the ground itself? What small part we have in our world, yet how immense is the grandeur contained therein!

    How can we let ourselves give up? How can we permit it to be ruined? How can we permit ourselves to live less?

    The wonderous capabilities we have been given, the opportunities we can seize should we will it.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — BCEINOU Wordo: NOVEL

  • Juntos

    This one will be an amalgamation of shower-thought type-thoughts that I've come up with over the past few days.

    [...]

    In life, though it may be bound by arithmetical laws, it seems that there is a differently nuanced take. The distance from zero to one is far greater than the distance from one to two.

    Take, for example, the psychological effort spent on exams. If one were to take only one exam for the entirety of the course, there is much greater psycho-spiritual effort dedicated to that one exam. If for that same course there were two exams, the economist would say that 50% of the psycho-spiritual effort goes to the first exam and the other 50% goes to the second exam. Yet we humans can never be assumed to be ceteribus paribus. In practicality, once one has successfully sat the first exam, the second one comes easier. Thus, it is closer to a 75%-25% split of the psycho-spiritual effort applied toward that one class' exam.

• Politics and World Events

  • Happy Chanukah

    Happy Chanukah! I've never celebrated Chanukah before but I think we did a pretty good job. I made latkes for lunch and everyone but the five-year-old was delighted. Donuts in the evening, which I have to say turned out amazing. Deep fryers really succeed at enacting their intended function. We filled them with jelly as is appropriate. Promised my wife we could watch The Hebrew Hammer but it has seemingly fallen off of the global streaming-service network so we're gonna watch...Space Balls instead. Not quite as Jewish as The Hebrew Hammer but not not-Jewish.

    It's been busy since last I wrote. Went to two music events at my synagogue, one for little kids and one for adults. Both good, but the one for adults was transcendent. I love to sing. I sing pretty well for someone who has never trained at singing. I can't harmonize, for instance. But I've always wanted a better outlet for singing than just singing to myself and my kids. For a while I was interested in shape note singing, but didn't live in a place that made it easy to connect with those communities. And now I'm looking for specifically Jewish community, and shape note singing is decidedly Christian.

  • 2025-12-14

    So President Orange-man suspended CAFE penalties for automanufacturers selling American-bound cars. What does that mean? It means that automakers really don't have to meet CAFE fleet average fuel economy targets for their vehicles in the United States. Being fined and penalized for not meeting CAFE fuel economy standards was the one big lever the US government had to try to force automakers to make their cars more fuel efficient.

    El Presidente Trump kind of pulled an interesting trick. Since he could not repeal the CAFE regulations, he instead made an executive order changing what is effectively a coefficient number used to calculate the fine for car makers to zero. So basically the formula that the regulation uses to calculate the financial penalty for a car maker is then basically multiplied by zero. This effectively neuters the law using IMO a kind of math hack. Clever girl.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The Dichotomy between the Real and the Digital

    There exists within my mind a dichotomy between that which is truly real and that what is digital. I cannot, I am afraid, put into words how much I like Reality (tm). What is real is that which is.

  • In defense of ebooks

    I was perusing Gopher today while work was at a dead stop thanks to the holidays being near and nothing going on. I came across a couple glog posts about how physical media, specifically print books, were better. I mean it's not a secret why: no electricity needed, no chance at changing text, DRM isn't really a thing, etc. And while I do agree there are advantages, one thing I will note is that ebooks have taken precedent because of the many shortcomings of print books.

    1. Ebooks weigh nothing. You can fit entire libraries on actual cassette tapes. My personal library, though small, has been transferred to my e-reader and my phone. Dozens if not hundreds of ebooks, right at my fingertips. I don't need to pack anything more than a single device that is often smaller than the books it displays.

    2. Ebooks are easier to obtain. Granted I spent a ton of time scanning and OCR-ing my library, ebooks are just a walk in the park when you buy them directly. Yes, you may need to deDRM them, but in my experience, that's pretty easy, especially compared to bad sector disc protection.

  • Vibe Coding

    So, we have all heard the hype. AI everywhere, blah blah blah. Yeah I am just as sick of it as everyone else.

    However, I was at a plant last week in Idaho for work and was talking to one of the workers there. He works for six months a year, then takes the other half year off to write software with AI. He was very passionate about it.