Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CKNRSUT Wordo: WAVES

  • Have I already told you that I'm on new meds?

    I feel like it's the only thing that's been going on in my life, and it's the only thing I can tell people when they ask what I'm up to, because it's hit every part of my life like a wrecking ball and everything is in shambles right now.

    My medication needed changing because my emotions were all over the place and it was keeping me from doing anything at all because I was too sad and too full of emotions to do anything but wallow and go into crisis mode because I had been wallowing 24/7 for months. Now I am on new meds! And I am incapable of doing anything with my emotions that isn't feeling vague annoyance and panic at the fact that they exist, and glossing over them as I find the next thing to do that will keep my brain and body occupied so these emotions lose relevance.

  • CD Players

    Does anyone know any good or at least good looking (portable) CD players?

    Podcasts are popular, but I'm an audiobook man. Not because I'm trying to lean into the Y2K aesthetic with Books on Tape, but because a library was throwing out a lot of audiobook CDs so I got them.

    A brief search has revealed at least 3 new portable CD players were crowdfunded in the last year or so.

  • That's not a mistake!

    You do something, and the result is bad, really bad. Did you make a mistake? Not necessarily.

    [...]

    Imagine there's a random number generator with outputs between 1 and 5, and you have to bet on whether the next number will be odd or even. What would you do?

    Obviously, you would bet on odd numbers because there are 3 possible odd numbers and only 2 possible even numbers.

    After you place your bet, the next number is generated, and it's an even number!

  • What kind of music have you all been listening to.

    been a while so I thought I would check in on what my fellow pub dwellers have been listening to, and what are some of your favourite albums in general. Right now i've been getting into AIC, favourites being We Die Young and Nutshell. Some of my favourite albums in general are, The Bends by Radiohead, as well as Pornography by The Cure. My fav song ever is The Boxer by Simon and Garfunkel. What have you all been listening to, and what are some favourites.

• Politics and World Events

  • Words mean things

    I don't think there is ever a good time to appropriate the word "refugee" when referring to something as petty as ex-users of [insert stupid social media website here], but if there was ever a bad time to do that, the bad time is now. And yet. Here we are.

• Technology and Free Software

  • is anyone making this kind of robot?

    My primary motivation for research and progress on these things is not technology for application in society. Personally I am fundamentally pessimistic about technology and even though I try to use the good parts of the internet I think the internet as a whole does more harm than good.

    Similarly, creating new technologies that make computers capable of doing things they cannot currently do, specifically capable of better imitating humans or doing tasks that only humans can currently do, probably is not going to make the world a better place and definitely won't create a robot-powered luxury outerspace communist utopia like some people imagine.

    [...]

    One of many pretty obvious things that LLMs and similar technologies *don't* do that most competitors for the 'sentient' label *do* do is have continuous cognitive activity from moment to moment, even when not being prompted. This is related to some idea of agency.

    So that leads me to wonder whether it would really be so hard to run a while true loop on an LLM. Probably a few LLMs working together. They can talk to each other in a systematic way and have really specific training and have some kind of overarching goal to learn stuff. Maybe a more specific goal would be helpful. Then the system can have access to a web crawler and just run all day. Do its thing.

  • Realtime Game

    An observation was made that a real-time game is turn-based, with (usually) automatic turn changes and (typically) a small timeout between turn changes. "My game runs at 60 turns per second" works, though the more common word used is "frames", probably from the movie industry who run a sequence of pictures at some more or less constant rate. This musing was prompted by (yet another) discussion of what a roguelike is, for which one might find various and sometimes incompatible definitions. Nuance (or judgment) can be added with modifiers, so one has a "traditional roguelike", "what passes for a roguelike on Steam these days", etc. There are various (mostly compatible) definitions, some of which exclude the original game, rogue (~1980) from being a roguelike.

  • music, audiotool, archives

    I first started making beats when I was fifteen or sixteen. This was in 2016, near the height of the online lofi hiphop community, and just at the rise of the Soundcloud era. It was a great time to start messing around with FL Studio. There was a vibrant community sprouting around sharing sounds and techniques, and I spent hours at watching tutorials both at home and school.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Likes

      I don’t have notifications on for likes or boosts. I go in and check them manually. There’s no need for that stuff to reach me, especially not one-by-one when it’s more efficient to look at them batched. It’s there when I need it.

      Last year as an experiment I went one month without looking at likes. There were some downsides to the experiment because I didn’t know if I was saying dumb shit that made everyone feel sad & awkward & hurt or if people liked what I was saying.

    • Introductions, and self inserts

      It's a late night. Today's one of my days off, and I'm fortunate to have been able to spend it inside, relaxing and working on my Zaibatsu pages. I'm almost done now; just a couple more sections I'd like to write, a few details to adjust. I'm happy with it. Every web presence I've started up to now has progressively gotten simpler and simpler, until now; I've arrived at something that just might be sustainable, with peers to be inspired by.

      I spent a lot of my youth in chatrooms, roleplaying characters. It began with real juvenile stuff, back before I was even double digits, graduated into more intricate universes I shared with friends; and it lives on today, in the form of Dungeons and Dragons sessions I have weekly with close friends.

    • Closing the spec gap: mandatory <META> and exponential back-off

      There's just a little more than one month to go before my scheduled time for switching to the separated and more formally written protocol and markup specifications and transitioning the current wordier and less formal combined specification into a kind of "technical overview". Sometime between now and then, probably roughly at the half way point, I will make a final update to the current official spec, so as to reduce the difference between it and the new specs, such that the actual switch has very little in the way of consequences for implementers. Two of the largest remaining differences between the specs are discussed here, with a request for comments on various things I might do in response to these differences.

      [...]

      So, the current specification for status code 44 is certainly not ideal and the new specification's take seems to be an improvement. What I am wondering is whether or not it is worth specifying something more specific than that automated clients "SHOULD use an exponential back off". I'm not sure what that might be. I am interested to hear thoughts on this matter from people who have already written servers which issue 44 status codes, or who have written automated clients which attempt to honour 44 status codes, or who operate Gemini servers which are struggling against large numbers of automated requests. I suspect there are very few such people out there and I am probably overthinking this, but if you do exist, I am listening. In the absence of clearly superior suggestions in the coming weeks, I will likely change the current specification to match the new specification in advance of the switching of official status.

  • Software Releases/Announcements

    • Gemfeeds downloader

      So, I wrote a gemfeed parser and news downloader.

  • Programming

    • Agile vs. sloppiness

      I saw a call for speakers for a conference on Agile product development that's not too far away from where I live. I was looking for the deadline when I saw this sentence:

      We don't have a deadline for the call for speakers, and we'll just keep going and see what happens because we're Agile.