Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 16/05/2023: Centralisation Concerns and New smolZINE



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • 🔤SpellBinding: HIYORSL Wordo: BOOKY
      • Poem Instead of a Post

        Years ago my mother told me that she still felt the same as she did when she was younger, but when she looked in the mirror she didn't recognize the woman looking back at her. I'm feeling some of that these days: aging well (I tell myself), but still aging, wondering how I can in some respects feel so close to who I've been throughout my life, but also feel so far away from it.

      • Lantashi's Dance - Huyrlikan

        I am continuing my writing adventure. I have a secret project that only my close friends and family know about, that I hope to publish this year or next. I've made really good progress on that.

        But I am also continuing with my light-hearted stories, such as the one about me, Lantashi (the Dungens & Dragons character who also happens to post on Gemini!). I hope to keep publishing those here, on Lantashi's Capsule.

      • Ruminations on self

        It's really hard being perpetually watched by someone that'll guilt you when they think you're fucking up with respect to their interests in your doing things for them.

        Oh, the madness of performing for self-interested audience!

      • Bulldogs Can't Swim

        Years ago I had a giant Argentinian bulldog. I would never own a bulldog, and the idea of 'owning' animals generally irks me, but that's what happened. Our neihgbor kept putting a bulldog puppy into our kid's arms, and after a while everyone wanted to keep it. And so we wound up with a bulldog.

        We also had another dog, a fast mutt obviously built for racing, and the bulldog grew up alongside, thinking she had to run fast. And she did -- she didn't have much stamina, but she could sprint! She was a bowling ball, knocking everything and everyone who stood in her way, to the delight of children.

      • Christina's 5 questions

        We spend almost a third of our lives comatose, hallucinating, mostly amnestic, automatically washing our brains, doing routine maintenance with elevated core temperature. You can wake us. If we go too long without sleep we get paranoid, hallucinate, forget stuff, get sick, intentionally kill ourselves, or accidentally crash our means of conveyance.

      • Football Club Barcelona wins La Liga 2023

        And just like that, with a few games to spare, FCB won their 27th La Liga Title. Crazy! It was a really good domestic season for them and one that was hard thought. Xavi has been at the club for 1.5 Seasons and has improved the team's defense dramatically. FCB has always been a club with a style that is more focused on attacking, rather than defending. However, after Neymar and Suarez left the club, the attack has been lackluster, and I guess one way to help with attacking is to make sure you don't let any goals through. Idealistically, the club are not playing "Barcelona Football" anymore, Tiki Taka is gone, teams know how to defend against it. This is the difficult part for Xavi; trying to maintain that Barcelona style, but yet still winning all the trophies.

      • Hey bartender, a water please. Cold.

        I want to be the guy that made it by doing what he loves. IT is burning me out. I don’t want to stare at a computer all day long. But nothing else pays so well right now. And with my family it is hard to ‘jump into’ something else.

      • Mary Magdalene

        Here's a short story for you all. I did post it when I first arrived here at The Midnight Pub a couple of weeks ago, but I deleted it, because I got the feeling that some of you didn't get it, misunderstood it, or even got offended by it. That wasn't my intention, it's just a story, a beautiful one in my (perhaps a bit screwed up) mind, not because of how it's written (I wouldn't dare have such an inflated opinion of myself), but because of what it's all about. It's my take on the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. A struggling carpenter's son who found his true calling in life, a rich and well-situated man's daughter who didn't wanna get married to someone twice her age, someone she didn't really know, didn't love. A holy epitaph of sorts, a love story and an hommage to Harry Dean Stanton, the actor, singer and renaissance man, who I really admired for his candor, his singing and his straight-forward acting. I wrote the story a few weeks after his death in September 2017. I've put some autobiographical elements in it, but mainly, it's just a made-up fairy tale to be amused by, or, of course, to be fucking outraged by, if that's the reader's inclination. It is what it is. A bit harsh, explicitly outspoken (x-rated), here and there, I know, but with this said, I truly believe that you beautiful people can see through all that and find your way into the heart of Mary – the character, the symbol, the woman who did what she needed to do to be able to follow her heart – to believe in herself, in the man she loved (platonically or otherwise), in something greater than herself, in truth, in forgiveness, in compassion, in humanity!

    • Politics

      • The owner class

        I sometimes mention the owner class on here and I just wanna be super specific that it’s not a specific smokey-room secret society group of people, nor a specific ethnicity.

        [...]

        This means that 13% of the people have 87% of the stuff. (Pareto wasn't too far off.)

        And then among the 87% remaining people, it’s once again true that 13% of the people have 87% of the stuff, and so on—the owner class is you and me, at one point, compared to the global poor.

