Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 12/09/2023: On Human Rights and One Year Without Windows



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 🔤SpellBinding: CHKMYUO Wordo: GUANO
      • Garden Room

        In my last post, I talked about a straw bale course I went on, and a few projects I had in mind coming out of it. One of them was the idea of a "garden room".

        [...]

        I got one hundred bales. It works out at about 16 cubic metres of straw (top tip - 1M€³ of straw more or less equates to one linear metre of wall). not all of it fitted in the garage - I've got an overflow pile in the garden, and we had to sort and throw away / gift / recycle a whole bunch of stuff that *was* in the garage. If I can't use it, things might get a bit strained at home ^^.

        The bales are barley straw, very similar to what we worked with at CAT; as there, most of the bales are ~900mm long, with a few much-longer outliers. I don't have a suitable moisture meter, but they feel dry - the farmer's son said they monitor moisture when baling, and stop if it goes above 15%, and then they're stored up high and under cover, so I'm not worried by that. The strings are nice and tight, and their density is ~105kg/M€³. That could be higher, but it's certainly good enough. Best of all - no wasps.

      • Star Log 2023-09-10 (Fairbanks, AK, USA, publ. 2023-09-12)

        Last Sunday (Sept 10) I had a brief opportunity for stargazing early in the morning, about 3am. The clouds mostly cleared away early that morning, so I went out to the boat launch. The boat launch itself was stuffed with campers and assorted folk, but providentially I found an unoccupied pull-off area a little further down the highway, which I noticed when I accidentally missed my turn-off into the boat launch. The pull-off area had a decent view of the skies in most directions, though I occasionally had to deal with the bright lights of passing vehicles. And i had a view of the city lights, through some spruce trees:

        [...]

        It seems that the S5300 has no way to allow manually setting the exposure time of the camera, like a bulb mode, but I found out later that there is a "fireworks" mode with a larger exposure of four seconds, which I would like to try out some time.

        Something interesting right now is that Uranus is located in the sky about halfway between the Pleiades and Jupiter, making it pretty easy to find with binoculars: [...]

    • Politics and World Events

      • "On Education"

        "On Education" by Bertrand Russell opens with the "evils" of educational institutions. One perhaps should define what "evil" means. Homeschooling is noted as perhaps lacking in sufficient socialization, and could make an outcast of a child. Evil softens to "grave defects", and then to "not satisfactory".

        A noteworthy question is whether education should produce independent judgment, or instill particular beliefs. Or, what kind of individuals, and what kind of community do we hope to see?

      • Human Rights

        Last Sunday I was at a protest here in Stockholm against the world’s grossest and disgustingest snitch law, and I agree 100% that this law needs to be stopped. It’s a law mandating teachers, librarians, health personnel etc to turn in “illegal” refugees and immigrants. Others can and have written more eloquently & better against that law than I can.

        This (what I’m about to write about) is a much less important tangent, not at all meant to distract from the vital fight against the fascist law proposal.

        [...]

        “Eat the rich” is not gonna work but maybe we can starve ‘em by working for each other instead of for them. The coming mass automatization of centralized means of production via artifical learning models is an obstacle to that but maybe not an insurmountable one.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • The Opaque Corpus

        I came of age in the dot com boom: Pentium chips, Herman Miller chairs, the first wave of media darling startups (who remembers pets.com?). It was a era before massive computational power was easily available, and long before "compute" entered the lexicon as a noun. AI was still not in a particularly good place - after the promises of the 1970s failed to deliver the general AI its practitioners were sure was on the horizon, funding dried up. For a long, long time.

        The state of the art in the 1970s was neural networks; after that, there were researchers involved in investigating other ideas, such as Bayesian networks, which work off probability and priors.

