Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Late To The Party, Again

    Blame the Boomers. Growing up as I did in the aftermath of the 1960s, my teenage years were overshadowed by the sense that I had arrived too late on the scene, just missing out on grand and glorious bacchanal that was the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius. And, for a time, those burned out ex-hippies wouldn't ever let me or anyone else forget it, as, looking forever back through their rose-coloured granny glasses, they relentlessly celebrated their lost youth and fading wonderfulness.

    Or so it seemed. And though it's not really true - I do, sometimes, arrive on time - the pervading sense of having missed out, of perpetually showing up late, has stayed with me and coloured much of my experience in the years since.

  • 11 🔤SpellBinding: ACDGINY Wordo: AWAYS

  • Kangeiko (mid-winter training) started at the Kodokan

    Today I woke up at 4:40. At 4:55 I was already walking out in the (moderately) cold, walking to the train station. I even had to run to catch the train, because I left the house a bit late. Kangeiko, the midwinter taining, at Kodokan started today, and for the next 10 days we'll have judo practice from 6-8 in the morning.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Thinking about software licenses again

    I have used very permissive licenses in the past. I just wanted to make it easy for fellow "hackers" to use my code. If you see an MIT-licensed project, you know that you don't have to worry about anything.

    I *had* considered "Bad Actors". But back then, a Bad Actor was some company that takes my code and incorporates it into a proprietary prod- uct. Like, someone takes my window manager, modifies it, and uses it in an embedded device. Or someone uses my Gopher server and ... I don't know, what would you do with that in a commercial product? Okay, anyway, suppose that had happened. Then what? I would first have to know about this violation and then I would have to sue that company. This whole scenario was extremely unlikely.

    But the situation has changed last year.

    Now we have "AI" crawlers and I *know* that they are scraping my website like crazy. And now it is *evident* that they do not follow any license requirements (assuming I had used the GPL). They break the rules and everybody knows it (and most people don't care at all, because look how shiny it is).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Posting to antenna (for the first time)

      Sorry for the spam. I'm trying things out, to see how geminispace works

  • Programming

    • Floating points (brain dump)

      I had planned to write a short essay next, focusing on the Big Bang as promised, but I will not do so today. I don't feel I have the mental power for the research, and I promised myself that the next article will be more thoughtful and of better quality.

      So here we are. There are a few topics floating in my head recently, and I will be happy to take them out and share in text.