Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Developing a sense of style

    It turns out that choosing clothes that make you look and feel good is hard. With a few exceptions that was never really something I was concerned about prior to a few years ago.

    At some point I thought "why is my wardrobe mostly just jeans and boring coloured t-shirts?" After that point I made an effort to wear more colourful clothes. Kinda a reverse Johnny Cash's Man in Black - while the world is still shit I'd rather inject a bit of joy.

    Uniqlo's clothes are nice but their colour selection is, frankly, sad. You get greyscale, muted blues and if you're lucky a dark red or a mustard. Even their wall of different coloured socks is not exciting. Other shops seem to be, by and large, following the same trends.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Choosing Sides in the Holy War

    The topic of Generative AI is something I've been mulling over for several months now. If you've done anything computer-adjacent over the past couple of years, you will not have missed (although you may have wanted to) the topic of LLMs and AI. The breathless hype; the aggressive adoption in the industry; the incredible and worsening crunch on memory components; the questionable billions of dollars being invested back and forth; the rush to build data centers; and, most pertaining to this post, the holy war in the open source community, declaring death to the clankers, may they pry my keyboard from my cold, dead hands. My own employer is very much on the AI bandwagon, and through this contractual obligation, I have had the opportunity to use frontier agentic models for software development. This is to say, I am not basing my opinions on hearsay or "vibes", but actual evidence and experience of using these tools.

    As a flexible technology, Gen AI has many facets to it: speech, music, images, video, text, program code, to name a few. An interesting note to keep in mind is that all these have traditionally been something that only human skill and creativity could achieve at a high, meaningful quality. For example, text-to-speech was always robotic and stilted before machine learning entered the picture. With modern techniques, you can generate extremely natural-sounding speech. When it comes to the more creative arts, while technically proficient, the results of Gen AI lack soul. The same applies to prose as well as images and audio. You can generate paragraphs of pleasant, well-flowing text, but ultimately it is hollow and plastic-wrapped. So far, nothing has changed the fact that actual art is born when the human mind imbues meaning and message into a medium; it is fundamentally a form of communication out-of-band with its actual physical manifestation.

  • Burning CD-Rs

    Last Christmas, my parents bought me a Discman clone.

    I wanted to get back into listening to CDs, since it is far more convenient and practical than listening to vinyl all the time.

    While I like vinyl and the patient deliberation it quietly demands of you, it is a very expensive hobby unless you are particularly savvy at finding hidden gems in charity shops among fusty old Donny Osmond records and coffee-stained Nolan Sisters singles.

    These days I will only buy vinyl versions of my most favourite albums but, even so, that has proven to be expensive since they retail at around ~£30 each on average. My vinyl record collection consists mainly of 80s synthpop, goth, ambient electronic, jazz and video game soundtracks.

  • Now in Mono

    You may have already noticed if you are reading this post on a conventional web browser but I've developed a new CSS theme for my Gemini capsule.

    I've dubbed it Hardcopy Mono and it is designed to mimic documents printed on a monochrome L*serJet printer, especially capturing the neutral greys of the toner and the slight off-white of high-quality printer paper.

    It is subtle and indistinct by design. Instead of demanding your attention, it allows for my words to stand on their own merits, while also being presented as clearly as possible.