Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • More notes on the Brazilian SYN attacks

    Again, that makes sense given that all the SYN attacks have been directed towards the secure HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) port. Checking certificate transparency logs is an easy way to find active servers that can be used for a SYN amplification attack.

    But another weird thing I noticed—the Brazilian SYN attacks against my server have seemingly stopped. I haven't seen one forged SYN packet for over 24 hours. I don't think my reporting on it would effect that, but perhaps after detecting that I'm blocking the packets they gave up on my server? A potential botnet that was being used got taken down? Very strange indeed …

  • underwater

    these trails used to be underwater
    could be why I often feel 
    like drowning
    
    
    life demanded more space
    so they made the lake smaller
    with brute force
    

  • Fake, but not really, Soviet gold coins

    During most of the human history gold was the only thing that had more-or-less internationally recognized value. The second-worst energy-wasting computer thingy, bitcoin, is a recent invention, and United States only become a problem outside of their hemisphere after the previous world war, World War 2, ended, and before that, it was all gold (OK, pound sterling was also kinda important, but it also was a function of Great Britain trying to have the Gold Standard).

• Technology and Free Software

  • The coming AI winter can't come fast enough for me

    The post rambles, but it does describe the author's journey to understanding that in programming, you need to understand the underlying problem, in addition to knowing how to program, and not just hand off the thinking to some [DELETED-random text generator-DELETED] LLM (Large Language Model). I think it can be sumarized by Richard Feynman's [4] quote: “What I cannot build, I cannot understand.”

    Somewhat related is this short story, “Warranty Void If Regenerated [5]” (via Hacker News [6]). It's a story (written with some LLM assistance that I did not pick up on, although I did notice the LLM generated art work) about a possible future of software modification in a post-LLM-written-software world. What's interesting is not that it proposes what software development might be like, but in that it describes the issues in programming in general, what with unstated assumptions, breaking updates, and the people who prompt and fix software issues are still called “programmers.”

    Then there's this savage indictment of software development with LLMs and their mass copyright violations, “Clean Room as a Service [7]” (via Hacker News [8]). And yes, it's a real service to launder existing code under an inappropriate license (for your use) to code you can use (but possibly not copyright yourself—current law holds that LLM-generated content does not fall under US (United States) copyright). There's even a blog post [9] that goes into more detail about the “service.”

  • I haven't thought about software patents in a long time

    At work I'm often considered to be the go-to person for questions of software licenses. The latest one was customers wanting to upload HEIC images into the software.

    Some background: The high efficiency image file format (HEIF) is a digital container format for storing images and image sequences. High efficiency video coding (HECV) is an image and video encoding format and the default image codec used with HEIF. HEIF files containing HEVC-encoded images are also known as HEIC files and are mandated to use the .heic filename extension or .heics. Note that the acronym HEIC (high efficiency image codec) is used as a brand (and in the MIME subtypes `image/heic` and `image/heic-sequence`).

    And already we start the see the complexity counter go up.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Small Web Feeds

      I came across the 512kb club a long time ago, and it was very influential in helping me understand how websites work and the impact different kinds of assets or design choices can have on how pages load. As a fan of gemini, it makes sense to me that websites should be as minimal as possible.

    • Fancy Curl Sites

      I posted about it a bit on the Fediverse, but otherwise didn't elaborate much on it becuase I figured it was fairly self-explanatory. But I've had a handful of people ask me how I did it, so I decided it might actually be worth it to write a post about how I did it (…like seven months late).

      I should note this idea came from trinkey's (`curl trinkey.com`) and strongsand's (`curl proot.party`) curl sites, I didn't come up with it myself. Even though I did go about it quite a bit differently from them, all credit for the very cool idea goes to them.

      First, since it's the more interesting part, actually generating the ANSI-marked-up files to send to the clients. I entirely hand-wrote the index page[1] and about page[2].

      Note that I believe trinkey and strongsand generate theirs on-the-fly with the ratatui[3] library (or similar), which is probably more convenient; hand-writing it seemed more expedient to me though.

    • thank you antenna, agate, amfora, and kineto

      i really wouldn't consider myself very active in the gemini space. but i have had a gemini server running for almost 5 years now!

      and i occasionally love to read the small posts people put on antenna. so thank you for sharing your random thoughts or learnings!