Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 15/07/2023: Jekyll-Gemini and Generators and Extensive FAQ Update



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 3 Day Weekend - Day 1

        Tomorrow and Monday are going to be really bad with a high of 37c / 98.6f. Now the North of Japan is getting battered by rain.

      • re:Did Ricciardo forget how to drive fast?

        Ricciardo is easily one of my favorite drivers in F1, so I was very excited to hear of his return to Alpha Tauri. That said, I have concerns.

        Honestly I expected Ricciardo to end up in Indycar or NASCAR after he failed to get a seat this year. It got harder and harder to root for him after his performance on Renault and McLaren. His performance on Red Bull though truly was something to watch, his overtaking ability was amazing.

      • Should I Subscribe to the So-Called Legends?

        After much speculation over quite a bit of time, I've come to the conclusion that the "standards" of production concerning sonic "normality" are tricks. They apply to a very small percentage of the music making population. They have been refined over decades to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And refined even more now to appeal to those who consume music through streaming services.

        Like most who are in the habit of composing and recording our own music, I have fallen for this trick time and again and I must untrain myself to hear "mistakes" in production values when they don't correspond to what the most well-known masterers and producers of the day proclaim to be "correct". I laugh and laugh at myself when I think more closely about it. Do I follow the guide of mainstream *musicians* to begin with? Am I an acolyte of the pop and rock or even electronica legends? Absolutely not. So why should I subscribe to the so-called legends of sonic "quality", as well?

      • Is Ann Reardon a hack? | Generic clickbait title for maximum engagement!

        She put this video out a while ago, “investigating” whether cows’ milk is as bad for you as people say, and comparing it to other alternatives like soy milk, almond milk, etc. She touches briefly on the ethical aspects, which honestly for me is the *only* thing I care about when it comes to animal agriculture — but then, I’m someone who doesn’t care one bit how healthy my food is, so like. Whatever.

    • Politics and World Events

      • Authoritarian Character Structure

        Radical psychologists Wilhelm Reich and Eric Fromm answered the question of why people submit willingly to authority.

        While most of us were watching the 2016 presidential election with disgust, someone I’m very close to, looked at me with a fiendish grin and announced, “I’m voting for Donald Trump.”

        This was perplexing. How could they be captivated by a racist, xenophobic, homophobic narcissist? Having starkly contrasting reactions towards the object of their affinity, I realized a lot of futile and draining arguments were likely to follow. Rifts, drama, and cut-offs between friends and family have become ubiquitous in American society over the past year, with many left bewildered by the resurgent appeal of authoritarianism.

      • Veganism Is Not An Insult To Native People

        There are so many reasons to keep a vegan or at least a vegetarian diet... Health. Animal abuse. Pollution, deforestation, and waste are real consequences of mass consuption of meat. Respect for life. Religion. Offending native people with your opulent veggies is simply not a thing, except for some overeducated fools with way too much time on their hands.

        If anything, meat eaters are much more guilty of 'diet appropriation', with caveman paleo diets and baby-seal-blubber diets. Consuming absurd amounts of fast-food meat daily without ever considering where it came from is terrible.

      • Fundamentalism seems alive and well

        I suspect it's because whereas you've willing submitted to a media narrative, your friend paid attention to what Trump has actually done/said *in context* - which is impossible for you because you've also submitted to the aspect of said media narrative that insists you'd have to be an idiot to ever pay attention to what Trump has actually done/said in context, and you've incessantly repeated such to/with others who've also submitted to said media narrative, and in the domain of mind whatever is repeated most is what seems most real, because conceptual repetition constitutes "practice makes perfect" in the domain of mind.

        In my view, *NOBODY* is more racist that the news media. They're the one's obsessed with and perpetually talking about colors of people, thus elevating skin color to being a determiner of personhood - the belief at the root of racism.

      • Fading Echoes

        In my recent post “Frankly” I think I left some important things unsaid.

        Now that the discussion has died down I hope I can risk stating my own points of view without triggering more unpleasantness.

