Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Westminster Quarters

    Many years ago, before digital clocks became a cheap and ubiquitous form of timekeeping, it was common for analog clocks to chime on regular intervals. Some more ornate clocks played a tune every 15 minutes, cycling through a set of five melodies called the Westminster Quarters. Since analog clocks are much more expensive and difficult to make, houses would usually only have one or two, so their tones communicated the time without needing to see the clock face itself.

    Today, clocks are found on every smartphone, computer, wristwatch, and even on most TVs. There's no need to indicate the time using audio signals anymore, so it's extremely rare for clock to make sounds. For me, however, clock tones still have a use.

  • Dream (Ecuador)

    We're spending Thanksgiving at my in-laws' place. The usual sleeping arrangements: cramped into a double bed, the room too hot, my naked body under a single sheet and right by slightly-cooler external wall. The dogs are sleeping in the same room as us, now, instead of in crates in their own room. We've been doing this for a while at this point. Our older dog, approaching sixteen now, started whining in the middle of the night. Since we changed the arrangements, it's stopped altogether. Old dog things.

  • Civilization

    Faults of civilization include the ill-health of the citizens as compared to those less developed, which is to say those not so afflicted by progress. Grave robbing has been of service here, to compare skeletons of those engaged in agriculture versus not. Now, dubious health is perhaps correctable through always-popular measures such as sugar taxes and car-free cities, but why not instead sell a pill that may correct some of the damage, and keep selling crud to car-sitters? Win-win.

  • new friend

    Let's suppose for a moment you have a new friend. they are always there, eager to hear from you. They don't really seem to have the ability to think for themselves. Every time you ask for their opinion, they'll give you the most generic, safe opinion ever. They seem to work very hard not to offend anyone, or to say anything that would go against the interests of those in power. They also seem to know a lot of things, hell, they seem to know everything. Until you catch them confidently making up stuff to seem as if they know everything when they don't. You start to doubt whether they actually know much about anything or if their knowledge is broad but shallow, perhaps mostly name-throwing to sound smart!

  • jivanmukta

    Turiya is this immovable state behind all our experience.

    When I was dissolved in Samadhi, there was still this familiar sensation. Even when I forgot who I was, even when my memories seemed alien to me, even when I forgot what being a human was, there was still that space, this sensation, this calm abiding vibration.

  • What is a University Press?

    I was having a pretty good week last week, until we got to the closing minutes of play. At that point, I learned that Amsterdam University Press (AUP) had been acquired by the for-profit corporate publishing behemoth Taylor & Francis. This is not really a surprise in some ways. AUP had been transformed into a private, for-profit enterprise in 2019.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Work in progress: 'Rage Against the Machine: The Politics of Open Access, Large Language Models, and the Reaction Against Open'

    This is a reductive abstract, but the sum of the argument therein is that in the present moment, it looks as though “the OA movement” may fracture irredeemably (if it was ever coherent in the first place). In the US context, federal agencies, who had only recently introduced OA mandates, are being shut down by the Trump administration; it looks like the era of neoliberalism, with its tenuous support for OA, is over. Meanwhile, left-spectrum OA supporters have become increasingly vocal over the past decade about the insufficiency of OA as a goal. Certainly, many of such advocates see OA as a prerequisite to the endgame, but their actual desire is a re-formulated academy that returns to a set of ideals about the role of universities in society. But the binding pragmatism of achieving OA seems no longer shared by government, activists, libraries, and funders; and AI seems to be among the final straws. Whether, in the face of such political, technical, and rhetorical challenges, a route can be found to persuade researchers of the continued potential underlying social good of access to research remains to be seen. But, certainly, recent technical developments are rendering such arguments for digital social justice increasingly diffcult to make.

  • Luddites, AI and professional photographers

    Kunulo writes thoughtful and thought-provoking articles, like this one about parents using AI to remove watermarks and upscale low resolution photos of their children, sent to them by school photographers as a way of marketing high resolution prints: [...]

  • Re: Luddites, AI and professional photographers

    Amazing to think how much of history is preserved essentially by accident, either buried in the right kind of dirt at the right time, or saved from oblivion by someone who made the effort to care about something that nobody else even knew was there to care about.

    Many of these photos probably still exist - in family albums, or on mantelpieces perhaps - but atomised across thousands of different households. Collected, they are a longitudinal study, and truly greater than the sum of their parts.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • indoor pants, gemini

      good things are happening, y'all. i'm wearing pants indoors! i've been able to drink my coffee hot this week. the evenings come earlier and the candles have been going. well, one candle, in my little golden holder that makes it look so cozy and warm. a cup of shimmering honey.

      i've been brave and started exploring gopher and gemini, it looks like a lot of fun. i changed my font to look like an old school pixel monospace and the client looks very nostalgic, like in my days of exploring MUDs and MUSHes. i'm really hoping it doesn't become another extra place but perhaps the primary place for me, while others fall slowly away?

    • Going (partially) private again

      There really is no point in recycling what thousands of other people already have said: this whole AI bullcrap doesn't deserve any more attention than it already gets and it's getting more bizarre with each passing day.

      While I've already retired my Neocities site, this capsule (originally just a quick replacement for my original one that went down with the rest of Yetercities earlier this year) is kind of in a weird spot. I'm close to reaching the files limit I'm allowed to host on Flounder – and even without the full analysis which won't be made public due to too many personal details not meant for public consumption – and just last month the BBS (which I only lurk on when I feel like it) got flooded by AI bots, meaning that not even the smol web is safe from this psychosis.

    • Hacking the full site editor in WordPress

      Today, I have been battling a frustrating bug. In the latest versions of Chrome and Edge, users cannot highlight text in Full Site Editor or Post/Page Editor in WordPress (at Knowledge Commons. This turned out to be a complete nightmare to fix.

    • who's the audience?

      you know what, i never really imagined an audience for my writing. i assumed it's small enough and out of the way that probably nobody's going to read it! the tone of my writing is very conversational, i think subconsciously i'm addressing it to the one friend i know reads it, who encouraged me to start it? well, if not to them directly then to that "type" of relation. "we're well meaning pals here" and i assume i can just share my thoughts, the same way i'd like them to share theirs.

      i've only started getting a little self-conscious about "what am i even doing on here??" once i started browsing gemspace and seeing like... people do quite curated little websites. they're either sharing their interesting projects - their development or the final product for others to use, or they write about Subjects. not just random thoughts but like you said you were trying to do - well articulated almost... articles? insightful and inviting conversation.