Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Polyphemus Moth!

    On August 23 this year, I saw a peculaiar looking white little ball sitting in my yard. I bent down to take a closer look and realized it was a silkmoth cocoon (family Saturniidae)! I picked it up, expecting to find it empty, and was shoceked to feel the pupa inside twitching around and freaking out that it was moving. I thought it would be fun to see what it would hatch into, but I didn't have a net cage I could use to keep the moth contained.

    Years ago, I was madly into carnivorous plants. One of the very few issues I had with growing venus flytraps was summertime temperatures -- they like full sun, but they do not particularly appreciate the Texas summer heat that comes with it, even when they're growing in a larger pot. After some experimentation, I found they grew much better under 30% shade cloth from about June to September, so I built a little PVC frame to hold the shade cloth over my plants. I quit growing carnivorous plants for a variety of reasons (mostly their very high water needs and what I percieved as a degradation of the community, but also mental health), but never got around to getting rid of my little shade cloth frame. I saw it sitting there and realized I could use zip ties to add on two little bits of mesh on either end of it and make a cage for my moth! I'd've preferred for it to be taller and narrower, but I wanted something I could throw together quickly.

• Technology and Free Software

  • I Don’t Want to Interact With Stochastic Parrots

    I don’t care if you call it AI, LLM, chatbot, or whateverGPT. I simply don’t want to interact with it in any form. If you interact with me, make sure to never send me any output from those nor to use it as a "source" to justify one of your arguments.

    I’m one of those people deeply interested in all the extraordinary stuff other humans have to say. Unfortunately, life is already too short to hear them all. I need to make a lot of choices. That’s why I will not tolerate any attempt to steal the little time I’ve on this planet by making me interact with stochastic algorithms trained to produce tons of "average," non-human content.

    The direct consequence of my choice is that I will refuse to interact with humans who take pride in making themselves a meat interface between me and the algorithm they’ve chosen to replace their free will.

  • Emacs, Bignums, and Logarithms

    Emacs calc has bignums which allow it to handle numbers bigger than the largest machine number. This size is limited to 2^N, where N is the integer-width variable, which by default is set 65536. In calc, the largest bignum I could generate using calc-power was 2^65535 before getting a overflow error signal. Here is 2^65535, which in decimal is 19729 digits in length: [...]

  • Internet/Gemini

    • ROOPHLOCH 2026!

      solderpunk has announced the annual ROOPHLOCH 2026 (Remote Outdoor Off-Grid Phlogging Challenge) in a recent phost at the zaibatsu circumlunar colony. [1] I have participated in the past and would like to continue. Unsure what I will do this year or where or how it will happen, but I do enjoy the annual gopher event and helps me to not feel so...disconnected. I hope to see some of you participate as well this year!