Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 19/06/2023: “We Need More of Richard Stallman, Not Less”



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 🔤SpellBinding: ACYGINF Wordo: SKIPS
      • Re: ~christyotwisty's Five Questions for June 2023

        I guess it depends a bit on what you consider an object? And whether I should limit it to things I have a realistic possibility of ever buying. Is a house an object? If so, I'd like a Victorian in a walkable neighborhood, please. If a house isn't, but a car is, I'd like a Hyundai Ioniq or Kia EV6. I'm under no misapprehension that electric cars are a real solution to climate change; we need to aim at eliminating cars almost entirely, in favor of universal quality public transit. While I'm waiting on that dream, I hate my current car. It gets much worse in-town gas mileage than I expected it to, and has been unexpectedly expensive to maintain. I don't have any foreseeable chance of buying either of those things, since electric cars are still priced as luxury items here in the US.

      • Good Music You Haven't Heard Of

        "Music is my life" is a cliche, so I'll refrain from saying it. Suffice it to say that my life has revolved significantly around music for a very long time.

        Starting from high school I was one of those kids who had headphones on at every possible second. While not quite so anti-social anymore, I have worked as a developer for more than 10 years at this point, and have spent every work day of all of those listening to music while coding. And that's to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of miles driven, workouts worked, and dinners cooked while blasting tunes.

      • Medevel23 Free and Open-source Documentation Generators For Developers

        What is a Documentation Generator?

        A documentation generator is a tool that automates the process of creating documentation for software projects, APIs, or other technical products.

    • Science

      • New Rubik's 4x4x4 Cube

        I've been interested in Rubik's Cubes and other twisty puzzles for almost twenty years, but the height of my obsession was around 2010. Most of the puzzles I own come from those days, including my two Rubik's-brand 4x4x4 puzzles.

        The original mechanism in official Rubik's 4x4x4 cubes consisted of a plastic ball with grooves just offset from each perpendicular equatorial ring. The offset allowed one half of the puzzle to slide along the groove, while notches on the other side of the offset held the other half in place. As the outer layers turned, pieces would be swapped in and out of the grooves.

      • The lack of time for geeky tasks!

        It's been a busy month! New things going on at work world compounded with plenty to do around the house means I haven't spent as much as I would doing side projects. In turn, nothing really notiable to phlog about as of late.

      • RE: Division, remainder, mod âž—%❓

        Yes, you are qualified. You can tell whether -1 and 1 are the same number.

        And yes, as a programmer, you should care. Integers are the most basic atomic data type in a computer. As programmers we have to deal with integers and do integer arithmetic all the time. Both remainder and modulo are useful (the latter more so than the former, in my experience), and knowing which one we have in hands can be the difference between the program we just wrote doing what we expected or crashing.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Yet More On Paging

        So it turns out that amfora copies Bombadillo and only scrolls some of the page. Half-page scrolling can be problematic as the new content may be hard to find in the middle of the terminal. Half-page might be good if you're quickly skimming the text; two impressions might help you spot something that was missed when it was elsewhere on the page, and in that case you're glancing around and not following the prose. One option here is to patch amfora for full-page motion; probably these should be distinct commands like less, mutt, and vi have for full- or half-page motions.

      • Neovim: init.lua from scratch

        After chucking one of my only remaining Arch installations in favor of FreeBSD (now a dual boot with Void) I've been one by one massaging my dotfiles and fixing software compatibility issues to get my preferred environment up and running. Only yesterday I managed to get my multiplexer, Zellij, up and running by backporting a fix from upstream git to their current release. I've been having trouble getting my NeoVim config setup, in that it was reporting that it couldn't set up language servers, and last night after work I began investigating.

        I've been using kickstart.nvim for a while as a jumping off point, as when I made the switch from an init.vim to init.lua I didn't really feel like starting from scratch. But what I found bothered me enough that I chucked it all. About four months ago they switched from the Vim package manager they had always used, Packer, to a new one called Lazy. I've never experienced issues with Packer, but if that was the only change and things were working I'd probably just roll with it. They also switched from just using the NeoVim official lsp support package to a new plugin called Mason which is supposed to make installing new language servers easier. Crap, here we go.

