Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Home Remedies #3217

  • 🗞️ An Update With No Update

    This is an update. Or at least it claims to be. In reality, nothing has changed. No breakthroughs have appeared. No disasters have struck. No dramatic announcements have been issued. The situation remains exactly as it was before, quietly humming along in its ordinary, uneventful way. There is continuity, stability, and an uncanny absence of excitement. One could almost admire the stubborn persistence of nothing happening at all.

  • Woods do not re-wild themselves

    ...not in a human lifespan, anyway.

    In the south of England, people are buying small plots of neglected, tatty woodland and leaving them unmanaged. Their expectation, so they tell me, is that these woods will eventually revert to a "natural" state, whatever that is.

    There is no truly primordial woodland in England: every square foot of woodland in the country has been managed, in some sense, at some time. The best we can claim is "semi-natural ancient woodland" -- by definition land that has been forested since at least the 17th century, and only lightly managed since then. In practice, most of our "ancient" woodland has, in fact, been forested since the Norman Conquest, but it's been managed over most of the ensuing time.

    So what happens if you take a plot of woodland that's been managed for timber, then allowed to fall into ruin, and leave it untouched?

    It turns out we have a pretty good idea, from studies done in Lady Park Wood in the Wye Valley. This wood has been closed to the general public, and completely unmanaged, since 1945 -- just over 80 years. Has this wood reverted to a "natural" state?

• Technology and Free Software

  • Not having to think any more 🧠

    I'm not a big LLM user/fan but I'm not here to bash it. I'm going to talk about how other people use it.

    My colleague is an experienced dev, but he's not confident. I know he can do it, but he's not so sure. He doesn't vibe code, but he verifies everything with a chatbot. The bot helped him write the design document and the code for the project we're working on, and it verifies his changes. He trusts the bot and believes what it says. So when I ask why something was done a certain way, the answer is "the bot said". If I ask for more, he asks the bot again and sends me a transcript. The explanation hasn't passed through his mind at all!

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Small Technology and Small Economics

      Two terms jumped out at me: "small technology" and "small economics." Berry noticed that these two ideas were already on the wane in the mid-1970s, but now in 2026, they're almost completely gone from the developed world.

      What do "small technology" and "small economics" mean? In the book, these terms denote agricultural tools and financial plans that are sensible on the scale of a single family owning, at most, a few acres of land. They involve more work and less profit than a corporation's operations, but that's not the point: the point is to develop intimate knowledge and sustainable practices regarding a specific piece of land. The decisions involved directly affect the livelihoods of the family, just as importantly, the long-term health of the land. However, while Berry focuses particularly on the collapse of small- and medium-scale agriculture in America, the fundamental concepts of small technology and small economics appear in many other contexts.

      I first became interested in Gemini because of a desire to escape a global and deeply impersonal modern Internet. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2021, while local governments still banned large gatherings and I was forbidden from working in my company's office, my communications moved almost entirely to digital spaces--which, in practice, meant the big social media sites. I hated Twitter's algorithms even before the days of Elon Musk; Facebook was full political slapfights; Discord had nothing but NSFW memes. I hated that government safety protocols were pushing me to sign away my private information to every big tech corporation in the country. I wanted not only an escape: I wanted to find a small refuge, a hovel in the mad rush of the Internet where real, similarly-minded people could commiserate and, perhaps, find some comradery. I wanted a small community powered by small technology. Thus was born the introductory text that remains on my capsule to this day: "one more little craft in the chaotic spacelanes of the Internet."