Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics and World Events

  • Yesterday’s World vs. Tomorrow’s World

    1982, in the middle of the First Lebanon War, when the IDF invaded Lebanon all the way to Beirut and fought against Fatah, the PLO, and Palestinian terror organizations in Lebanon—I was a five-year-old child. I would turn on the television at five-thirty, right after the nonsense of “Erev Hadash” ended, and watch “Three Four Five and a Half” with Chompi and Insham, two talking puppets. I watched the children's plays performed there… I didn’t know what Fatah or the PLO or the IDF were, or who the Prime Minister or Finance Minister was. In my imagination there was some troll sitting in a cave guarding an ancient treasure chest…

    My sister and my whole family would say to me, “Why are you wasting your time on that nonsense on TV,” but I was a devoted viewer of all the stupid children’s programs and cartoons or dubbed shows on Educational TV and Channel One in Romema, the Israel Broadcasting Authority.

    [...]

    Today I don’t watch television at all. At most I listen to the radio and music. And when I do look at today’s television, what I actually see is the “telescreen” from 1984—mind-shaping, the pop-politics of a television that rapes you and slaughters your soul…

    24-hour broadcasts of war reports, routine sirens, missiles, interceptions, running to shelters—and meanwhile the government steals from the people their money, their rights, and their democracy as always, all in total lawlessness. Compared to the television of the past, the conclusion is that today’s media aims to turn viewers into post-traumatic or mentally broken people for life…

• Science

  • A Solar Panel Story

    It was Jimmy Carter who first had solar panels installed onto the White House. Apparently the oil embargo of 1973 and other concerns had lit a fire under some, and warmed water while not magical will shave some bucks off the energy bill. "The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here" (1973) details some of the fire.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Attempt to steer RWKVv7 and ending up with configurable confidence

    Happy Easter! I am _really_ concerned about AI alignment and how that would make the world.. well... crash and burn and humans all die (thanks Robert Miles, my beloved Ai Safely YouTuber). That kept me up at night and the dread is is tearing me apart. I decided to do _something_. But transformers are a pain to deal with because all tokens are processed at once -- that's too much data to understand on my puny machine. Also the main blocker and tackled by real alignment researchers. I only know how models work form my experience building inference engine backends.. I won't be able to make a dent on the problem. But, maybe I can with state space models like RWKV and Mamba. And in fact I believe they are mach easier to align (just my hunch). They have a static bottleneck; less place for misalignment to hide. And fixed state size means I can use classical big data analysis techniques instead of compute intensive transformer tooling.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: How should I feel about centralisation?

      Aggregators like CAPCOM, Spacewalk, Comitium, Antenna, GTL, Cosmos and others are really really good. I love them and want to endorse them. They really help Gemini.

      Some of the silo communities like Midnight and Bubble have some amount of interoperability with the larger Gemini world. They let you host more-or-less normal capsules with stuff that’s more-or-less compatible with gmisubs and tinylogs but that have extra bolted-on features like intracommunity comment systems. I’m leaning on putting that idea in the bad category as a whole. (Multi-capsule hosting sites that makes it easy for people to make capsules, perhaps through a WWW or Titan interface even, I love that and Gemini needs that and that’s not the problem at all and please keep it up, you’re doing great work! The problem is only the “local, logged-in commenters only” section because that creates silo sites.)

• Programming

  • Today I learned about $RANDOM

    beto-G4CMW~ % echo $RANDOM
    17672
    beto-G4CMW~ %