Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 30/07/2023: Gemini's Second Round of FAQ Updates



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 🔤SpellBinding: IMOPSTY Wordo: LOUTS
      • hobby annoyances

        I'm in a little bit of a hobby crisis!

        I think it is great to have many hobbies and interests; after all, some might be seasonal, so we need other hobbies for other seasons, or we grow tired of one and find relief in the other. There are some that we can't do while sick, and some we can do. There are mindless ones we can do on the side when we don't have much energy or focus left or can't come up with an idea, and some that demand our whole attention and planning. It's great how versatile everything can be.

        However, I am frustrated about wanting to do all my hobbies at the same time, and committing to one is making me sad I am not doing the other. They're all there to be picked up, and it's really hard to decide most days. I know hobbies come and go, have more intense and less intense phases, but still.

    • Politics and World Events

      • A History of Timebanking

        The roots of timebanking can be found in what early economists of the late 1700s like Adam Smith and David Ricardo described as the “Labor Theory of Value” (LTV); which proposes that all commodities produced in a market system originate their value in human labor.

      • Dead Cities

        So I've been thinking about cities a lot lately, having moved into a new one.

        I look at Inverness, my new city, and I see it bustling with life. There's a burgeoning queer community, an up-and-coming eco-friendly scene, and a few lovely small businesses soldiering on every day.

        Compared to my last city (Torquay, actually a town I believe) this is a breath of life.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Alternatives to High-Profile Games on OpenBSD

        Some games stand out in terms of popularity and critical appraisal, so it's only natural that those are attracting more attention and this is what people might look for if they want to judge if an alternative operating system or platform can help satisfy their gaming preferences.

        Naturally, OpenBSD with its security focus and intentional absence of emulation/compatibility layers doesn't make for a target for many high-budget/high profile games. Many of the engines used in those settings will possibly never run on OpenBSD: Unity, Unreal, CryEngine...

      • 8-channel DS18B20 temperature logger with AVR and UART

        So here's the problem: Say you want to log some temperatures over the course of several hours, or even days at a time. You'll need something to store all those data to; a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop will do the trick. A single temperature probe won't cut it though, because you're interested in several spots and the temperature difference between them. Whipping up a single analog sensor and the accompanying AD converter may be feasible, but doing that multiple times will get long in the tooth pretty soon, since you'll have to calibrate each one somehow. The next best option is, of course, the now ubiquitous DS18B20 from Dallas/Maxim/Analog (whatever): It is cheap, reasonably precise and accurate, calibrated right out of the box, and you can easily put a bunch of them on a single 1-wire bus. In case you're looking for something even more precise (and more accurate, too, as long as you can calibrate it that well yourself), I can highly recommend you the work of Ed Mallon over at The Cave Pearl Project!

      • Trying to hack my Kobo eReader.

        I recently got a Kobo Clara 2E e-book reader.

        I like it a lot, it's really gotten me in to reading again. I don't mind paying for the e-books, and though there are a lot of aspects of the system that I'm strictly against, such as mandatory logins for internet access, sync and updates (though this can be bypassed), tracking/telemetry and DRM on purchased books, I'm frankly too lazy to deal with all the issues that come with trying to bypass all these.

      • The Perforated Pipe Butt



        Several days have been spent on the topic of the perforated pipe butt. The conversation concerned how to render a particular word in lojban, agglutinative word formation, the distressing details of how lojban weirds aggluting agglutes (aww man, I gotta learn rafsi too?! (no, not really)), that there is an algorithm for this, that grammar parsers can check that your forumlation isn't totally terrible. Now from a marketing standpoint one would simply not advertise perforated pipe butts. The world is not ready for such logic. However, a showerhead is the end-business of a pipe, and has generally got holes in it, so I'm going with perforated pipe butt. Some may claim that a showerhead might look something like a head, maybe that of a snake wearing a hockey mask. "Water barfer" may also be a good term, especially if there are often air pockets in the line, or if your mental age is somewhere south of 12. Again, not so good on the marketing front, where the mantra "do not startle customers with accurate descriptions of reality" is doubtless in fashion.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • I Started a Mastodon Server

          I talked about self-hosting in my last post, but in the end I decided to use managed hosting instead.