        These investigations yielded success in some very early-internet ways, with Naive Bayesian classifiers showing incredible promise in spam filtering. Before Google clogged up the web with SEO spam (whether written by underpaid writers, or now wholesale by AI), spam was a real plague

      • Jumbled thoughts on using pinyin instead of characters

        For the most part i believe that switching to pinyin would not have any detrimental consequences. My reasoning for this is:

        (A) for a long time many people in china were illiterate and did not have trouble communicating without resorting to characters. (B) today in general speech people can have conversations without needing to resort to writing. (C) i have converted many wikipedia articles to pinyin and asked native speakers to read them. The consensus is that doing so is slow, but the content is understandable.

      • Locust cider thoughts

        I love Locust ciders, and I've tried enough of the flavors to make a semi-substantial post commenting on them.

      • This week — I Welcome My New Pixel Overlords

        TL;DR: I jumped down the rabbit hole of click-based pixel art virtual pets. I also grinded hard in GBF's Exo Cocytus Crucible event, answered some surveys, and discovered some interesting websites.

        This is a late, brief update because I had to do some heavy chores last weekend.

        (For anyone curious on what I've done at work this week: I've made several preparations for my upcoming training program, while finishing other tasks here and there. Nothing exciting, really.)

      • One year without a PC

        I swapped my Windows 10 desktop machine for a Raspberry Pi 4 around a year ago. Time for a resume and asking “would I do it again”?

        Let's start with the big question: Would I do it again, knowing what I know today?

        Well, yes and no. I'm much more happy with the streamlined, terminal UI based workflow that I have now. I feel more focussed and *way* less distracted. I spend less time procrastinating and I'm not really missing much. So that way it was totally worth it.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • AuraGem Relaunch

          I have just announced the relaunch of AuraGem! The address has changed to auragem.letz.dev. Most of the capsule should be as it was in 2022, aside from various updates and some things which I have taken down until they can be fixed (the music service and the starwars database). I was planning on waiting until I can pay for the original auragem domain, but I went with FreeDNS instead, which should mean that there should be no more DNS mishaps in the future.

          I have also made some updates to the search engine (AuraGem Search) which I am excited about, and will continue to make updates to it. One can read more about this on the search engine's new About and Features page.



        • More Updates to AuraGem

          Over the past two days I have made some more updates to AuraGem, particularly the Search Engine. These are mostly stability and QoL updates.

        • Celebrating the small web, too

          Recently Kagi’s announcement that they’d gone and done something to highlight small-web sites crossed my desk.

          I’m in favor of this. While the small not-web is nice — if you’re reading this, it’s probably on the small not-web — it doesn’t fit everything. If you’ve got a blog with a lot of pictures on every single post, things will probably be nicer for your audience if they don’t have to click on every single picture.

          Then there’s gwern.net, which does all sorts of fancy things with what I am told is completely optional JavaScript. Turning footnotes into sidenotes, that sort of thing. It has an entire Design page describing all the fancy stuff that goes into it, as well as an entire separate page that went into things that ended up not working out.

        • linkhut2outdoors

          This is a posix shell script for converting linkhut bookmarks to Solderpunk’s Smol Earth Compendium.

          You’ll get a text file; it’s up to you to then place that textfile on Gemini or Gopher.

          I’m not telling you to go use linkhut—the Smol Earth Compendium’s own format is much simpler, just use it straight up; this script is only good for people already using linkhut.

          It’ll only grab ones with the ‘outdoors’ tag (and remove that tag), and only bookmarks to pages on Gemini or Gopher, and not if they contain a tag that starts with the string “expires-2”. I want to submit more permanent entries.

      • Games

        • Dragons of Stormwreck Isle

          I finally got a chance to look at Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. This is a “capsule review” as opposed to a “playtest review” since I haven’t played it, only quickly thumbed through it! That’s right, I didn’t even read every room, just some of the intros.

