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.



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