Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 13/07/2023: Old Computer Challenge and Back to USENET



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 🔤SpellBinding: ACNYSWR Wordo: IMPRO
      • wobbles

        I spent the morning dealing with a VERY upset child. You see, I found wobble town about the same time I discovered all the wonderful, fun little things that exist over here around smol.pub. That is to say, probably later than a lot of people, but long enough back that my wobble has reached a seeming zenith of evolution.

      • working in a small team

        I've been working in a very small team the past 2 years. We are a very isolated little subgroup in our subdepartment, 3 people in total. There is not much that intersects with the work of the others really, so it is usually just us as a fairly independent little capsule.

        There are many benefits to this that I can appreciate. It is definitely easier to get a hold of the group it its entirety, be it for physical meetings or online meetings. The communication traveled quicker and there were less people to consider and inform. Consensus was reached easier and quicker on many things. The small size permitted us to avoid anything super elaborate and time consuming to get everyone on the same page. Smaller teams can be cozier and closer with each other.

      • Falling from the fingertips

        So there's not really me and you. That's thought(s). The thought of an individual experiencing non-individual, the latter of which includes the notion of you all.

        And it's been futile for being utterly imaginary.

        Look at the poor little homunculus, poor little individual, appearing as most of a body but with absolutely nothing where there is allegedly a head.

      • Four Leaf Clovers

        Me and the boys spent about twenty minutes searching dor four leaf clovers the other day. They found several each. I found none. I’ve never found one, in fact.

      • Omnium Gatherum

        I've listened to a couple King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard albums but so far this one takes the cake. I've had it on for the past couple days which is the biggest sign that an album has really clicked with me.

    • Politics and World Events

      • Pretty danged lucky

        Any questions on whether "the news" is more about driving narratives to be believed than reporting what happened?

        Nice day. Beautiful low 70F temps, sunny on and off. Did some cleaning and putting away outdoors. Alphabetized some sheet music. Showered and dressed. Slowly moving in the direction of my wife performing with the municipal band in her hometown, tonight.

        Stepping out of the shower today I was suddenly remembering my first practicing switching hands on a bath towel being used at an angle behind the back.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Old Computer Challenge: Life at 300MHz

        Note: yes, I shamelessly stole the title for this post from Artemis[1].

        We're a couple of days in and due to work and illness, I haven't nearly done as much as I initially hoped to do in this week. Yet, the core of the blue machine still hums along, happily but vociferously, waiting to be of service.

        Happy you're here to read along.

      • Rockchip NPUs and deploying scikit-learn models on them

        My first experience with my RK3588 board was mildly infuriating. I bought my Orange Pi 5Plus for it's quite capable NPU. However the low level matrix multiplication API segfaults every single time. After a long period of headbanging I decided to dump that approach for now and the barely working rknn-toolkit2 high level interface. Even that has it own set of ridiculous problems. I thought converting scikit-learn, the most basic and widely used ML library, would be a breeze. I was wrong. I ended up writing my own converter. With this experience I'll be able to tackle larger and more useful models in the future.

      • Heartbeat signal 2

        Hey, hello, this thing still on?

        It's a damn good thing I made a Makefile for this and all my scripts are still working.

        So, it's been a little while, almost a year apparently. I kept the server online for sometime after I effectively stopped updating my capsule until I did a switcharoo from Hetzner back to DigitalOcean.

      • web frameworks

        looking like we're gonna make websites as a way to contract in the local area and to rebuild company website.

      • WSL? Powershell? bare MinGW or Cygwin? Screw all, MobaXterm Personal

        Had to install 'tar' package to have GNU tar instead of BusyBox that MobaXterm includes. To have the tar exclude work correctly.

        Meantime, I have been experiencing frustration in relation to publishing html websites. The wysiwyg composers are no longer there, Seamonkey often has to be custom compiled. I swear if i continue using it i will at some point end up running it in steam-run on some NixOS someday.

      • Old Computer Challenge 2023 - Day Four

        The backlight of my twenty year old IBM ThinkPad R31 is not in the best of shape. Sometimes after boot it is a bit dim, but otherwise perfectly usable. And sometimes it is quite dark after boot, and I have to get really close to read the text on the screen.

        The first time the R31 boots after connecting the power brick, I have to set the date. Both the backup battery as the normal battery are very dead.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • hello again gemini

          last year i went through the trenches and around october i dropped so many things. i barely been around gemini since then — most of the time by accidentally clicking lagrange. i think at least three of my plants died at astrobotany. i barely skimmed antenna.

          and like. that's fine! the blogging (and by extension social media) mindset is all about The Update, but my capsule is a different beast. i put things in here when i feel like it, and it's not a mirror of my web presence. still i do feel kinda bad. i like it here. but yknow how it is with the brain. i dropped a bunch of stuff i liked because there was just so much overall.

        • USENET is ALIVE, long live NNTP !

          Hola! Happy Hacking to all hackers, DIY, Creators and tinkers out there.

          [...]

