Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • ache

    I am nothing but ache
    barely even a person
    realities split and blend
    take a step away and see
    there is nothing to see
    

  • to have and to hold

    the emptiness felt 
    alone in a dark room
    is no comfort 
    
    
    you did this to yourself, you say
    and feel lighter as the words come out
    

  • Long time no see

    I am engaged to be married on Saturday. Oh Lord how things have changed since my last postings here. I love my fiancée and I can't wait to be hers!!! She is absolutely lovely, and I love to kiss her on the forehead and cook for her and hear about her day and plan for the future. I like her family, she likes mine, and we are facing the arena together, come hell or high water.

  • Horror Collection

    This collection is all gpub files of the novelettes, novellas, and novel of H. P. Lovecraft, often refered to as "Cosmic Horror". I plan to add other horror to it eventually. But really, this is what I like, so this is what is here. If folks have requests: reach out and let me know!

  • Esperanto Music History

    Something that often surprises people about Esperanto music is how expensive it can be. A quick look through the UEA catalogue or the FEL Retbutiko shows that the majority of CDs sell for between €15 and €20 - considerably more than the price of a major label CD, which is generally no more than about €10. Given that Esperanto music is almost universally performed by amateurs, it can seem strange at first glance that it is more expensive than music made by highly-paid professionals - but in fact there are good reasons for the price disparity, which I will explore in this post.

    The premium price of Esperanto music is nothing new. The very earliest Esperanto records, on the Esperinst label, were sold in the UK in 1926 for a price of 5 shillings, when typical records from the same factory were priced at 1/6. In my original post about Esperinst, I suggested that maybe that price was for the set of two records, which would still be a significant markup, but further research has confirmed that 5 shillings was in fact the price of each individual record. I’ll publish a full report of this research later in the year, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the records’ release in August, but 5 or even 6 shillings per disc was indeed the typical price of Esperanto records in the UK during the shellac era. An advert in The British Esperantist, April-May 1940 for the Linguaphone Esperanto Course, consisting of a small book and a portable case containing 15 double-sided records (total duration about 90 minutes), described how it “remains at the pre-war price of £6 6s. 0d.” - over £300 in today’s money!

  • 🪨 Plate V

    It was the oddest job interview I’d ever experienced.

    First of all, we arrived at the lobby as one big group, brought in on bespoke company transport—black vehicles with tinted windows. It rained on the way over, so everyone was wet, shaking out their umbrellas in a rustling like birds’ wings. We took the elevators up in staggered intervals. Filed into a conference room with chairs set up around the perimeter in the shape of an oval. At the center was a desk with a clay ball sitting on top of it, stabbed full of miscellaneous objects.

    Second of all, we were told not to speak but write—with old-fashioned paper and pencil—staring at this crazy ball.

  • Western and Frontier Fiction Collection

    This collection is all gpub files in the "Western" and "Frontier Stories" genres.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The Suspicious Adoption of Signal

    For years, almost all of my text-based direct messages with other people used one of two systems: SMS and Facebook Messenger. I know SMS has its own set of problems, but I've come to despise Facebook Messenger, and I preferred SMS wherever I could. Many of my friends and family stubbornly refused to switch away from Messenger, though, so I had to live with it. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, there was a shift in late 2025.

    It started when my sister-in-law, who lives in the UK, informed us that she wanted to leave Facebook Messenger and start using Signal instead. I like Signal: even though it requires a phone number to sign up, once you're on the platform you can operate completely independently of telephone networks, and your communications are much more secure. Yes, there are better systems out there, but it's already difficult enough to get anyone to try something new when so many communication apps exist already--and Signal is leagues better than Facebook. My wife was somewhat reluctant to make the switch, but I eagerly accepted.

  • EVE Ores

    There was some confusion on the rookie help channel (when is there not) so some details on ores in EVE Online may be in order, in particular for storyline missions.

  • catastrophe averted

    I managed to use 1vyrain on an x230 to install coreboot. Plot twist: I installed the SeaBIOS version becaues it was all i could find in a prebuilt form, but hours before that I had installed my OS in UEFI mode with full disk encryption.

  • Science Fiction Collection

    This collection is all gpub files of classic era, though sometimes lesser known, science fiction. Since the "Golden Age" of science fiction started recently enough to not normally be in the public domain, these works are here on a technicality: they were generally published in magazines and serialized, and those magazines did not renew the copyright (nor, apparently, did the authors).

  • Learning stenography (how to type really fast)

    I type at around 100 words per minute (WPM). This is relatively fast; for reference the average person types at around 40 to 50 WPM.[1] Still, oftentimes I feel like I'm typing much slower than I want to be. I oftentimes say stuff out loud and try to write it down, and at my current typing speed I just can't really keep up. And my thinking speed is even faster than my speaking speed.

    Currently, I type using mostly my index fingers, with the other fingers sometimes used for keys in the extremities of the keyboard. This certainly isn't the most /optimal/ way to type; most typing education recommends touch typing[a], or using all five fingers on each hand to type.* I /could/ learn this, it probably wouldn't be too hard, but I'd basically have to relearn how to type. Even with touch typing, at most I'm looking at maybe an extra 20WPM? That didn't exactly seem worth it to me.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Hello World!

• Programming

  • Thoughts on the spread of AI in tech

    Something I've been musing about a lot with my coworkers as of late is the meteoric rise and spread of AI slowly infecting abosolutely everything. I have no problems with AI in the traditional sense: machine learning techniques are extremely valuable across a wide range of different domains. I've been interested enough in it that I've done a lot of work teaching myself how a large array of machine learning tools actually work behind the scenes: circa 2016, I built a standard neural net, followed by a convolutional neural net completely from scratch, and also worked on implementing things like data augmentation techiniques, binarization, etc. I never quite got around to recurrence or backprop through time or any of those other really advanced techniques.

    But, since the rise of attention mechanisms created the boom of LLMs, it's become truly infuriating to me. Initially, sure, the techniques piqued my interest (quite understandably). As the technology rapidly began to mature, I began to sour on it as I saw how it was being used.

    As soon as I began to see people using the very earliest LLM models to be used for things like generating art and writing human-like text, it didn't take a genius to realize that companies would try to use it to replace workers, given the kind of world that we live in. I figured it would take a while because the early results were not particularly impressive to me.

  • Goldschmidt division

    The Goldschmidt division algorithm is a fast division using the Newton-Raphson approximation.

  • Re: The AI has come for my code

    GitHub's availability has tanked the last few years, with all kinds of outages. This'd be fine if it were still the mostly-hobbyists code hosting platform it started as, but in the last decade, it's worked its way into enterprise organizations, and downtimes absolutely wreak havoc.

    The culprit seems to be AI commits, up 10x so far in 2026 from 2025. At the current pace, GitHub expects AI commits to total more than 14 billion this year. I'm well past the point of hoping my fellow developers' bad decisions are going to go away; it's become increasingly clear that we're collectively going to have to learn to deal with the tsunami of shit, because apparently writing and understanding your own code is now a thing of the past.