Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 18/06/2023: Division, remainder, mod...



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 🔤SpellBinding: BKLYRUO Wordo: CURDY
      • Coffee

        I drink too much coffee. Any time I pass coffee machine I get a double cup. Maybe 5 or 6 doubles through the day until evening.

        I will try to take a break from coffee for 2 weeks starting today.

      • Alan Kay's Dynabook

        I recently stumbled about a PDF file detailing the "Dynabook", a sort of personal mobile computer envisioned by Alan Kay in the seventies... and oh boy, what he envisioned was lightyears away from todays locked town and "appliance-ified" smartphones.

      • Face Blindness

        I don’t remember when I learned about face blindness—but I was glad I did, as I learned it’s not just me.

        Face blindness is a condition in which the ability to recognize familiar faces—to identify people by their face—is impaired.

        According to Wikipedia the prevalence in the general population is 2.5%, so it’s not particularly rare.

      • Soylent Tea is People

        I follow the youtuber The Spiffing Brit, because he is a fellow gamer and tea drinker with a good sense of humour and lots of fun game exploits.

        He also likes OpenTTD and recently held an event where community members could participate in a match like no other.

        The game had (it's just been removed) a system for buying shares from other companies. This was rarely activated in multiplayer games because of how broken most players found it. In this case another community member had modded that system and much more of the code to allow for an experience never before possible in OpenTTD.

      • Father's Day

        Today marks my first Father's Day as a day. Father's Day has been a day I've struggled with in the past, but I'm thankful that it's now a day I celebrate.

        A little warning, this isn't my most uplifting post, my apologies for that. But it's something that's overdue for me to get onto "paper".

        The relationship with my own father was one that got worse with each year since high school. My dad choose to leave the family and move to North Dakota for work. This led to my parents growing further and further apart. I started to dread the weeks he would come home and visit. Inevitably the distance led to my parents getting divorced when I had just started college.

    • Politics and World Events

      • Capitalism Comes in Many Flavors?

        In so doing, though, he greatly exaggerates the difference between these flavors. Pearlstein’s first major variant of modern capitalism — robber-baron capitalism — was characterized by the large-scale economic power of big business. It was succeeded by the managerial capitalism of the New Deal and post-WWII era: “Competition tended to be gentlemanly and the power of big business was held in check by the federal government (big government) and unions (big labor).”

        The “State capitalism” of the European social democracies and Japan is just a more extreme variant of American managerial capitalism.

      • We are not afraid of ruins

        This zine is a collection of texts written by people associated with the Syrena collective, which was evicted from an occupied building at 30 Wilcza Street in Warsaw by people associated with the Przychodnia "squat"*. The conflict inside the Syrena squat with Przychodnia involved in it had been going on for months, if not years. We are writing about the day of our eviction - 5.12.2021, and what this house and social center was to us.

      • Not Being an Asshole

        I've been posting less and less... Not that I've been writing less - I just look over my posts and delete them because it feels that the world would not become a better place because of my post.

        I used to not care at all. Then I cared a little but it felt like I was shouting into the vacuum anyway. Now it feels just pointless most of the time.

        For a while I kept the unpublished posts -- first as .txt files that my indexer ignores, then in an 'attic' directory, still thinking I might rework them later. Now I just delete them, and feel a little better.

    • Science

      • Division, remainder, mod âž—%❓

        I'm not qualified to say if that's true (and I don't really care) but I have some relevant observations because I came across this while implementing a Whitespace interpreter.

        Whitespace was originally implemented in Haskell, and I wrote an interpreter in Java. These two languages disagree on what the operator % means for negative inputs, so I read...

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Riot Medicine

          I just added a page to my archives [0] area of this gopherhole for Riot Medicine [1], an open source medical guide for street medics.

          Riot Medicine is a full-length textbook that covers everything you need to become a medic. The 466 pages include organizing, medcine, equipment, and tactics. It is written for those with no medical training and no experience at protests, but medical practitioners and seasoned protesters will still find it useful.

        • Tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow

          I'm still getting used to getting my info from a wider variety of channels. I used to get a lot of stuff via Twitter, some things from email (from my family), some things from bookmarks and from search. Now I've added geminispace, Cohost, Mastodon. I'm reading more. Where am I finding the time? I'm scrolling less.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

IBM Effect at Confluent: Mass Layoffs and IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines (BCGs) Said to be Violated
For Confluent employees who survived the layoffs there will be "culture chock"
Estimates That IBM to Lay Off Close to 10,000 Workers in 2026 (Not Counting People Pushed Out)
There's still chatter about Confluent mass layoffs
Sophie Brun, Raphael Hertzog & Debian sexual conflicts of interest
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
 
