Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 12/08/2023: TUI and IBM/Lenovo



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 🔤SpellBinding: CLNOSUY Wordo: SKIRT
      • Gazing back from “The Universe Next Door”

        Maybe it’s dumb to try to review a 40-year old book that has already had thousands of other readers & commenters weighing in but here we go! And I’m not talking about the contemporary Robert Anton Wilson classic by the same name that was published at around the same time.

        Nope, the book I just read was Jim Sire’s The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog.

        He is a Christian theist who lays out his own worldview and then does brief forays into other worldviews for contrast.

    • Science

      • Occam’s Turtles All the Way

        And the standard non-theist/​pantheist/​atheist/​polytheist answer is, of course, “who created that creator? And the creator of that creator?”

        Ultimately it becomes a matter of semantics.

        Theists define “creation” as the subset of what exists and what’s there that excludes the theistic God and the entire realm of that God, labeling that excluded part as “transcendent”.

        I’m not onboard with that definition. By cosmos I wanna refer to the whole shebang, not just a subset.

        Theism, to my mind, diminishes God so much. Shrinks the idea down from something that encompasses all to this tiny li’l superhero flying around.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Re: TUI music players

        Yeah, that’s just facts. Most TUI things are bad. CLI is where it’s at. mpc, for example, is a good basis for shell scripts & automation. I love it. And since it’s for mpd, you can still connect it to a GUI or TUI app also, to get the best of both worlds.

        He also thinks that a conf file full of comments, including commented-out defaults, is bad. That’s also a good point. With a good editor it’s easy to hide away all comments or to navigate a huge file, ostensibly making the advantages of having those comments outweigh the drawbacks, but not everyone has that and starting from a blank file can often be a lot easier.

      • Games I've played on my brother's PSP back then

        I've never had a PSP myself, but my brother had. He is really one of those guys who has always been into Sony. I think it must have been back in 2007. My dad bought me my first computer a few years ago for christmas and it has been the time when we have got our first internet connection at home. An usb UMTS modem with EDGE/HSPA+ support, 8 mbit/s and a limited data plan of 1.5 gigs a month. Not much but enough to download some demos and funny videos for my brother's PSP every now and then. I've even built him a wiki of his favorite wrestlers (Jeff Hardy, The Hardy Boys, CM Punk, Edge) from WWE/Smackdown.

      • My last ThinkPad

        I've been a ThinkPad user for more than a decade now. I've enjoyed many of them, some for the better, some for the worse. But at the end of they day they all had something in common.

        I'm sorry for the clickbait, but Kai Hendry inspired me to use the same title for my own post. And I'm with him, this is probably my last ThinkPad, for sure.

      • The $50 ThinkCentre M600/M700 tiny series

        A few weeks ago, a friend from a local hackerspace told me about them becoming so cheap the first time. A lot of them are currently being sold from many ebay sellers in Germany. The price? Approximately EUR 50,-

        The ThinkCentre tiny series is the ultra small form factor (USFF) computer sold by Lenovo, while others, such as HP calls them mini or Dell who came up with micro. They are as small as a book but have nearly the same performance as their desktop brothers and sisters. At least when it comes to office work. I've got the M700 tiny which sits right next to my ISP router and I hardly ever notice. They are silent, reliable and just do their job.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Emphasis On

          Still interested in the question of Gemtext and emphasis, I figured I’d gather some data.

          [...]

          But as there’s very little support for it, the more important question is: why?

          To see if data would help answer that, I sampled three sources to check for use of emphasis: news articles on the web, Gemlog entries, and Phlog (Gopher log) entries.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Linux Kernel Tainted by Software Patents That Make Linux Worse and the 'Linux' Foundation is Compiling Bribes to Enable This (Promotion of Monopolies and Tolerance of Software Patenting)
Why you need to reboot when a serious bug is found in Linux? "Licencing"...
Links 04/05/2026: Energy Shortages Become More Visible, Germans Reject Military Service, Merz Says US 'Humiliated' Over Iran
Links for the day
KDE's Cornelius Schumacher Explains Why You Should be Slop-Free
Output is not measured by quantity of words
Links 03/05/2026: Insolvent US Bailing Out Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Oracle, OpenAI, and SpaceX
Links for the day
 