      • We need more of Richard Stallman, not less

        The Free Software movement has been mostly killed by the corporate Open Source. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its founder, Richard Stallman (RMS), have been decried for the last twenty years, including by my 25-year-old self, as being outdated and inadequate.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

GNU/Linux is 486 in Ireland
4.86% that is
"Secure Boot" is a Security Problem, Not a Solution
These people don't try to improve security but to undermine security
Don't Talk to Bullies
This serious matter is still being examined by British authorities
 
Links 18/08/2025: LLM Reputation Damaged, Australia Catches Google Foul Play
Links for the day
Geeks Like GNU/Linux
The technical community seems to be consolidating and rallying around GNU/Linux
End of Reliable Media
it makes the world a worse place, it renders the Web a misinformation machine
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, August 17, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, August 17, 2025
GitHub Won't Last Much Longer
Many things at Microsoft are going to go the way of the Skype (or "dodo"). GitHub will be among those.
We've Never Used Large Language Model (LLM)
we just never used an LLM
Gemini Links 18/08/2025: Retro and Endless Escape from the WWW
Links for the day
Working Whilst Away From Home
Decades ago being away meant all sorts of problems associated with workflows and connectivity
The Next Version of Windows Will Always be the Best (for Microsoft)
It's worse and slower over time
"End of the Smartphone Era" According to Jeffrey Epstein's Key Enabler
They call it "sour grapes"
Microsoft's Windows in Gabon: Still Moving Down
What is this Unknown? Who knows...
Links 17/08/2025: Strike Downs Air Canada, Postmortems of Putin's Red Carpet Summit
Links for the day
Links 17/08/2025: Slow Tools and Enshittification of YouTube
Links for the day
Links 17/08/2025: "The Performance of Power" and "My Undesirable Friends"
Links for the day
Growing Our Reach
Our goal was never "hits"
The Russian Vision of Technology
Russia's surveillance is very extensive
Sooner or Later Almost Everyone Will Know "AI" is Just a Go-To, Misused, Misapplied, and Grossly Overused Term of Liars and Con Jobs Who Ride a Ponzi Scheme
At the expense of people gullible enough to "invest" in this or take salaries/bonuses in the form of "stock" (tied to a Ponzi scheme)
The Register MS Has Begun Using Slop Images
It's not clear when it started; but it's definitely getting worse [...] Worst of all are 'articles' about slop that are themselves slop
Reddit Funded by Microsoft
Reddit is merely a filter and we knows who controls that filter (using money)
When It Comes to Technology, Mozilla and Firefox Are Illiberal
Last month in Planet Debian we saw one more person explaining to everyone how to "turn off" DRM in Firefox and hide the pop-up/s
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 16, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, August 16, 2025
The Open Source Initiative Has Many Scandals, We'll Try to Summarise Them All
Open Source Initiative (OSI) hates facts
Open Source Initiative (OSI), Wikipedia, Molly De Blanc, and Censorship/Reputation Laundering
OSI is like SPLC. The old name remains, the mission changed
Gemini Links 17/08/2025: Misunderstanding "Geminiverse" and Let's Encrypt
Links for the day
Links 17/08/2025: Breaches, Layoffs, and Scams
Links for the day
The Case for Software Freedom in Europe Becomes Stronger as GAFAM and the US Become Allies of Those Who Invade Europe
"One would think that both sides of the pond would be very interested in this valuable commons and work to not just protect it but cultivate it further, rather than work to saw the legs from under it by advancing software patents instead."
Slopwatch: Google News, LinuxSecurity, LinuxBSDos.com, and Garbage From Brian Fagioli
nowadays when people search the Web or when one researches some topic (looking not just for news in Google News) one is increasingly likely to land on a fake 'article' spewed out by some Microsoft LLM
Gemini Links 16/08/2025: Back After Hiatus and News Aggregators in Geminispace
Links for the day
Links 16/08/2025: mRNA Being Abandoned, Putin Plant Flags in Alaska, Faces No Sanctions
Links for the day
Links 16/08/2025: Science Besieged, Confidentiality Standards Breached
Links for the day
Links 16/08/2025: Loners and Vacation, Climate Issues
Links for the day
Links 16/08/2025: Chatbots Bad for Kids, Software Patents Apple Battle
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 15, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, August 15, 2025
Slopwatch: WebProNews and Google News Promoting Fake Articles About "Linux"
Google News is being flooded by these slopfarms, so when Linux news is being sought online (via Google News) many people will read bots that spew out FUD
Original European Patent Convention (EPC, 1973), Routinely Violated by the European Patent Office, Now in Geminispace
hundreds of thousands of European Patents must be immediately revoked
Gemini Links 16/08/2025: Politics and Alhena 5.2.8
Links for the day