Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • First Post

    As customary, this is the first post
    
    
    I have small thoughts
    wandering all day
    when another appears
    they are gone forever
    

  • Momo a charming book

    Momo is a novel by Michael Ende published in 1974.

    It is only 240 pages.

    Michael Ende is also the writer of The Neverending Story, which was published in 1979.

    In a blog post, Sandra calls Momo an awesome book [1] This is how I discovered Momo.

    About the story:

    Momo is a little child with a gift for listening.

  • Dilly for Dally

    A wise man once told me to let the universe take me down whatever path it takes me. Sometimes, I worry too much about the future, and less about the present. So, in June, I did just that - stayed focus on the present, and let the universe just guide me wherever.

    Well. In June, it guided me to the bookstore I almost always frequent, where a young man asked for my number. We spent the past few months talking on and off. We both struggle with our mental health, which meant we'd sometimes go weeks without talking, only for me or him to send a quick little message that spiraled into conversations. This Friday was our first date, and it was wonderful. Not quite what I expected it to be - a movie date that led to something very sweet and lovely. A part of me - the part that still, for some reason, abides by old school rules of courting - thought that may have been too fast. Maybe he only wanted a quickie, or was bored that day. But then... he wouldn't still be responding to my messages even after, right? And he wouldn't have wanted to randomly hang out on Saturday, even though he's usually at work until 9, right?

  • Whose Land Do You Live On: Bruce Lincoln and the Method That Makes a Claim Answerable

    Whose land do you live on? Hold that question; it is a question about method. I will argue that method is the part of your research that makes your claims answerable by someone else. I will make the case by separating three words people use as one, by reading Bruce Lincoln's "Theses on Method" (1996) with his critics, and by naming the four places method must appear inside an article.

    Theory, methodology, and method are not synonyms. Theory tells you what counts as an object of study in the first place: religion is discourse, or practice, or a system of symbols. Methodology argues that a set of procedures fits that object. Method is the procedures themselves, what you do with your sources between Monday morning and Friday afternoon. Break it into three parts: 1) the object, a specific set of texts, people, practices, or institutions rather than "faith" or "the church"; 2) the operations, meaning you read closely, you interview, you compare, you trace a term through an archive; 3) the warrants, why those operations fit that object. Why interviews and not sermons.

  • The Only Way Out Is Through: Accelerationism as a Wager, Not a Speed

    On Friday, 17 November 2023, OpenAI's board fired its own CEO. The next day Marc Andreessen, one of the most powerful investors in technology, posted a single word: "e/acc!" Not a sentence; a faction. Within days the press had a frame for the fight: doomers versus accelerationists. Both words come out of French theory books from the 1970s. I will argue that accelerationism is a wager about strategy rather than a claim about speed, and I will show it by holding together two sentences a careful reader has to keep in the same hand: the formula, and the flinch.

    The plain version first. Accelerationism is the family of ideas that says the exit from capitalism runs through capitalism, not around it. You do not get out by slowing down, and you do not get out by standing outside the system waiting for it to fall over. You get out by pushing harder. Steven Shaviro compressed the position into one line: the only way out is through. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, who edited the field's standard anthology, put it less gently: the only radical response to capitalism is to accelerate its own uprooting, alienating tendencies. The forces which tear up old jobs, old towns, old certainties (deregulation, automation) get treated as the door rather than the wall.

  • Sept 29 2 p.m. Jen’s Second Transplant

    After getting the call yesterday afternoon, we are in Cleveland now. They are doing a lot of check-in testing. Jen’s mom and sister are here, and our boys.

    It’s a lot of waiting at the moment until we find out if the lungs from the donor are viable. We probably won’t know that until 7 or 8 p.m.

• Politics and World Events

  • "The Billionaire is Wrong" Chess – a whistle-stop tour of chess variants and "mods"

    A long time ago, long enough for me to have forgotten when it happened, a certain very rich man once wrote something about Chess that implies it's not very good. He claims that the game is "too simplistic", and lists a bunch of things that could be understood as being incompatible to being a battle simulator.

    The Internet of course instantly clowned on him in various ways, but I would like to take this opportunity to take a slightly different angle. As the reader might be aware, Chess is a very old game, and it's rather like a language too – starting from a humble beginnings as a dice-based game in India, it travelled east and west throughout the Old World changing and developing as it goes. Its footprint can be found from Lisbon to Tokyo and its legacy has extended to well over a millennium. In every new place it has found home in – as far north as Mongolia, and as far south as Thailand, through the Middle East and North Africa and of course, into Europe, it has changed ever so slightly as players experimented and created town-by-town variations, and the nations post-Westphalia standardised on one. Today, the game we know today, and the one that this very rich man has tried to make some criticisms out of, is in this context known as FIDE Chess.

• TV

  • Smart people modelling stupid people, and insurance

    There was an old 4chan screenshot about how two different television shows handle smart people: one is about how a smart person models other smart people, and the other is how a stupid person models a smart person. The gist of the matter is that the former is written in a logical and is more or less /actually/ how smart people operate, whereas the latter treats the smart person as more or less a wizard.