        The only new posts on the “thread” have been from textmonger and I’m also replying partly to those.

        I’ll try to be brief.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Old Computer Challenge 2023 (0) preparations

        From the notebooks on my desk I chose an 8 year old ACER Travelmate B116. This machine has 4 cores and 8 GiB of RAM. It features a SSD disk, so it is not anywhere near /old/ specs. My Asus from 2007 would fit better, especially with a magnetic drive. However I got rid of that machine some time ago.[a]

        The Acer had Debian 12 installed on it already. Its disk is encrypted, so I accept the overhead as a little decrease in speed.

      • Inexhaustive List of AI Models that works on RK3588

        Armed with experience converting scikit-learn to RKNN. I spent the past few days trying to get Waifu2x (Anime image upscaling) and endup defeated. Either RKNN got stuck submitting commands or I get the mysterious message `W RKNN: [07:11:36.064] Output(Deconvolution2DFunction_0): size_with_stride larger than model origin size, if need run OutputOperator in NPU, please call rknn_create_memory using size_with_stride.` and got garbage output. Yet that API is not exposed nor I can find the symbol in the shared library. Heck not even if try to run SRCNN, something much simpler. Something is really weird. Yet searching only shows people running YOLOv8 also facing the same issue without solution.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Jekyll-Gemini and Generators

          Jekyll-Gemini barfs on this because it's not a gemini file and it doesn't know how to ignore it. By default, jekyll-gemini ignores anything that is not a .gmi file. But that only seems to be true in the root directory and the `_posts` directory.

        • Old Computer Challenge 2023 - Day Six

          Some weeks before the Challenge, I switched from Pleroma to Honk as my ActivityPub server. Honk is written in Go, uses SQLite as database and is almost Javascript-free.

          Today at opening Honk I added the "-g" switch to links, so I get a browser that display graphics. I also had Emacs running ERC, the IRC-client that is build into Emacs. The machine became very slow and even after closing links, it still uses 120Mb of swapspace.

      • Software Releases/Announcements

        • Extensive FAQ updates, more to come!
          I am excited and delighted to announce that I have just published some extensive updates to the official Project Gemini FAQ!

          This is the first update to the FAQ in over two years, and I'm retrospectively ashamed and embarrassed that it was left in the state that it was for as long as it was. There was nothing terribly wrong with the answers which were in the old FAQ, and in fact a lot of those answers are still there with no or minimal changes. The problem was with its incompleteness and inaccessibility. The FAQ, and indeed the entire gemini.circumlunar.space capsule, have evolved piecemeal over the years from content prepared in the earliest days of the project, when the audience for official information was a lot smaller and a lot less varied. They've been tweaked and expanded as interest in the project has grown, but never extensively reworked to address the fact that this audience has grown a lot and changed a lot. Not everybody who hears about Gemini today has used Gopher before - most of them have never heard of it. Introducing Gemini to these folks from the beginning as "something between Gopher and the web" is meaningless. An FAQ where the section entitled "Protocol design" comes before, and is longer than, the section entitled "Getting started in Geminispace" is not welcoming.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

We Are Safe in a Modern "Tech" Society, Right?
People are safer if they control their own computing
The Way Things Are Going, They May Soon Stop Saying "Web Address" and Instead Say "Chrome Address"
The Web isn't built or based around open Web standards anymore. It's centered around user-agent.
Microsoft as a Golden Cage
"I was laid off by Microsoft and can't find a job. I'm weeks away from giving up my apartment and moving across the country to live with family."
Weekend Discussion About How IBM's Bluewashing of Red Hat Will Cause "Enshittification" for Users
"I worked at a software company that was acquired by IBM so I knew it was game over for RedHat the day they were acquired"
Brett Wilson LLP Getting Sued by Its Very Own Clients, a Legal Story That Has Made the Mainstream News (Law360)
Law360 or Law.com are about as mainstream as one can get in that "sector" (litigation 'industry')
Lucas Nussbaum & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
 
