Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Book Review: Dark Data by David J. Hand

    I recently listened to Dark Data by David J. Hand as an audiobook borrowed from my local library, mostly during my daily commute. It had been on my reading list for a long time, and even though I consumed it passively—stuck in traffic rather than sitting with a notebook—it left a strong impression. As a data scientist, I found myself repeatedly thinking that this is a book I need to own in print, to read slowly and carefully, because its ideas reward reflection more than casual listening. Hand’s central argument is that the data we don’t see—what he calls dark data—often matter more than the data we analyze. Using humor and large-scale real-world examples rather than equations, he shows how missing, hidden, distorted, or deliberately suppressed data can mislead analysis across domains, from opinion polling and economics to science itself. The book introduces a taxonomy of 15 types of dark data (DD), while emphasizing that no list can ever be complete. As new data sources and collection methods emerge, so do new forms of darkness. The message is clear: missing data are not just a technical inconvenience to be imputed away; they are often central to understanding why conclusions fail or models break.

  • Dark hair in real life

    I met the girl that I saw in my dreams! It's so funny, not 100% a perfect match, but very similar vibe. My daughter even talked to the friend of the dark haired girl. I looked at her in the eyes for a moment and there was a sense of familiarity. I didn't talk to her though. I have to get back into that habit.

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Carbon Dating #3205

  • "The Luminous Dead" (Caitlin Starling)

    Oof! This was advertised as SciFi horror, which isn't wrong: The main charac- ter explores a deep cave on an alien planet, but for various reasons -- one of the main ones being that she must not give off any scent and must remain mostly quiet, i.e. her voice must not be audible -- she's in a suit with lots of sensors and gadgets and a *feeding tube*. Without the connection to the main computer, she'd be completely lost. But then there's also the woman on the other end of the comm line, who's supposed to tell her where to go and what to do. Buuuuut is she trust- worthy? ;-) And why is it only *one* person in that control center in- stead of a whole team?

  • Juicy Wings At Home

    jprjr from buffering.party recently posted their crispy chicken wing recipe on Antenna. Since I just made my own last night, I thought, why not post my recipe for hot wings?

• Politics and World Events

  • Why Alexis de Tocqueville Would Not Have Been Surprised by Donald Trump

    When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States for the first time in 2016, many viewed it as a shock, a break with political conventions, and an anomaly in the history of Western democracies. The common explanation quickly fixed on the person: his style, his rhetoric, his provocations. But that perspective falls short. It explains how Trump presented himself, not why a political system was able to carry him all the way to the top. If one shifts the focus from the individual to the structures, what emerges is less a historical accident than the outcome of a long development. Alexis de Tocqueville likely would not have been surprised by this development. As early as the nineteenth century, he described the fundamental tensions of democratic societies: the power of majorities, the temptation of simplification, and the danger that short-term successes can displace long-term judgment. Tocqueville did not see democracy as a self-running machine, but as a fragile order that depends on balance, restraint, and time. Where these elements erode, tyrants do not necessarily appear—yet political forms do emerge that shy away from complexity and mistake rule-breaking for strength.

  • Origins of the Petrodollar and the 1974 Oil-for-Dollars Deal

    In the early 1970s, after the end of the gold standard, the United States faced high inflation and a weakening dollar. In the wake of the 1973 oil embargo, Washington struck a decisive deal with Saudi Arabia in 1974: Saudi Arabia (and, subsequently, OPEC) would price oil exclusively in U.S. dollars, and in return the United States would provide military protection and supply weapons. This agreement created a lasting global demand for U.S. dollars (because every country needs dollars to import oil) and led oil-exporting countries to recycle their petrodollar revenues into U.S. assets such as government bonds ("Treasuries") - thereby supporting U.S. public finances. The resulting "petrodollar" system strengthened the dollar's status as the world's leading reserve currency and became a pillar of U.S. economic dominance. For decades, this arrangement allowed the United States to run large deficits and expand the money supply with a lower inflation risk than many other countries would face - effectively helping finance both the military and the welfare state through foreign capital originating from oil sales.

• Technology and Free Software

  • notes on matrix

    the spec for matrix URIs says the authority and fragment section are unused. I figured the authority section would be a good place to put like, the account you use. and that account can be a profile name or passed to your client or something.

  • Szymon Kubica's MicroBox Turns the Arduino UNO R4 Into a Battery-Powered Handheld Games Console

    Developer Szymon Kubica has turned an Arduino UNO R4 development board into a handheld games console, complete with color display and multiple built-in games: the MicroBox. "MicroBox is a custom-built game console powered by the Arduino UNO R4, designed to allow for implementing various retro games and switch between them using an intuitive UI [User Interface]," Kubica explains. "Currently, MicroBox features the following games: 2048 — merge the tiles to reach the 2048; Minesweeper — avoid hidden mines using logical reasoning; [Conway's] Game of Life — watch and interact with a cellular automata evolving based on Conway’s rules; Snake — the most iconic retro game; Snake Duel — two snakes compete against each other." Inside the console's 3D-printed housing is the Arduino UNO R4 microcontroller development board, built by Arduino in partnership with Renesas and launched back in June 2023 as the UNO family's biggest upgrade before it jumped tracks to become a single-board computer with the release of the Arduino UNO Q late last year. The Arduino UNO R4 features the Renesas RA4M1 system-on-chip, giving it a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M4 core running at 48MHz, 32kB of static RAM (SRAM), and 256kB of flash storage — plenty for basic games.

  • Declaratively manage containers on Linux

    When you have to deal with containers on Linux, there are often two things making you wonder how to deal with effectively: how to keep your containers up to date, and how to easily maintain the configuration of everything running. It turns out podman is offering systemd unit templates to declaratively manage containers, this comes with the fact that podman can run in user mode. This combination gives the opportunity to create files, maintain them in git or deploy them with a configuration management tool like ansible, and keep things separated per user.

  • Declaratively manage containers on Linux

    If you want to run a more complicated service that need a couple of containers to talk together like a web server, a backend runner and a database, you only need to configure them in the same network. If you need them to start the containers of a group in a specific order, you can add use systemd dependency declaration in `[Install]` section. Podman will run a local DNS resolver that translates the container name into a working hostname, this mean if you have a postgresql container called "db", then you can refer to the postgresql host as "db" from another container within the same network. This works the same way as docker-compose.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • A small forum programmed - Meeting Point

      Can I use multiple identities? Technically yes (your Gemini client can manage multiple identities). But for this forum: please use one identity per person, just like in regular forums.