    Considerably less attention has been given to modelling a stupid person. Writing someone stupid /seems/ easy, but is it really? I don't know, because I rarely do so, and it seems like few writers make that too, probably because unintelligent characters are hard to write about unless they happen to have some other more interesting quality that compensates for it. There are characters that are stupid in various stories – Wheatley from Portal 2 comes to mind – but there hadn't been much analysis to this end.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Jet Lag: The Game is a show I like

    Jet Lag is an online video series that runs episodes on Nebula, then YouTube a week later. It's a travel competition show that features a small, recurring cast of players who play games at map-scale; the show describes itself as a board game where the world is the board.

  • source for the game

    I was writing about the game and went to clean up the source so I could release it to the general public and nuked my entire code base.

    Luckily, I was developing it as a guix package, so a trial run from not too long ago was in my guix store and I was able to recover most of the source before finally pushing it to a remote. So I lost a bunch of progress and all my git history, but I managed to svae the game.

    I also nuked my new system config, but discovered that when I do a guix home reconfigure it actually saves the version of the config that was used to do all the work. I just had to dig it out of ~/.guix-home/configuration.scm and I was good to continue customizing.

  • how hard could a simple text game be

    My goal was to create a simple text-based game that would run under vanila python in a terminal and not need anything fancy or any additional libraries. Seemed simple. I was going to make a platformer that presented levels comprised of enemies that were made up of the words in whatever file it was passed. I was going to use the word frequency in the body of text to determine what would be enemies and what would be weapons. Still pretty simple. There’d be some really strong aggressive enemies that track down the player and then there would just be the background enemies that wander about and hurt the player by bumping into them coincidentally. The weaker enemies can be jumped on and the stronger ones require using a weapon. Still pretty simple.

  • I want to be a human.

    I don't want to be a cog in a machine.
    I don't want to be a part of a machine.
    I don't want to be a machine.
    
    
    I want to be a human, to be myself.
    I want to live where I could do what I desire.
    
    
    A place where I can be myself.
    The place where I does not belong to anyone but me,
    where I can think for myself, before think for the others.
    

  • I won't

    in wanting there is fear
    clinging on tightly 
    the what ifs and the buts 
    and the things I refuse to say
    but I won't let go of the wanting
    the yearning, the dreaming 
    I won't, I won't, I won't
    

  • Abusing the iPhone Duo hinge API to play Flappy Bird

    The last iPhone I bought was the iPhone X, about nine years ago.

    Everything Apple released after that felt like an iterative upgrade, so I wandered off to explore the more exotic corners of Android: keyboard phones like the BlackBerry Key2, tiny phones like the Jelly Star, all of them have their merits.

    In the end, though, I always landed back on Pixel phones running GrapheneOS, mainly because I want photos that stay sharp even with a bit of hand shake.

  • LLM's reek and so do their addicts... / LLM assisted/generated support emails.. / are people are so fucking lazy and stupid they can't write their own emails now?

    A few weeks ago, I had taken ownership of a rather interesting support case, where a CUDA code would write out its files and checkpoints and run until completion; exit code 0. However, the user reported "data holes" in their output files that would cause corruption when viewed at a later time. Obviously, this isn't good and this isn't something the help desk personnel should deal with for obvious reasons.

    When I read over the email, there was formatting that I had (luckily) never seen before... It was odd, although there were still enough obviously-human elements to it, such as the use of Engrish, sentences formatted oddly (to a native speaker), etc. I was more concerned about potential data loss than the email, so I engaged with the user and tried my best to ignore this. I'll post the screen shots below, and you can decide if there was LLM assistance/authorship or not. I've used yellow airbrushing to highlight the "odd" formatting. See below.

  • Who will buy the iPhone Duo?

    Personally, I was never enamoured with the form factor. Too expensive, too thick and too fragile. But the small number of people I know who own one repeatedly and emphatically told me that they'd never go back to a candy-bar style phone.

    Having used a Galaxy Z Fold 8 for a few weeks, I've completely changed my mind. The passport-like size of the external display doesn't make a lot of sense until you use it, but the book-like dimensions immediately feel just right. It's a delight to use. The internal screen is perfect for video, gaming, or web browsing. I can happily fire up a terminal and do extended work on my homelab, which was always a pain on my regular-sized phone, but I’d often do it anyway because that was the device I had with me.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • SPOOKY ROOPHLOCH

      Well I just noticed that I've got a pretty creepy scene going on here. I'm sitting outside on an almost silent night on a little stool before an old wooden folding table with a laptop and lantern upon it, the latter picking out the twisted remains of a dead tree emerging amongst some thistles, while directly behind me there's a red full moon poking up just above the horizon. Now while the text I type becomes obscured by bugs attracted to the light of the laptop's scren, a breeze blows through the grass rustling it like whispers in the warm night.

      But I'm not out here to dabble in the occult, this night at least, science will give me all the power I need to reach you without resort to waves of sound, radio, or everyday telepathy. As it was a year ago, light will be my carrier, over a distance of twenty two meters back to the verandah of my house, where awaits an internet-connected laptop ready to beam my words into the intersphere.

    • Test Post

      I'm just getting comfy, don't mind me.