Links 04/05/2026: Economics of Slop Discredited, Democrat and Republican Voters Want Cuts to Data Centres
Links for the day
IBM's "FutureNow" is the Rebranding of the Client Innovation Center (CIC), for Lobbying Purposes by IBM While Halving People's Salaries
So says a new comment
Libera.​Chat Openly and Publicly Admits It Has an LLM Slop Problem (Chatbots in Its Channels)
If there's a policy that bans chatbots (not humans), there's even a moral imperative for it
Microsoft: Yes, We Are Losing Windows Users and Yes, We Have Problems With Payroll (So We Lay Off Essential Workers)
From what we can gather, "hey hi" is now the name of everything at Microsoft
Ubuntu.com While Ubuntu.com is Under DDoS Attack and Intermittently Offline Due to Windows Botnets: Don't Use Ubuntu, Use Windows Instead
Unbelievable, as this is their advice when Windows zombies hammer away at their Web site and general infrastructure
Links 04/05/2026: "DNC Covering Up Its 2024 Autopsy" and Rudy Giuliani in Critical Condition
Links for the day
ChromeOS and GNU/Linux Exceed 5% in New Zealand
Can we expect New Zealand and Australia to divest from GAFAM?
The Real News is Botnets (e.g. Windows With Back Doors), Not Iran
Let's focus on the botnets [...] Microsoft's aim is the opposite of security
SLAPP Censorship - Part 66 Out of 200: Alex Graveley Did Illegal Things, Then Asserted Mentioning Those Illegal Things is Privacy Violation
Alex Graveley "has suffered damage and distress" when the public found out he told women to kill themselves
The Corrupt Lecture the Non-Corrupt - Part XII - Outsourcing Everything to Microsoft, Which is Illegal
Today's EPO isn't about technology or law
Melissa Chan on Why Press Freedom Matters to Everyone, Not Just Journalists
dispelling a myth
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, May 03, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, May 03, 2026
Gemini Links 04/05/2026: Another Old Web Pillar Gone and Simple Lobsters Mirror for Gemini
Links for the day
SLAPP Censorship - Part 65 Out of 200: Graveley and Garrett Claims Are Word-by-Word Similar (They Also Collaborated All Along)
We'll keep it short today
IBM Has a Long and Rich History of Showing Chatbots Bear No Business Prospects (From Jeopardy to Watson Healthcare and McDonalds)
Watson Healthcare is already in the dustpan, so they are rebranding it again
Europe Decoupling is Bad News for GAFAM, Especially Bad to Microsoft
Countries want independence
India Needs to Recognise That the World Wide Web is Monoculture in India
In the US, a judge with Indian roots dealt with a case related to this; why won't India?
All-Time Lows for Windows Down Under
seeing the demise of Windows in Australia (historically a slow or low adopter of GNU/Linux) is good news
IBM's Kyndryl Accounting Fraud Explained and More Recently the Insiders Talk About Mass Layoffs
Judging by how the media totally ignored 800+ layoffs at IBM's Confluent and 400+ layoffs at Red Hat a few weeks ago don't expect to hear anything about Kyndryl layoffs
Links 03/05/2026: Water Shortages Crises and Slop Fakes "Are Coming for Your Bank Account" (Slop-Enabled Fraud)
Links for the day
All-Time Lows for Windows in Spain and Portugal
data which became publicly available less than 24 hours ago in statCounter
The Corrupt Lecture the Non-Corrupt - Part XI - EPO 'Products' to Cement Asian and American Monopolies
Only a fool would believe Lame Duck Campinos
Microsoft Windows Falls Below 9% in South Africa
As one can expect, GNU/Linux is measured as going up in France
Gemini Links 03/05/2026: The Black Side of the Web, LiveJournal, Chimarrão
Links for the day
A Month Since Mass Layoffs at Red Hat (400+ Engineers Laid Off), The Media Didn't Cover It
We are very concerned about the state of the media
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, May 02, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, May 02, 2026
Gemini Links 02/05/2026: Strange Psychosis and TUIs
Links for the day
Links 02/05/2026: Microsoft Has Begun Rebranding Vista 11 as 'XBox' (Because the Console is Dying), Slop Rejected by Oscars
Links for the day
IBM's CEO 10 Years Ago in IBM-Sponsored Forbes: "For those willing to embrace [blockchains], the future will indeed be bright."
How well did this prediction materialise?
SLAPP Censorship - Part 64 Out of 200: Not Amused by Repeated Threats (to "Shut Down" My "Existence" While Mentioning My Wife Too)
it's about censorship
RightsCon Cancellation as a Data Point in a World Gone Astray
RightsCon should not even be controversial
The NHS is Under Attack by Anthropic and Microsoft (or Their Lemmings That Infect the NHS)
They are kidding themselves if they seriously believe Web-facing source code repositories are the real threat to patients
cPanel is Not Linux, cPanel is Proprietary Software
It's fair to say I've used cPanel for 23 years
Links 02/05/2026: Gen Z is Turning Against Slop and OpenAI/Microsoft Rift Explained
Links for the day
Storage and Memory Prices Are Rising Not Because of High Demand (Production Can Match Demand), It's Partly Because of Price-Fixing (Same as Food Price Increases)
Sophisticated robberies are still robberies
Thousands of Layoffs at IBM, So IBM Pays Mainstream Media to Claim That IBM is Hiring (Paid Lies)
This is a story about the media failing us, not just IBM failing as a company
A Look at DataStax Bluewashing (IBM and Layoffs)
IBM is a place that many people leave or get pushed out of
Gemini Links 02/05/2026: Leaving Session, Alhena 5.5.7, and Slop Failing Customers
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, May 01, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, May 01, 2026