          I had been going through the Mastodon install process on a new VPS when I made the decision. I wanted the flexibility to be able to scale the instance in the future and because of that was starting to setup object storage for media uploads. That's when the complexity of what I was setting up started to hit me.

          If you were doing a pretty simple installation and knew you didn't want to scale up the instance later, I'm sure installing and maintaining Mastodon wouldn't be that bad. But there's also other fediverse projects that are easier and more practical to self-host, like Gotosocial, if that's your goal.

        • 2023-07-30 - Second round of FAQ updates.

          Section 4 of the FAQ, "Protocol design", has now been expanded and reworked, mostly to try to explain as clearly as possible how various aspects of Gemini's design are in fact the deliberate consequences of leaning hard into some chosen principles. The FAQ as a whole is certainly still not perfect and I expect that I may continue to tweak it in the nearish future, but I don't think there should be any more changes on the same scale as this recent overhaul for quite a while. If anybody would like to attempt updating the existing translations, or starting a new one, I think that work could safely begin now without fear of major disruption.

          Whereas the first big FAQ update made the whole document more than three times longer than it used to be, this update has "only" made the FAQ 20% longer. It's gotten very long, I'm well aware. The whole thing is close to 27,000 words. Reading at 225 words per minute on average, which some very brief web research seems to suggest is typical for adult native speakers of English, the whole thing would take two hours. That's a big time commitment, but then, actually reading the entire thing will leave somebody with a breadth of understanding of the protocol and things related to it which, previously, could only possibly be acquired by extensively studying the mailing list archives, which would take an awful lot longer and have a much lower signal to noise ratio. So this large FAQ does, in fact, represent substantial progress.

        • Welcome

          It's probably not gonna be that active as I don't have much to write about and don't really enjoy writing much.

        • Hello, Geminispace!

          So I'm late to the party, Gemini started in June 2019 and apparently had some explosion of usage during the Covid-19 pandemic due to being posted on HackerNews with some success. Here we are in July 2023, nearly August and I'm finding out about Gemini. Better late then never though :)

          It's not quite fair to say I was 100% in the dark, I knew something called Gemini existed and I had seen it vaguely mentioned in context, but never looked into it. I knew it was some kind of protocol, maybe I could have told you it was... something something... gopher? Yeah, so not exactly familiar.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Nat Friedman Had Left Microsoft GitHub Exactly One Week Before Matthew Garrett Sent His First SLAPP (Which Was an Empty Threat, He Was Abusing the Legal System of Another Continent to Terrorise Critics Who Had Just Unearthed Major Microsoft Scandals)
And it was likely talked about by his lawyers around the exact same time Nat Friedman was packing up
 