          This last week I been working on adding #inn2 to our arch GNU/Linux server, after reading a lot of source code, man pages and old and new documentation I have got up and running, and peering with other popular hacker BBS's and communities from around the world


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

What I Learned in London
some ministers still help us in our fight for press freedom in the UK
At IBM, Workers 'Expire' Early ("Next Step" is 'Voluntary' Layoffs Decades Before Retirement Age)
It seems like the "new normal" is layoffs not existing or barely existing because companies hide them
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on Gym Equipment Can Endanger Several Parties
Joy oh joy! Give us more "smart" things
Microsoft Silent Layoffs This Month (PIPs and More "Buyouts", Driving Out the Workforce), According to Insiders
They know it's happening because they see it and fellow workers talk about it, even if the media keeps mum
Omarchy is Already Dying
Same as the life cycle of slopfarms
A Vortex of Beacons (or "Bluetooth Everywhere" Vision)
If someone (or someones) calls you paranoid for taking about "beacon"-like functionality, there will be no lack of authoritative citations (e.g. Web links) they can be provided to prove them wrong
 
GNU/Linux is a Platform for Work (Usage Surges in Daytime)
GNU/Linux 15% in daytime
We Need Rain, Not Chatbots
There's no "anti-AI" (it's not even AI), there's opposition to fraud, to plagiarism, and to companies that profit more when there's global warning (caused in part by their business activities)
SLAPP Censorship - Part 151 Out of 200: Dealing With Sleazy People and Companies That Steal (While Employing These Sleazy People)
we offer a quick summary and we're reflecting
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 15, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, August 15, 2026
Gemini Links 16/08/2026: Sterrenkijker Releases, Solar Gemini Server
Links for the day
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part XVI - The German State Does Not Enforce the Law Against European Patent Office Officials
It's not acceptable that Europe's second-largest institution can get away with crime time and time again
Germany's National Broadcaster (DW English) to Air Julian Assange Film This Coming Week
It seems rather sad that we live in a world where rich thugs can get away with so many horrible things
WordPress is Bloatware and Bloated Software Guarantees Security Incidents
This site turns 20 in about 11 or 12 weeks from now and it was never cracked, not even when it ran WordPress
Too Many Chiefs (or Chefs) at IBM, They Don't Know How to Run a Company (With a 100+ Year or Century-Old Brand Recognition Advantage)
It seems like a consensus opinion; some line managers or middle managers are too selfish or self-deceiving
Clacton's Election Was a 'Show Election'
At least some people squeezed out some "free press" out of this charade [...] That the media kept boosting parodies as the alternative/s to the bigot is a topic we wrote about a great deal over the past 3 weeks
Windows is Burning
Windows is the "burning platform" of the year
Gemini Links 15/08/2026: Stress, Jetlag, and GPU Hype (Waste of Energy for Amusement, Fake 'Currencies', and Now for Mass Plagiarism)
Links for the day
Links 15/08/2026: XBox Rotting Further, "France’s Top Court Strikes Down Ban on Social Media for Children"
Links for the day
SLAPP Censorship - Part 150 Out of 200: Always Independently Verify What People Claim to Be (or Find Yourself in a Jason Arday-Type Moment/Dilemma)
I'm not a cardiologist and Garrett was never a security expert
Links 15/08/2026: "There Is No A.I." (Slop Plagiarism Isn't Intelligence) and Its "Impact on the Environment Is Absolutely Horrifying"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 15/08/2026: Gratitudes, "Microflier" Drones, and Literate Programming
Links for the day
IBM's PIPs and RAs (Layoffs) Going on, Interns as 'Scabs'
It seems like a consensus (also in Reddit, we took a quick look)
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 14, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, August 14, 2026
Gemini Links 14/08/2026: Slower Internet, Logging Off Made Easy, and Human Code
Links for the day
Links 14/08/2026: "Mystery of Dark Oxygen", People Despise Slop, and Backlash Grows Against Fake Currencies (Energy-Wasting Scam Like Slop)
Links for the day
Free Publicity
They say there's no such thing as "bad press" or that every publicity is good publicity, sometimes free publicity
Farage's fears, media hijacked by-election, what really happened in Clacton
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
It's Friday. A Ton of People Departing From IBM and Red Hat.
A mere subset of people who announce this in public at Microsoft's LinkedIn
GNU/Linux and ChromeOS Beyond 11%
Combined with ChromeOS, it's already past and beyond 11%
Chatbots/LLMs Are the Next "Clown Computing", Pure Hype, a Serious Mistake
Programs that scan text and emit something similar (but full of errors)
Links 14/08/2026: Slop 'Music' Causing Problems, Slop Data Centre Contractor Unpaid (Massive Debt), and The Cyber Show Says We're "Colonised By Wankers"
Links for the day
Fake Growth of Social Control Media is Misleading
nowadays people look for alternatives - ones not controlled by MElon, CPC, and Kapo-Berg
statCounter: Windows Down to All-Time Low of 25%, Android Leads the Pack, GNU/Linux About to Leapfrog Apple, Overtaking MacOS
The situation was very different in past years
Microsoft's Mass Layoffs (Including 'Voluntary' Secret Layoffs) Take Their Toll on Seattle
How much longer can they hide their crises?
Planet Fedora ("Fedora People") is Just IBM Staff, Former IBM Staff, and LLM Slop
this is what Fedora boils down to now
Explanation of What Will Happen to Red Hat (and Other Acquired Companies) After August
In short, a lot will be scuttled; history shows it happens over and over again
SLAPP Censorship - Part 149 Out of 200: It Took a Long Time to Show What Jason Arday (at Cambridge) and Harvey Weinstein (in Hollywood) Really Were
Really bad when society endures abuse because the abusers silence their exposers
Gemini Links 14/08/2026: 32-bit RISC-V and BlackBerry
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 13, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, August 13, 2026