Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Planetary Alignment #3192

  • What I'm Listening To Now: loscil, "Ash"

    Lately I've been listening to more by Vancouver electronic/ambient musician Scott Morgan, aka loscil. "Ash" is his latest EP, and one I'm enjoying very much. Googling to learn more about him, I realized that back in 2014, one of my high school friends was part of a musical showcase with him. Very cool. Different styles - from what I've heard by loscil, it's a bit spacier, expansive, whereas my friend's music has often been more aggressive, noisier.

    I had a bunch of friends in high school who made electronic music, as we called so much back then. A few, happily, are still at it. One of my old friends, the one I thought might go furthest with it, has as far as I can tell not made anything in a couple of decades, focusing on his radical academics. So it goes.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — CHLOPYR Wordo: BRAVO

• Technology and Free Software

  • What are the AI bulls saying?

    I'm trying to understand why the fund managers aren't selling off the Magnificent Seven. Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, and Meta Platforms make up about 35% of S&P 500. I guess the fund managers are reading the kind of stuff iShares by Blackrock puts out, like Are AI stocks in a bubble? Why this isn’t a dot-com redux from early November 2025, by Kristy Akullian, CFA, Head of iShares Investment Strategy for the Americas

  • ls but 'The Unix Way'

    ls is a particularly useful utility, but it falls short of the Unix path in many ways. Most eggregiously, it does two things: scan the filesystem collecting data, and display such data.

    As a result, it has two distinct sets of flags that control it -- ones to deal with the filesystem, and ones that sort and otherwise format the display.

    Over decades, many flags were added to allow ls to do an adequate job on both ends, but we lost in the process.

    83 distinct flags or options are offered by GNU ls. I have a T-shirt with the summary of ls options, and it is a lot of text! Such complexity is directly resultant from the lack of domain separation between the distinct tasks the utility performs.

    What's worse, is that ls is not really composable. There is nothing you could pipe in as a substitute for it directly hitting the filesystem. The output is human-readable, and cannot be externally manipulated easily with text tools.