      • Brownshirts vs climate

        The throughline of fascism that’s been most resilient through modern day is the idea of class struggle being replaced by “workers should comply with owners against a common enemy”, and then that enemy is pretty replacable with the scare of the day.

        Pit-in-the-stomach feeling reading the news today as the brownshirts in Sweden are gearing up to delay climate solutions even harder, through outright denial. This is a horror show since the other parties are already bad and insufficient at climate stuff. We definitiviely can’t afford to add a big old stinking Overton magnet in the opposite direction.

      • How the failures of psychiatrists contribute to people self-diagnosing with adhd

        Over the years i've heard and read many negative experiences of psychiatrists. Most of the people relating these experiences are women and/or afab; most of the psychiatrists involved are cis men. Common themes are arrogance, condescension and dismissiveness - not particularly surprising, given the presence of not only gender dynamics, but also things like class privilege on the part of the psychiatrists involved. The stories range from "that wasn't so great" through to "I was actively psychologically damaged or traumatised".

        Although, in theory, one can lodge complaints about these things with various professional and government bodies, it's unlikely to be a trivial process in practice. In fact, it's likely to require a substantial amount of resources, both psychological and financial - and many clients of psychiatrists simply don't have these resources. Worse, there can even be limitations on sharing information via informal channels: here in Australia, private Facebook groups can be held liable for defamation if people in that private group say “I had this negative experience with this particular psychiatrist”

      • Autism, the mental health professions, gaslighting, and trauma

        i recently mentioned that the mental health professions have gaslit and traumatised us autistics. Someone quite reasonably asked “In what way?” My reply got long, so i've decided to instead put it up as a post. tl;dr: If you're at all concerned about the mental health professions' historical and current attitudes towards us queers, you should definitely be concerned about their historical and current attitudes towards autistics.

      • Populism

        It’s weird how the shift from workers vs owners to pluralists vs populists has been presented as this new phenomenon by commentators like Norris and Inglehart, the latter arguing that it’s because of how the new generation has new values.

    • Technical

      • "the only way to win, is not to play"

        I haven't. I have nothing against AI, but I will not be delving into it with reckless abandon (or at all) like I did w/ the WWW in the mid-90s. A lot of headache (for me, my life) could have been head off if I had not gone down The Rabbithole.

        The Web is great. It's also so elementary in "concept" (or was, now it's a reality) that it's hard to imagine civilization became so enamored with it.

        A server talks to another server. The messages can be, and are, fast. Fairly quicker than the postal service, and back and forth continuously should one choose.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Self Referential Post

          It refers to itself in three different ways:

          First it describes itself in sufficient detail that a casual observer could identify whether any post is equivalent to my post; although of course they could not be certain that it’s the same instance or even whether it’s identical to my post.

        • Are we rebuilding the centralized web, minus tracking?

          It has been some time since my last gemlog entry (or blog post for that matter)… Mainly because real life and work has been crazier than usual… I've managed to stay more or less up to date with content I wanted to read, but not with my writings… But when free time is more limited than usual, priorities and choices must be made ^^.

          /!\: This post contains what I believe will be a *very* unpopular opinion about bubble and how gemini is getting more centralized and dependant on a small number of users / services, if you disagree and might get angry, ignoring this post may be the best :). I don't expect response to this post, so don't force yourself either. /!\

        • Bubble and Geminispace.org - Worry About Centralization

          If I were to choose a core mission for the project, it would be to enhance social interactions inside the Gemini community. I think something fundamental was lost after the Gemini mailing list shut down. While aggregated gemlogs are a sort of a communication medium, the level of friction is very high and there are quite high technical barriers to participation. (The Usenet group is good to have around, but let's face it: in the year 2023, Usenet is a relic.) I would be very happy if Bubble and, for now, Geminispace.org, can bring a sense of cohesion and connectedness to the community in a way that is "native" to the Gemini protocol.

        • Re: Bubble and Geminispace.org - Worry About Centralization

          I do kinda agree with @bacardi55 that centralization is dangerous because it decreases resilience, even when the central power is as benevolent and kind as @skyjake haha.

          While it's not currently having any negative effects, just the basic surface way in which browsing geminispace.org using Lagrange is analogous to using google.com on the chrome browser makes me a little uneasy.

        • Station's thoughts on gemini and centralization?
        • feeds are a dark pattern

          I'm glad to see the current wave of non-corporate social media. I'm also disappointed to see how most of them copy the worst feature of corporate ones - the feed. I know this might sound weird, especially if you haven't tried out anything else - but bear with me.