Pushing Microsoft's Proprietary Trash/Trap as "Open" and "Linux" (Windows is 'Linux' Now?)
Maybe it's time to just stop saying "FOSS". The people who use that term are promoting Microsoft.
Slopwatch: Comparing Linux to Vermin, Attacking BSD With LLM Slop, and Helping Microsoft Demonise Linux/OpenBSD/SSH Over Weak User Passwords
Microsoft must be laughing its arse off, seeing how a bunch of Serial Sloppers (no skills, no comprehension, no integrity, no creativity) and slopfarms use Microsoft LLM to flood the Web with anti-Linux FUD
Links 05/06/2025: US Poised for Another $2.4 Trillion to Debt, Cops Want GAFAM Kill Switches
Links for the day
Links 05/06/2025: First US Spacewalk 60 Years Ago, GNU Octave 10.2.0 is Out
Links for the day
Scandinavia Saying Goodbye to Microsoft
The Danes have had enough of Microsoft
GNU/Linux Measured at 6% in Bangladesh, According to statCounter
Windows isn't growing, it's going away
Gemini Links 05/06/2025: Loop Earplugs Review and ANS Forth
Links for the day
Armenian Adoption of GNU/Linux
Russian influence in Armenian must be worrying to Microsoft
Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part II: Turning a Once-Respected Patent Office Into a Circus and Laughing Stock
It's not legal, but administrators who don't care about the law and don't fear the law would just go ahead and turn things to junk
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, June 04, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, June 04, 2025
Slopwatch: Mindless Slop Pieces, Fake Images and Text, Linux FUD on the Cheap
spewed out by Microsoft-controlled LLMs
Links 04/06/2025: Workers' Strikes, Sudan Exodus
Links for the day
Links 04/06/2025: Linux Foundation PR Spam and Lee Jae-myung Wins Election
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/06/2025: Future Leaders of the World and Platforming Jordan Peterson
Links for the day
Links 04/06/2025: WSL Backfiring on Microsoft and "Disney, Microsoft Announce Massive Layoffs"
Links for the day
Our Case is a Very Easy Win, the SLAPPs From Microsofters Were a Grave Error, and Censoring Information Won't Work (It'll Only Ever Backfire)
Censoring is what people do when they lose the argument
Say the Truth, the Rest Will Follow
There's no guarantee that writing the truth will result in an audience (or readership), but over time - in the long run - people generally gravitate towards what they know or feel to be crude truth, not just what's comforting (albeit false or self-deluding, usually groupthink dictated from above)
How to Expose High-Level Corruption Without Getting in (Too Much) Trouble
Democracy depends on free press and freedom of the press depends on being able to safely publish (and keep available) material that bad people don't want to be known to anybody
In-Depth EPO Coverage at Techrights Turns Eleven
11 years is a very long time
Windows Measured Below 10% in Afghanistan, GNU/Linux Gaining a Lot
about 80% are Android (Linux) users, compared to only about 10% for Windows
Poland's Political Predicament and Social Control Media
Democracy and fake "tech" don't mix well; the latter tends to interfere with the former and that's why we get more "Putins" out there
EPO: Taking Away From the Staff to Give More to the Rich
The Central Staff Committee (CSC) wrote to EPO staff earlier this week
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, June 03, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, June 03, 2025
Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part I: It's a Lot Like the EPO
we can commence a series soon
Gemini Links 04/06/2025: Inescapable Questions and Quitting All "Oligarch Tech"
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Linux FUD From Slopfarms, Blaming Linux for Microsoft Issues; Even WebProNews Has Become a Slopfarm (Googlebombing "Linux" With Slop Images and Fake/Plagiarised Text)
The Web is really getting bad; it's also overwhelmed by fake material or plagiarised material, wherein the plagiarism gets disguised/hidden by LLM sausage factories
Links 03/06/2025: Tiananmen Square Massacre Censorship and Growing Military Activities Around Taiwan
Links for the day
Linux is Already Dominant (Android), Let's Make GNU/Linux Dominant in Desktops/Laptops as Well
"Dr. Stallman recently warned everybody about Microsoft."
The Loyalty to Microsoft and the Salaries From Microsoft (Funding SLAPPs Against Techrights and Tux Machines)
Garrett always knows better. He knows everything best.
Windows Falls in Italy as GNU/Linux Jumps to 5%
Italy knows a thing or two about digital autonomy
Nigeria is All Android and Google
Windows down to almost nothing in Africa's largest population
Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (Second Wave) Not Limited to Redmond
"More layoffs at Microsoft as axe falls in Washington and California"
Gemini Links 03/06/2025: Forth System and "Common Lisp is a Dumpster"
Links for the day
The Leaks Were Right: Mass Layoffs at Microsoft in May, Then Another Wave in June
Just as we've been saying for over a month
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, June 02, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, June 02, 2025