Links 19/03/2026: "AI Glasses" as Euphemism for Mass Surveillance and ABC (US) Has Begun Publishing Slop as 'News'
Links for the day
The European Patent Office, Europe's Second-Largest Institution, is on Strike Today
Lots more to come
What People Impacted by the Bluewashing Layoffs at IBM Confluent Say (While the Media Says Nothing at All, in Effect Burying the News)
Worse yet, the mainstream media spreads lies about it right now
IBM Has Turned Red Hat and Fedora Into Slop
This is IBM policy
IBM is Being Robbed, Companies and Jobs Are Destroyed
Companies taken over by IBM will be exploited and destroyed to keep a bubble inflated for a little while longer
In Confluent Layoffs, IBM Vapourises a Quarter of Its Workforce (IBM Buys Something That It Destroys Already)
In the past, such things were typically referred to as "media blackout"; now it's just "the norm".
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, March 18, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Links 19/03/2026: LLM Fatigue (It Doesn't Work as Advertised), "Small Web Feeds"
Links for the day
SLAPP Censorship - Part 15 Out of 200: Background and Particulars of Truth Regarding Techrights and Tux Machines
the basic facts (this has aged well, except the times/ages/numbers)
A Slopfarms Survey for Today (linuxteck.com, linuxsecurity.com, linuxjournal.com)
Not only did Google news link to a slopfarm; it linked to three run by the same team!
Links 18/03/2026: "Venture Capitalist Warns That It’s All About to Come Crashing Down" Due to Slop Bubble, "Birdwatching for Fun and no Profit"
Links for the day
IBM Red Hat is Still Promoting Restricted Boot Which Restricts Users' Control Over Their Computers
Red Hat under IBM is a total catastrophe
Arvind Says... Something Something "Hey Hi" (the State of Today's Media)
Look for news about IBM and most likely it'll boil down to some sound bites from an executive and nothing else
New Post Has Just Explained How IBM Gets Robbed by the People Who Fail IBM
Their plan for IBM is a personal plan
Slop-Spewing GAFAM LLM That Knows Nothing and Understands Nothing, It's a Stochastic Parrot That Cannot Even Figure Out Tux Machines is a Community That Started in Tennessee 22 Years Ago
RMS rightly calls those things "bullshit generators"
Cusdeb Makes New Presentation About Where GNU Hurd (Still a Possible Linux Replacement) Stands in 2026
coming from a generally RMS-friendly account
Gemini Links 18/03/2026: Librarians, Phone Anxiety, Growing 'Small' Net, and Slop Versus Software Engineering
Links for the day
Smug Threat by Garrett to Put My Family and I in Prison Doesn't Prove We Did Anything Wrong, It Only Proves He's Truly Desperate to Stop Further Publications That Embarrass Him
his reputation is poor in the United States
systemd Increasingly Microsoft Project, Controlled by Microsoft and Slopware
Cannot allow choice
What IBM Meant to Red Hat: "Proprietary Bundling, Restricted Source Access"
Anyone or anything that joins IBM likely shortens its lifespan
IBM Thrashing Confluent Upon Arrival, Based on Rumours
We deem it a bigger issue that investigative journalism perished, not that one must rely on hearsay online or mere "rumours"
Slop Is Plagiarism, Not (Vibe) Coding, and It's Not Automated, It Doesn't Save Money
Reject misnomers, explain what's actually happening
UPC is Still Illegal and Unconstitutional (Kangaroo Court for Patents, Manned by Corporate Staff), Federal Court of Justice of Germany Receives Belated Complaint About It
What is happening to Europe???
EPO Demonstration Happening Right Now, Later This Week Things Will Only Escalate Further
The SUEPO The Hague Committee wrote to staff this morning
Links 18/03/2026: Commodore's Hedley Davis Dies, Apple Not Good Enough, Cheeto "Floats Treason Charges for Iran War Coverage"
Links for the day
A Step Close to Shutting Down the European Patent Office (EPO)
Not going to work all month long
EPO Staff Demonstration Today
The demonstration will be live-streamed for those thousands of colleagues who don't live in Munich
Gemini Links 18/03/2026: Brazilian SYN Attacks and BGP
Links for the day
LibreLocal Also Coming to Jordan, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand, and Spain
It helps raise awareness of Software Freedom
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 17, 2026
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 14 Out of 200: Men Who Strangle Women (and Worse) Trying to Force Us to Write Public Apologies to These Men
For those who never before saw a SLAPP, they basically make many demands
Instant Bluewashing at Confluent: Mass Layoffs Alleged at IBM
So the main question is, did IBM just fire 800 people?
"Vibe-forking" and Why It'll Ultimately Fail (Hype on Top of Hype)
Code made with LLMs sucks; converting solid, human-tested code into slop only complicates matters and increases risk
Updates About Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation
After all those years (a decade) and in spite of phony scandals many people out there still respect him
LLM Slop With "Linux" in the Domain Names
This is becoming a pain and a problem also in the arts and in software engineering
The EFF Has a Bug, Fixing This Bug is Likely Not Possible Anymore
"the EFF's continued existence impairs the arrival of a replacement organization, one which will actually champion digital rights."
Links 17/03/2026: Microsoft Windows Broken by Samsung, Afghanistan-Pakistan War Escalation
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/03/2026: Newcomers and False-Positive 'Slop'
Links for the day
Héctor Orón Martínez & Debian shadow candidate pressure on Sruthi Chandran
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 17/03/2026: American Fentanylware (TikTok) Investors Implicated in Kickbacks, "Big Oil Knew It Was Wrecking Louisiana’s Coast"
Links for the day
For Third Time in a Week The Register MS Runs Google SPAM That Paints Google as an Ally of Women (Which is False, They're Womanisers)
What does that make The Register MS to women?
British Justice Minister Sarah Sackman Blasts Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
The "legal industry" is due for "some reckoning"
GAFAM Deprecating Old Videos ("Content") by Removing the Support for Their Format for No Good Reason
"Security" is not a valid excuse
Credit/Debit Cards Have Long Been Called Plastics, Over Time They're Becoming More Like Pure Plastics
They cost less than a dollar to manufacture
The European Patent Office (EPO) Holds a Public Demonstration Tomorrow and It'll be Live-streamed
The EPO's workforce was meant to be capable of speaking many languages and have extensive experience in the sciences
People Who Attacked Techrights Also Attacked My Mother
Picking on old ladies because you don't like Free software advocates is never OK
Little Community Element Left in CentOS
CentOS, unlike Fedora, was meant to be long supported and solid
Social Control Media is Cancel Culture (Companies Like Facebook Also Punish/Ban Accounts for Mentioning "Linux" and Lobby for Anti-Linux Legislation)
The masters of Social Control Media decide what ideas can and cannot be expressed
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 16, 2026
IRC logs for Monday, March 16, 2026