          One of the issues with feeds is how they (don't) handle the conflict between frequent vs. rare posters. Their posts are all mixed together. The only way to ensure that you've seen the posts from the latter is to try to scroll down as much as possible each time - which gets addictive. The alternative is to just take short peeks of the feed - seeing posts only from a small minority of the people you follow.

        • smolZINE - Issue 38

          We're back! You've all been busy doing some pretty rad things around geminspace and that's great to see. As always, if you are enjoying smolZINE and have any desire to contribute, please check out the Community Contributions section at the bottom and get in touch. HINT: The more contributions I get the more often I will publish new issues ;-).

        • Slightly around the Gemini horn

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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Attacks on Techrights Are Only Making Techrights Bigger and Even More Popular
A week ago they offered to settle with us
EPO Staff Can Go Listen to Richard Stallman Next Week in Munich (Technical University of Munich, Rudolf-Diesel Hörsaal (MW2001) on Campus Garching at 18:00)
"The talk is open to the public and attendance is free. Registration is not required."
 
Our Sites Continue to Improve
LLM slop has had no noticeable impact on us
Gemini Links 15/10/2025: Neovim, Helix Compared and Gemlog.blue Now Closed
Links for the day
Links 15/10/2025: Mass Layoffs at Amazon, OneDrive Spyware Revved Up, More 'Gen Z Protests'
Links for the day
The EPO's Staff Engagement Survey 2025 is Already Tainted by Intimidation by EPO Management (Trying to Influence Outcomes by Scaring Genuine, Honest Critics)
"[W]e have received reports that, following the previous survey, teams with negative responses were reproached or questioned about their answers..."
The DDoS Attacks by Microsoft's Scam Altman and Other Slop Charlatans and Frauds is Hurting the FSF, Delinking It From Copyleft Projects
This impacts a lot more than access to the licences
Microsoft Scanning Faces in Photos People Upload to Microsoft (Even Unconsciously), Slashdot Turns Report About It Into "Microsoft Sez" (Says)
Or "let's repeat the lies from a PR person/Microsoft's publicist"
[Teaser] Angel Aledo Lopez the Manipulator (Nepotism, Poll Rigging, and Other EPO Corruption)
We'll discuss this later today or tomorrow, based on internal EPO material
Epic Metaphor for End of IBM: "The IBM Demolition is Down to the Last Shards!"
Nothing lasts forever
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 14, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, October 14, 2025
Proprietary and DRM Prisons Spiralling Down the Sinkhole? Not Just Yet.
Let's hope that more people will flee to GNU/Linux
The European Patent Office (EPO), the Second-Largest Institution in Europe, is Cracking Down on Recreational Activities
Without AMICALE activities, and as staff already says it's pressured to work more for less, how can the EPO recruit bright people?
Transparency: FSFE financial reports exclude speaker fees and expenses
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Many Developers Have Many Political Views, They'll Never Agree on Everything
It's an effort to divide and destroy, not build
Gemini Links 14/10/2025: An Opportunity to Consider GNU/Linux and Another Simple IRC Client
Links for the day
Slopwatch: UbuntuPIT, LinuxSecurity, Google News, and the Serial Slopper Brian Fagioli
Nothing of merit here, just more slop
Links 14/10/2025: Lack of Trust in Slop and "Retirement Challenges"
Links for the day
Rhonda D'Vine, Gerfried Fuchs, Pronouns & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
At IBM, Relocation Means Layoffs (Downsizing)
Silent or 'invisible' layoffs?
Central Staff Committee of the European Patent Office (EPO) Warns That EPO Management is Robbing or Manipulating Pension Funds Again
Faking "growth" is just about as bad as forgery
Probably a Lot Worse Than LLM Slop: GNOME Tying Itself to Divisive Politics, Even Where It's Clearly Not Relevant
Something has gone terribly wrong in GNOME
Links 14/10/2025: Microsoft OneDrive Scanning Faces in Photos (Without Asking First), "OpenAI Says It Will Move to Allow Smut"
Links for the day
They Generally Don't Like Scholars, as They're Less Compelled or Pressured to Repeat What Corporations and Oligarchs Say
People who loathe scholars have an agenda in mind that, unlike that of reasonable people, revolves around controlling people
Dystopian Trends in Technology Make Richard Stallman More Relevant Than Ever
It's good to see him attracting vast audiences
Belated New Article About Last Thursday's Lecture by Richard Stallman in Helsinki, Finland
there are good reasons to pay with cash, not limited to privacy
Attacking Richard Stallman Has Become 'Career Suicide'
If you're going to viciously attack somebody, make sure your arguments are rock-solid
Microsoft's Failing XBox Business Has Turned Games Into Funerals
How does it feel to depend on Microsoft?
