Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 08/05/2023: Recalling Tradewars, Suckless Window Manager, and More



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Mercedes team mates 🏎

        The Mercedes car is difficult again this season. They're a long way from Red Bull's pace. But of their two drivers, Russell seems less bothered by it that Hamilton. In commentary, Coulthard said this is the best car that Russell has ever had, whereas Hamilton is used to a car that can win. They are coming at the problem from different head spaces.

        Hamilton's been around for long enough that he knows how far away they are, and he seems dispirited by that. There's only so much that he can do to make up for the deficiencies. He's getting near the end of his career, and it's quite possible that he'll not have another car good enough for a championship before he retires. But Russell is going to be a round for longer. He's doing a good job against a team mate with extraordinary stats. If the car comes good he knows that he can challenge. And if it doesn't, he's going to have other teams interested.

      • Why not 'inquiry'?

        Just a quick off topic/title update on today:

        Went all the way to the courthouse, through the metal detector, up an elevator no doubt teeming with COVID :-), only to learn from the person taking names that - as they'd allegedly informed me (she didn't say how) - I was granted reprieve from the entire jury selection period (of three months) due to my dad's possible need for my care.

        Except they didn't inform of that. Instead, my sister fly from several states away to care for dad (his current woman needed a cruise..).

        2023, yet communication is still rocket science.

      • Episode 48 Elephants

        Elephants are cool in war, and they have ivory tusks. Do you want your players to be poachers?

      • I'd rather be Ferrari than Ford

        The movie "Ford Vs Ferrari" is a great watch, and you can't help but root for the Ford team. It was an inspiring story in one light, while also being a tragedy when looked at from a different light.

        Something that I've given a lot of thought to in my life is how our society seems to be in a perpetual race towards mediocrity. When I ws a kid there were still a lot of little independent stores on Main Street, one of them being Hummel's grocery, which was a little mom and pop grocery store that had been there for a few generations. Another favorite of mine was Jack Frost, a little combination candy shop and Greek diner where there was a spit of lanb cooking behind the counter and a little Ms Pacman table to waste some time on. They had awesome gyros. Then too, we had an honest to goodness drive in diner called Maxi's, where you could get a hot dog and fries if you wanted but the real attraction was the homemade root beer. And when my dad wanted lumber or other supplies for one of our numerous home improvement projects, he had 84 Lumber or Stambaughs to choose from and could get just about any domestic hardwood he wanted, in stock.

        All of those places are gone. That town has a WalMart, a Home Depot, and a whole army of chain restaurants now. It's depressing.

      • Duolingo

        I've wanted to learn Irish for years. Ages ago the best resource online was a website that had some, uhhh, sketchy real world connections. But the Duolingo owl can be easily summoned on the phone. So, it begins. Girl and woman. Boy and man. Variations on "I". Apple, water, is, has, eat.

    • Technical

      • What is Tradewars?

        Tradewars is a classic multiplayer game that was first released in 1984. It was one of the earliest examples of a game that could be played by multiple users over a network, and it quickly became popular among computer enthusiasts.

        The game is set in space, and players take on the role of space traders who must navigate the galaxy, trading goods and resources with other players. Along the way, they must also defend themselves against pirates and other threats.

      • IPsec, Rust, burritos, stew

        This is yet another post with assorted news, on both IT and cooking.

        A few weeks ago I have set an IPsec VPN, mostly used for home devices, with strongSwan (on both computers, with Debian systems, and mobile devices, with Android: a mobile version is available via F-Droid): password-based authentication (eap-mschapv2) for clients, pubkey authentication (with a personal CA and its certificate manually imported everywhere) for the server. Maybe I would rather use a pre-shared key authentication for both (with it being simpler), but the Android client does not seem to support that. Have set it with static addresses for "roadwarriors", so that they can be identified by an address, and making them available to each other. Tried SIP on top of it: baresip works mostly fine on Android (without video), Twinkle mostly works on Debian (apparently requires user names though), and though I tried Kamailio as a router initially, it is not that useful with static addresses (since P2P can be used easily then). Though most SIP clients support SRTP (and ZRTP), along with TLS. Also tried to control a remote mpd and listen to its streams via M.A.L.P. (also available from F-Droid), which does work. Maybe it could be useful for rsync as well, since it doesn't have encryption on its own (though it is commonly used over SSH, which is more straightforward than setting up IPsec). I have not yet investigated how it works with ICE and XMPP's Jingle: maybe it would help to establish more efficient connections, going through a local machine instead of a remote TURN server (though then again, it is easier to achieve by just setting local XMPP and TURN servers). Anyway, IPsec is nice and it feels good to have it set, at least for a few local machines, even though it is not quite useful to me currently.