The Same People Who Attacked Richard Stallman (RMS) Are Attacking Daniel Pocock to Discourage People From Listening to His Information
Pocock is being demonised for the same reasons and by the same people who attack RMS
Your Typical Anti-Richard Stallman (RMS) Cancellist
"About the RMS cancellation"
Richard Stallman (RMS) Has Announced His Talk in Rome Less Than 20 Hours in Advance (and on a Sunday)
Why did he wait until the night before?
GNU Tools Cauldron Event in Portugal: Videos Now Available via Invidious
Go have a look
Slopwatch: GNU/Linux Sites That Became Slopfarms and Spamfarms
The Web is a mess and "Linux" or "Ubuntu" sites became part of the problem
Richard Stallman's Talk 25 Hours Away, Aula Magna Palazzo del Rettorato (CU001), Sapienza Università di Roma (Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5)
The talk is 25 hours away and we see some QR code for it
Gemini Links 12/10/2025: Watches, the Depression of 2026, Gamboling with Odds
Links for the day
Links 12/10/2025: 'False' DMCA Claims and Slop Facing Perils Again (the Hype Wears Off)
Links for the day
Microsoft Has Just Lost Privacy Case in Austria and Its Latest Moves Make a Complete Ban Seem Imperative
Microsoft is not a software company, it's a spying agency that uses software to collect data
The Register MS: Microsoft is the Security Expert, Not the Prime Culprit, So Buy More Microsoft
This front page feature is devoid of any actual substance, it's just Microsoft copypasta
Paris 'Love Nest' & Debian Outreachy: from Lycée Lakanal to ENS Cachan, Cr@ns, nepotism
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Stefano Zacchiroli (Zack) & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 12/10/2025: "Palm Computering", Further Exploration of Slide Rules, and Key Takeaways from The Well-Grounded Rubyist
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 11, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, October 11, 2025
Tomorrow: Founder of the Free Software Foundation and of GNU/Linux, Richard Stallman, Speaks in Roma (Rome), Italy at 4PM
GNU/Linux is more important than ever in this dystopian world
Microsoft and Apple Are Rare Topics in Geminispace
in Geminispace it's rather safe to assume everyone is into BSD, GNU/Linux, and sometimes retro
Qualcomm and Manchester United Appear to Have Dumped Microsoft (Qualcomm Now Invests More in Linux, Apparently)
It's a relief to no longer see Microsoft logos and brands on a local football club's gear (I'm not a Manchester United fan, but not a foe either)
As Guest of Honour in Rome, Founder of the Free Software Foundation to Speak ("Distinguished Lecture") After Introduction by Leonardo Querzoni
Happy hacking...
All Things Open is Proprietary
The OSI has become a front group of proprietary software openwashers, led and sponsored by proprietary giants
When Microsoft Lays Off Lots of Workers They Say It "Invests in AI" (a Lie), Now It's "Reshuffles" or "Microsoft Tightens"
Microsoft "news" by bots
"I saw Richard Stallman give a talk in the mid 80s, which began my fear and loathing of software patents" and "Richard Stallman was always right."
"By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction — moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological."
There Were Several Waves of Microsoft Shanghai Layoffs in 2025, Western Media Continues to Turn a Blind Eye to Chinese Layoffs of an Epic Scale
Sometimes select Taiwanese news sites (published in English) or automated translations are all we have
Brett Wilson LLP Spreads Trumpism to the United Kingdom, Looking to Profit From 'Legal Colonialism' (Overriding Sovereignty)
There's growing recognition of this conundrum worldwide
The Demise of Shopping in Person
In a world like this, how valued is the customer?
This Past Friday, "Nearly 700 People Came to Listen to RMS!" (Richard Stallman)
"Nearly 700 people came to listen to RMS!"
Distinguished Lecture by Richard Stallman This Coming Monday in Rome
After "Free software, Crucial for Freedom in a Digital World"
Slopwatch: UbuntuPIT Churning Out Plagiarism and the Slopfarm LinuxSecurity Turns to Pseudonyms
