Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Plus ça change... 🏎🏁

    If I were offered the job of writing the F1 regulations, I wouldn't take it. I think there's no outcome that counts as success. But more capable people did take the job. Maybe they could pull it off?

    There's lots of change in F1 this year: half the power is from the battery, ground effect has gone, and many smaller things.

    On the plus side, there's been entertaining racing with lots more overtaking and some genuine doubt about who would win. The competitive order has been shaken up and it's not the same old faces at the front: the championship leader is a teenager.

• Science

  • Artemis II Mission Tracker

    This capsule provides live tracking of NASA's Artemis II mission, the first crewed mission of the Artemis program.

    Artemis II is sending four astronauts around the Moon and back, testing the Orion spacecraft's life support systems for future missions to the moons surface.

  • Artemis Tracker

    I've setup a simple tracker for the Artemis flight: [...]

• Technology and Free Software

  • What if the Clients are Smart

    I've usually considered two levels of security for a network, a higher level for servers and a slightly lower for clients. For example, all servers might be on a Kerberos domain with AFS, etc. with a paid support version of UNIX like Ubuntu Pro as described in a previous post. Clients could be a random, "best effort" security collection of Linux, macOS, other BSD & Windows machines. But there's no particular reason for this split, especially if macOS & Windows are excluded (e.g. for computation sovereignty reasons). Every network host could have the same security configuration.

    This has implications, e.g. I used to assume there was a requirement for a simpler filesystem layer making AFS look like a WebDAV share. But it may be better to just have everyone use AFS. This doesn't exclude use of end-user apps like LibreOffice.

  • Meditation on Copyright

    Time to think more about art. AI has impacted the art industry the most. Artists see their income dwindle. Customers with low budget got sucked away by AI with much lower cost of production. And high budget customers are figuring out they sometimes can get away with lower quality results. Not good for the artists. One thing comes up often during the discussion of artists wanting to ban AI generated art - it is not art and the AI stole their content in violation of copyright. Last time I hope I expressed my distaste for why I think that's a bad take. The entire view is anthropocentric and what works... works. This time I want to make my attempt to improve on the subject on copyright. The end goal is to arrive at a (set of) definitions with philosophical rigor. So we know someone violated copyright when we see it, with high confidence. Or not, and we prove it to be impossible. At least to create a design boundary on what's bad and should not exist in any good final decisions.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Alhena 5.5.5

      Enhancements include Split View, Restore Tab, an Outline button and the ability to use the "G" key to open right-click link shortcuts (use "F" for left-click). There's also a dialog to configure the "Hot Button" to show either top twenty bookmarks or the user's bookmark folder of choice.

      Split View can be applied to any tab or standalone page. The individual views can be horizontal or vertical and are resizable via a draggable divider. Links can be opened "Split Right" or "Split Bottom". Different tabs can have different orientations. Once in a Split View, link options include "Open Opposite" and "Close Split View".

    • How should I feel about centralisation? 🤔

      You can probably skip this bit.

      At first Gemini was simple. I could browse all the capsules. There weren't that many! Some random gemlogs were aggregated on Capcom and gmisub. I remember being a little excited when mine was first included on Capcom. If I liked a gemlog, my client has a feeds page. Simple.

      The thing about Capcom and gmisub was that they just gave you a hint about gemlog content. They purposely didn't carry everything. The smoll net wasn't centralised like the "bigg" web.

      But centralised services did appear. The Midnight, Station and Bubble/BBS all had some similarities to "Big Web" social media, and I've avoided joining them.

    • Gemini as the Final Frontier of Human Cognition

      I haven't written about Gemini in a long time. The late AI wave has gotten me really concerned about the future of humanity. Humans are the apex species on Earth because we are the most intelligent species. But AI seems to have surpassed us. I think we are truly in uncharted land at this point. I am not a pessimist about AI becoming Skynet. But I don't think the world is ready for the economic impact of AI, even if just in its current form. It is conceivable that AIs can do a lot of what humans do right now (not saying bullshit jobs have and might continue to exist in the future, hell, companies still have people doing paperwork and running between departments for approval today).