      • Suckless window manager

        One of my computer environments is a text-only session supported by tmux. I am using it with much joy for over two years. I'm working also with many true window managers, on Apple, Windows, and GNU/Linux systems. But I am enjoying that almost-true window manager made above of tmux the most. In the passing weeks, I read about Suckless Dynamic Windows Manager aka. dwm. Because of several holiday days, I had the possibility to install dwm on my own, and I realized that it's so similar to my tmux experiences but in a graphical environment. I've set it up as my main window manager and the time spent on playing with it was very good for me.

        When we are looking at [dwm Tutorial] we are able to get the whole concept of that program by looking only at the ASCII sketch which I copied below. So we have a base concept created by: /tags/, /title/, /status/, /master/, and /stack/ terms. And that is all!

      • AI Questionnaire

        A researcher in artistic applications of AI contacted me because some of my projects may have given the impression that I was working with AI, which I don't consider to be the case. However, as our preliminary exchange clarified, there is an EU definition that seems to cast the net wide and would include even very simple Markov models. Now, in fact, my Peptalk program does use a first order Markov transition matrix for letter combinations used to create nonsense words in its own polyglottally trained language. But really, would anyone seriously hype up such a thing as being AI?

        [...]

        When using software written by others, I tend to prefer that which is more transparent about what goes on inside. For example, I use a small subset of Csound for sound synthesis and processing and, when feasible, I write my own programs in C/C++ where I (hopefully) have a detailed understanding of what the program does. The approach is very different from having to deal with the black boxes of proprietary plugins, which I also use to some extent. With machine learning, it appears that no-one understands exactly how it comes that a model achieves what it does. In my algorithmic compositions, I program everything myself from low level routines for sound synthesis to the generation of the entire piece. A curiosity about algorithms or formalised representations of music has been an incentive for this work. Thus, it would be pointless to trust a third party readymade composition program with a few parameters to tweak, instead of having to engage in the modeling from the ground.

        Evolutionary computing was in the vogue when I did my PhD, and since I worked on sound synthesis, feature extraction, and algorithmic composition, it was almost expected that I too should find use for evolutionary algorithms. But I didn't. Limited programming skills may have stopped me, but most of all, I needed a subjective evaluation in the loop which I never found a way to formalise away.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



Recent Techrights' Posts

UEFI "Secure Boot Doesn’t Play Nice at the Moment"
UEFI "Secure Boot" does not improve security. It's an artificial obstacle in service of monopoly.
If You Want to "make your 'Windows PC' lean, mean, and fast" You Will Install GNU/Linux or Some BSD
That kind of article says a lot about IDG
 