Yesterday's "Distinguished Lecture" by Richard Stallman Possibly Attended by Close to 1,000 People
The capacity of the place is about 900
Slop Poisons Everything
Imagine wanting to find what Torvalds has just said or what has just been released
Taking Software Freedom 'Mainstream'
interest in Software Freedom must have grown
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 13, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, October 13, 2025
Gemini Links 14/10/2025: Ada Lovelace Day, Sony CLIE PEG-TG50 Review, Why to Avoid Network Solutions
Links for the day
Richard Stallman (RMS) Announced His Talk Less Than 24 Hours Before It Took Place and Still Filled Up the Auditorium at Sapienza Università di Roma
Photos from yesterday evening [...] It looks like it was a very successful event
The EPO's War on Techrights Was a Massive Mistake
The EPO started the SLAPPs after we had published a few hundreds of articles; we've since then published close to 6,000 because the attacks on us emboldened insiders to help us
General-Purpose Computers to Become Growing Area of Coverage
Without them, we have little left for controlling our lives
"They missed a great opportunity to shut up." -Jacques Chirac
Brett Wilson LLP has been trying to cheat the legal system many times
Harassment evidence: Switzerland, overcrowded fitness and yoga centers, incompetence and racism in accident response
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Vincent Danjean & Debian NXIVM collateral, blackmail risks
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
In Sweden This Past Friday Richard Stallman Explained Why Copyleft is Important
And he didn't have to 'bash' BSDs, either
IBM Layoffs Due to a Lack of Money and Company Debt Rising by Almost 10 Billion Dollars in 6 Months
IBM didn't buy Red Hat for any ideological reasons; it was a fast "cash grab" for revenue
Forbes Already Stopped Being a News Sites. Now It's a Spam and Propaganda Platform for "Paying Partners" (Companies).
news from Forbes became very scarce
Is the Second-Largest Institution in Europe (EPO) Gradually Becoming More Like a Sweatshop?
Underpaid, unqualified, inexperienced and incompatible people are already recruited to replace veteran examiners
The Register MS Has No FOSS Coverage Anymore
The Editor in Chief is like a Microsoft plant
Links 13/10/2025: "Toasty Subwoofer" and WiFi Speakers "Are About To Go Dumb"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 13/10/2025: iNaturalist and Tove Jansson’s Moominpappa at Sea
Links for the day
Microsoft Does Not Deny That Large Retailers Like Walmart, Costco and Target Are Giving Up on XBox (and Not Stocking It)
No doubt XBox is in trouble and rumours suggest that more mass layoffs are imminent
We'll Encourage Richard Stallman to Talk About Software Patents at the EPO Next Week When He Visits Munich (EPO Headquarters)
Go listen to Richard Stahlmann
Investigative Journalism Protects Society From Corruption, Crimes Against Women, Assaults on Civil Society
"what is the point of men doing military practice to defend a system that is so rotten?"
Swiss pimp usurping reputation of legendary Tissot boss Francois Thiébaud from France (BaselWorld, SWATCH Group SA)
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Paris 'Love Nest' & Debian Outreachy: from Lycée Lakanal to ENS Cachan, Cr@ns, nepotism
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Richard Stallman to Give Public Talk in 3 Hours, Then in the Technical University of Munich (Germany) Next Week
Richard Stallman at TUM on 21.10.2025 18:00, MW2001
Arnaud Parreaux lost case defending rogue employer
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Mathieu Elias Parreaux declared bankrupt in Switzerland
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Breakdown of the Rule of Law and Patent Law in the European Union (EU)
The EPO cannot recruit suitably qualified patent examiners this way, let alone retain them
Gemini Links 13/10/2025: Good Films, Wizard of Earthsea, Upgrading the Steam Controller's Stick
Links for the day
Leaks and Whistleblowers: Our Plan for Today
Society simply cannot advance when too many people self-censor
It's Not Justice When One Side Denies the Other Side the Ability to Even Speak
At this stage, Brett Wilson LLP is in my humble opinion acting in contempt of the Court
Links 13/10/2025: Australian Catholic University Uses Slop to Libel Students, Canada Threatens to Kill Beluga Whales
Links for the day
How Not to Silence Tux Machines (It'll Only Backfire, Badly)
defending Microsoft while attacking this site
Slopwatch: UbuntuPIT and Google News
It seems abundantly clear that Google News and Google in general participates in the slop epidemic
Vincent Danjean (not INTERPOL), Claire Bardel & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Christmas lynchings: Martin Krafft (madduck), Penny Leach (mjollnir) & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 13/10/2025: Birthdays and "Committee Unable to Contact Nobel Prize Winner"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 12, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, October 12, 2025