Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • pack rat

    The pack rat is dead.

    No loud noise, no machete, a lot of cheese, a rat trap.

    My vice-president is not texting me, nor Amy. It was all a dream, I won't keep contact with anyone from the regional burning man.

    I think about Kate. She was the coolest. She was the weirdest. I want her. I want people like that in my life.

  • ♑︎ Planner Season is Upon Us

    So, this year, I forewent Hobinichi to actually use my Travelers Notebook knockoff. For the first half of 2026, I was in the Papertess undated vertical weekly, because I wanted Tomoe River Paper. Alas the daily times go from 6am to 8pm. And yes, maybe I don't NEED more, but if I write in an appointment at 3pm and am already close to the end of the day, it just FEELS not right. Apart from that, I really like it and will continue to use it as my fandom planner. (Unless Hobinichi does another Godzilla Weeks…)

  • ♑︎ I've skipped the Grief

    I just went straight to anger. Not even directed at the poor, hate-ridden existence that drove into the crowd. Anger at our politicians. Because every act or retracted support, any refusal to flag a rainbow sends the message, this is a group not worthy of support. Not worthy of protection. Fair game to mow down.

• Technology and Free Software

  • ♑︎ A (Hand)Writer's Block?

    I wonder if it's my switching to handwriting Draft 1 and thus having introduced the friction of putting down this device, of switching of youtube and sitting with what I have written onto otherwise blank pages that want to be filled.

    But also, I've got no idea to continue. Which the previous times this happened, pen and paper actually helped out.

  • ♑︎ That Time I killed Half my Cult

    Youtube has pushed some Cult of the Lamb content at me, and while I still need to get the Woolhaven DLC, I was reminded of a very wholesome, very CotL-y story from my main file.

    Trigger Warning for canon-typical deaths, cannibalism and drug use, I guess.

    I had just unlocked the cannibal skill and for the fun of it, thought I'd use it. I had went through the whole game with the grass eater skill and thus, it was finally time to use the flesh of dead cultists I had collected.

  • Mechanistic Interpretability and Applications: The Final Frontier of Hacking (COSCUP 2026 draft)

    I feel lucky that I get to present my ~~BS~~ encouragement at COSCUP to prevent AI apocalypse, based on my work on RWKV. Hopefully landing in 40C3 too later this year.

    I dabbled into mechanistic interpretability as I am bored one day while also under existential dread that AI is gonna kill us all (thank you Rob Miles and Mythos, again). And decided I should not let dread win - doing nothing is exactly helping no one. So I did something, and it turns out you can do a lot of research within mechanistic interpretability with surprisingly little resources. What's even better being it resembles computer hacking, which I love. And again, my background is in HPC and systems, where I deal with inference accelerators for a living and the efficiency gain from coding agents are the main reason made dabbling in mechanistic interpretability possible.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • USENET

      In April this year, Japan introduced the term "Kokushobi". It consists of three Chinese characters: "cruel", "hot" and "day". The term is used to describe days when the temperature reaches 40c or more. The TV news now each day tells us to stay inside when possible, keep the a/c on and drink plenty of fluids.

      A few days ago I fell down another rabbit hole: USENET. What triggered it was coming across a newsreader for PalmOS called Yanoff[1]. I kind-of-sort-of got it working, but it was difficult and time consuming and not really all that worth it in the end.

    • Quite some time since I've had a brain dump

      Lately, I've been scanning SDF's gopher space [0]. It's still very active and to me, it's as nostalgic as getting online for the first time. The difference though is the wisdom and age I have now vs. then. There are quite a few interesting "phlogs" or posts, as I call them. In fact, some are so interesting I end up emailing the users. This activity itself feels like messaging users on IRC; it is genuine and you know that there is a person on the other side. What I like about the asynchronous nature of emailing is that it's always a suprise when you receive a response, especially one that is well thought out. So, instead of dealing with "big tech"'s social "platforms", I prefer this new, yet "old skool" method. I hope to meet more intersting people and develop relationships like I did at the end of the 90's and early 00's (2000 - 2004). I will say that reaching out to users on the Gopher/Gemini protocol means that you're guaranteed to speak to someone that just isn't superficial. That has been my experience so far, and I don't think that's going to change any time soon. One is going against the grain to find a Gopher/Gemini server to begin with, and then they take their time journaling their experiences. It's not about engagement, or dopamine hits, or influencing, it's how the "social web should be.