Our hunch is, UbuntuPIT will sooner or later realise that this toxic approach is just harming UbuntuPIT and tainting the reputation of past articles
The Lawsuit by Clients of Brett Wilson LLP Against Brett Wilson LLP is Officially On, It is Progressing, The 'Experts' Pick Outside Law Firms (RPC and Mills & Reeve) to Spare Them From Litigants in Person
So it is probably quite potent
Gemini Links 11/10/2025: Nyctography, Gerrymandering, and Lurking
Links for the day
The 'Culture Wars' in Free Software Have Gone Out of Control
Social control media amplifies such utterly infantile discourse
Teaser: To Compensate for the Fact Our Clients Are Terrible Human Beings Who Strangle Women (While on Microsoft's Payroll) and We Get Paid by Mystery Parties We Bombard You and Your Wife With Almost 10 Kilograms of Legal Papers
If you can't win an argument, then drown the other side with papers?
Links 11/10/2025: World Mental Health Day 2025, Another European Legal Defeat for Microsoft 360
Links for the day
MIT Technology Review is Part-Time SPAMfarm of Billionaires and Mega-Corporations
Does MIT operate its own "b2b" SPAMfarm?
Open Source Initiative Executive Director Leaves, Replacement Sought by Monopolists, Not the Community or OSI Members
Serves to show who runs this show...
Links 11/10/2025: China-US Tensions Grow Again, "Hey Hi" More Widely Recognised as Bubble Made of Capital That Doesn't Exist
Links for the day
Now Confirmed in Western Media: Microsoft Azure Layoffs This Month
Affirmed by more sources moments ago
Peter O'Callaghan QC represented grandparents, Westernport Hotel, at Liquor Royal Commission
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Either The Register MS Divests From FOSS Coverage or Liam Proven is on Long Holiday
Publishers perish when their audience loses trust in them
Microsoft Cancelling Another Datacentre is a Sign of Financial Trouble and Lack of Growth
The debt continues to grow
Gemini Links 11/10/2025: An Evening at the Fair and Fast Fourier Friday
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 10, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, October 10, 2025
Geminispace is Very Large
The word continues to spread and the number of participants grows
Another Wave of Microsoft Layoffs, This Time During National Day Holiday
This time it's China again
10 Out of 10: RMS Attracts Massive Audience in Göteborg, Sweden (All Seats Occupied, Some People Standing)
a 55-second clip of his talk
Staying Happy in Times of Crackdowns on Civil Society
Optimism in this sort of "new reality" or "new normal" seems like something for the irrational person
"Nobel" Exploited Posthumously for "AI" Hype, Now They Do the Same With "Quantum"
ere have been many jokes about "Nobel" for peace (often granted to pro-war people) and a fake one for "Economics" (establishment propaganda)
Slopwatch: Plagiarism and "Linux" Articles by Bots
Sites that do this won't survive; many of them rely on slop services (suppliers) that will cease to exist after the bubble bursts
Links 10/10/2025: Putin Admits Russia Downed Azerbaijan Airlines Jet, More New Heat Records
Links for the day
Noteworthy Claim That IBM is Firing a Lot of Lawyers This Week (RAs in the Legal Department)
A lot of what they do is patent 'trolling' or lawyering up against their own staff (e.g. HR disputes)
Links 10/10/2025: US Judge Bars Attacks by ICE On Journalists and Protesters; “We Took The Freedom of Speech Away” Says the President
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers, Google News Gifting Slopfarms, and Fake News/Plagiarism About "Linux"
Google itself is a slop pusher these days
Qualcomm, the New Owner of Arduino, Blasted for Its Software Patents Tax on 'Smartphones'
A lot of Qualcomm's patents are on software. We wrote about this in prior years.
XBox Layoffs Rumours, Downtime, and Criticism From XBox Co-Founder
"everyone is ditching the xbox."
Links 10/10/2025: Honoring The Legacy Of Robert Murray-Smith, Many Articles on the Hey Hi (AI) Bubble
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/10/2025: October Gothic and Reading Middle Earth Role Playing; C and Ada
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 09, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 09, 2025