Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Grug's Most Excellent Interdimensional Temporal Adventure

  • Writer's Block Broken (At Least, Temporarily)

    Last year I started playing my electric guitar again. It had been years, probably close to 15 if I'm being honest. I picked up my Strat, started messing around with it instead of doing the stuff I'd been doing on classical guitar. Relearned a few songs I'd written for myself. But then I figured, I was writing these in my 20s, and I'm in my 40s now. I should try to write something new.

• Politics and World Events

  • Shame

    About 6 million people died in the Holocaust. When I was in school, our class was shown a movie about it all. This was in the late eighties. Nobody knew about content warnings. And so, without preparation, without introduction, I remember suddenly seeing those bulldozers shovelling mountains of dead people. What an incredible shame.

    [...]

    Switzerland tried to be "neutral". Germany is too strong, they said! Also some people made a lot of money. And we're still having controversies about art collections being based on Raubkunst -- the art Jews had to sell under pressure from the Nazis. It's still happening, here in Zürich, Switzerland.

• Technology and Free Software

  • "Bog Hill" Data Comparison (with a sad twist)

    Although my last field trip to the FFH territory had to be canceled after seeing a bunch of tourists struggling to capture a plant with a phone, I've begun to review my own data spawning over four years. Overall the amount of butterfly species still is below average, even after expanding my research area to include the abandoned sandpit that is NOT part of the FFH area (all maps exclude it and various texts only mention the bare top of the pit; neither are being studied by the contracted researchers).

    Compared to my data, official data provided by my state is sparse and prone to some of the silliest misidentifications and plain made-up descriptions such as the pond in Zone III being declared a "fish pond" (it never hosted any kind of fish and never will). Two documents, one released in 2012 and another in 2020, offer some species lists, most of which are inconsistent (especially odonata which weren't recorded in 2011 but in 2019) or partially copypasted.

  • AI Alignment

    The term _AI Alignment_, like many new concepts associated with AI, is very broad and fuzzy. It means something like the techniques and processes to ensure that a LLM is aligned with human interests. It is usually discussed within the context of _AI Safety_, which can mean anything ranging from "content moderating LLM outputs" to "let's not develop an AGI that takes over the planet and enslaves us."

    There are lots of important philosophical questions that arise when we think about this effort. Human history is a series of pluralistic and conflicting "interests", so when we try to align AI with human interests, the obvious question is _whose_ interests?

  • Internet/Gemini

    • And I took that personally

      Now that I've got nft set up to do rate limiting to ensure my pod is available to the broader public and also have a bit more insight into who my visitors are one thing stood out. Apparently my miscreants are mostly ips which when doing a reverse dns lookup resolve to something under googleusercontent.com.

      A quick google of this domain name turns up many complaints about peoples services being relentlessly hammered by this source of traffic. The googleusercontent.com domain is part of googles compute offerings (GCP). I then quietly wondered to myself if it overly likely that I am to receive legitimate (read human) traffic from GCP.

    • The even fatter cat

      Fresh off blocking GCP with my evil laughter still echoing throughout the lair it struck me that while GCP had been the most obvious nemesis of my pod there was still a rather large elephant still lingering in the room. All while banning GCP I had left AWS off the hook. That seemed entirely unfair to AWS and I set off to block them in the same manner.