Links 15/09/2025: Russia Invades Romanian Airspace, Penske Media Sues Google Over LLM Slop
Links for the day
Links 15/09/2025: Bitcoin ATMs Scam and "Conservative Cryptography" (Backdoors Fantasies)
Links for the day
EPO Imitates Microsoft: "Three Days or More Per Week" Inside the Office to Get a Desk to Work on; "the Office Breaches Its Promise Towards Staff and Acts in Breach of Its Duty of Care"
The EPO serves no actual function in Europe
Links 15/09/2025: Political Affairs, Censorship, and Copyrights
Links for the day
Gemini Links 15/09/2025: Music Genres, Invisible Networks, and Akademy 2025
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 14, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, September 14, 2025
Satya's Plan B: Try to Hide the Massive Extent/Scale/Scope of Microsoft Layoffs
fewer people buy Microsoft
Red Hat News About De Facto Mass Layoffs (Bluewashing) Gone From Reddit (Censored by Gatekeepers), Still Online in The Register
With RTOs, PIPs, relocation etc. expect IBM to "shed off" many Red Hatters
Gemini Links 14/09/2025: ROOPHLOCH, Music, and Reddit
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Google News Infested With Slop (About Half of the Results for "Linux" Today)
This is the sort of junk one finds when looking for "Linux" in Google News these days
Links 14/09/2025: Ricky Hatton Dies and McDonald's Declares War on Tipping Culture
Links for the day
Links 14/09/2025: Disasters for CEOs Obsessed With Slop and Slop Companies School Like Fish
Links for the day
"Bad Shim Signature" (Microsoft 'Secure' Boot)
"Fresh install not booting"
What Microsoft Garrett and Microsoft Lunduke Have in Common
Similar tactics, different "wings"
Links 14/09/2025: US "Economy Sagging", "Michigan Economy Wobbles From Tariffs"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 14/09/2025: Minimalist Snippet Manager and Omarchy Linux
Links for the day
The Face of the Digital Far Right: Microsoft Lunduke
Microsoft Lunduke is an online extremist that belongs to and panders to the far right
20 Years Later and Academia Isn't the Same
"I never dreamed of being a professor"
'Cancel Culture' by the Right: Microsoft Lunduke Contacts People's Employers Trying to Get Them Fired
Microsoft Lunduke panders to extremists online
"Bad Shim Signature"; So 'Secure' That It Overrides Users' Preferences and Turns Itself Back on (Coercive Measure)
This was a few hours ago
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, September 13, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, September 13, 2025
Microsoft is Rapidly Dropped From Web Servers, Shows Survey
Microsoft lost about 8% "market share" in just 3 months
Many GNU/Linux Users Report MOK (Machine Owner Key) Issues in Recent Days
many people don't report this online and never post in Reddit
We Covered UEFI 'Secure Boot' Scandals. The World Listened.
To hell with UEFI 'secure boot'
Links 13/09/2025: Escalations in East Europe and POTUS’ Health Cover-Up
Links for the day
Gemini Links 13/09/2025: Lagrange Turns 5 and Lagrange 1.19.2 Released
Links for the day
Microsoft Inside Your Linux: "Security vulnerability that allowed an attacker to bypass UEFI Secure Boot."
2 hours ago
A New Low for "Linux Journal": Promoting MICROSOFT WINDOWS Using LLM Slop
They've just jumped the shark entirely
Fake News With Fake Numbers About Microsoft
"This is what happens when the world's economy is governed by sick old men"
Slopwatch: "Google News" is Fast Becoming a Mashup of Slopfarms, Linux Journal ("LJ") is a Dump of LLM Slop
Well done, Google News. Google itself can flourish as a slopfarm mashup.
Torturing Users Who Just Want to Run GNU/Linux on Their Own PC
"Linux does not want to install"
The Register MS Still Takes Money to Hype Up "AI" in Articles by Microsoft Resellers With the Term "AI" 30+ Times in Them
Notice how many times they mention "AI"
The Apache Logo News is VERY Old, Racists and 'Anti-Woke' Bigots Look for Something to Incite Other Bigots With
Nothing to see here, move along
Linux Mint 9/11: "4th One Today..." (in Reddit)
Remember that not everyone having an issue reports it to social control media like Reddit
Nepal Will Fall Without a Single Shot Fired, Thanks to Social Control Media
Or very few shots (by the authorities)
European Corruption in the European Patent Office (EPO) Targets Culture
"In reality, the project includes a new “legal instrument” shifting administrative burden and liability on EPO staff while creating new uncertainty and externalising Amicale activities."
European Authorities, Already Bribed and Infiltrated by Microsoft, Won't Help You Find BigBlueButton, Jami, Ring, and Jitsi
Because they're paid by Microsoft and are Microsoft 'addicts' themselves
UEFI Secure Boot Failing, as Expected for Nearly 15 Years Already (Techrights Said This Since 2012)
in the media
Debian 9/11
people report this issue
Gemini and Web Links 13/09/2025: MElon's Slop Grift and "Autonomous Trains"
Links for the day
Moving From Content Management Systems (CMSs) to Static Site Generators (SSGs) Saves You Time, Makes You a Lot More Productive
try to reduce the cost (financial and computational) of running your site
Pursuing Peace Through Violence
You cannot "see" a person's mind, until the mouth opens
Leak: European Patent Office (EPO) is Now Attacking Amicale Clubs
corruption has become the norm and scientists are robbed of any dignity
Can We Please Stop Celebrating Shooters?
"An important point to hammer on is that CoCs were never intended for uniform or symmetric application"
Oracle Fraud (or Defrauding Shareholders)
"the obvious [lie] is that watts are (wasted) electricity [and] and FLOPS are computing capacity"
Geminispace is Growing Faster in 2025 Than It Did in 2024
What matters is that corporations haven't ruined it and LLM slop is extremely rare
Links 13/09/2025: China Punishes for 'Negative' Posts, US Police Unable to Find Shooter
Links for the day
Who's the Mystery Financier of SLAPP Against Techrights and Is That a Millionaire/Billionaire?
Whose idea was it to fund meritless lawsuits against my wife and I?
Slopwatch: Slow Slop Day
This distracts from or may take traffic away from the original articles, actually written by actual people
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 12, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, September 12, 2025