          The original starter set, The Lost Mine of Phandelver, I’ve whole-heartedly recommended to new groups or people who wanna get started with D&D.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Open Source Initiative (OSI) Privacy Fiasco in Detail: The OSI Does Not Respect Anybody's Privacy
The surveillance mafia that bans dissent or key people (even co-founders) with dissenting views
 
Links 31/03/2025: China Tensions, Bombs Falling in Myanmar After Earthquake
Links for the day
Gemini Links 31/03/2025: Falling Out of Love With Tech, Sunsetting openSNP
Links for the day
R.T.O. at IBM in Texas and Atlanta (State of Georgia) Expected as "Soft Layoffs" Catalyst This Coming Year
It also sounds like more IBM layoffs are in the making
Law Firms Can Also Lose Their Licence for Clearly Misusing It
The bottom line is, never made the false assumption that because you can pile up SLAPPs in a docket you will not suffer from bad reputation or even get disbarred
Link between institutional abuse, Swiss jurists, Debianism and FSFE
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
LLM Slop Piggybacking News About GNU/Linux and Distorting It
new examples
Links 31/03/2025: Press and Democracy Under Further Attacks in the US, Attitudes Towards Slop Sour
Links for the day
Gemini Links 31/03/2025: More X-Filesposting and Dreaming in Emacs
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 30, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, March 30, 2025
Links 30/03/2025: Security Breaches, Crackdowns on Dissent/Rival Politicians
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/03/2025: London Soundtrack Festival, Superbloom, gmiCAPTCHA
Links for the day
Phasing Out Vista 10 in Nations Where ~90% of Windows Users Still Rely on It
Recipe for another Microsoft disaster
The Cost of Pursuing the Much-Needed Reform/Shield Against Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs)
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”
The LLM Bubble is About to Implode, Gimmicks and Financial Shell Games Cannot Prevent That, Only Delay It
To inflate the bubble MElon is now doing the classic trick of buying from oneself for a fictional value
Links 30/03/2025: Contagious Ideas, Signal Leak, and Squashing Lousy Patents
Links for the day
Links 30/03/2025: "Quantum Randomness" and "F-1 Visa Revoked" in US
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/03/2025: US as a Threat, Returning to the WWW
Links for the day
Links 30/03/2025: Judge Blocks Dismantling Of VOA, Turkey Arrested Many Journalists
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 29, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, March 29, 2025
Judges Would Never Rule for Men Who Strangle Women or Against Women Who Merely Wrote Articles About Abuse They Had Received From Men
We don't intend to do "trial by media", so we won't be disclosing claims and defences until it's over
Windows is an Unnatural Disaster, It is Also Avoidable
there's a wide window of opportunity opening
Gemini Links 29/03/2025: Less YouTube and More Station
Links for the day
In Some Countries, Such as Thailand, Firefox is Already Measured at Less Than 2% (One Day Firefox Will Get Blocked, Not Only Lack Support)
Web consolidation around Chrom-isms will doom the Web as we know it
Killing the News With Spam and Slop Benefits Those Whose Desire is an Uninformed Population
adoption of Free software depends indirectly on political activities/activism
Links 29/03/2025: Trademarks Battles, Fires Destroy More Than 3,000 South Korean Homes
Links for the day
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Privacy Fiasco in Detail: An Introduction
Perhaps tomorrow or perhaps next week we'll share more information about what happened and what was reported to the California Privacy Protection Agency
Links 29/03/2025: More Crackdowns on Science, "Hey Hi" Slopping is Flopping
Links for the day
IBM's BS (Bait, Switch) Regarding Ways to Stay Onboard
PIPs, RTOs, and forced relocations are just an illusion of choice (or ability to recover)
Costa Rica Almost Bankrupt Because of Microsoft
the incidents in Costa Rica are Windows incidents
Gemini Links 29/03/2025: Art of Looking, Wireguard, EMacs
Links for the day
Links 29/03/2025: Attacks on Social Security and War Updates
Links for the day
Banned evidence: Ars Technica forums censored email predicting DebConf23 death, Abraham Raji & Debian cover-up
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, March 28, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, March 28, 2025