Gemini Links 20/03/2024:Dumping Social Control Media, Trading Oddities
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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🔤SpellBinding: GIKLNSR Wordo: HALON
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Just me or GTC 2024 feels like cyberpunk dystopia
I watched the GTC 2024 keynote and I was like. Gosh.. really.. this sounds so .. wrong!
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greetings
I love science fiction. Started actually reading books with Dune, and progress has been slow and steady. I've read 4 Dune books so far, the first one and God Emperor being my favorites. Next on my reading list is "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
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seventh
nothing crazy has been happening since last entry... i've just been thinking about some system related crap. this disorder is so hard to live with sometimes :( i keep feeling so awful that all these alters cant live their own lives, that theyre limited and even trapped in this body.. i wish i could do so much more for them yknow? its just something i need to work on coming to terms with i guess.. i need to just do the best i can yknow? which i have been doing! but i need to combat the thoughts that i could be doing so much more.. im only one person with one body.. as sad as it is, i cant do all the things everyone wants to do.. egh, i talked about this in more detail with some friends so ill just leave this here
on a better note, i got a new wireless mouse since my last one is basically dead now...
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Politics and World Events
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Trading Oddities
I like to watch the financial markets from a distance, for fun. For a few years, I've been feeling like market behavior has become less and less human, but I haven't really bothered with examining those feelings or their source (apart from wild internal speculation). Today, I stumbled on an article[1] referencing a research paper[2], that put what I've been feeling into words.
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Technology and Free Software
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How hard is a scroll bar? 💻
Whatever GUI you're using, there's a standard scroll bar design. All the users know how it works. But instead we get "fancier" versions. They're usually very narrow, so they're hard to click on. They're often low contrast or even transparent, so they're hard to see. They don't have the little arrow buttons at either end, so they're harder to scroll by small amounts. And worst of all they are often invisible until you mouse over them, so there's no way to know they're even there.
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Accidentally optimising for battery life
Every now and then I will get frustrated at how quickly the battery on my phone or laptop will discharge. Usually this means a bit off research, before stripping out "bloat" and replacing it with 'lighter' software. This time the prompt came from a different place.
Over the past couple of months my screen time has been increasing. Some of it can't be helped, my work is computer based, organising and activism is mostly done through group chats and for obvious reasons has a big social media component to it. Well a week ago I reached a limit and uninstalled FB messenger off my phone, 3 days later the biggest culprit, instagram followed.
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Status update March 2024
We continue to improve, to re-factorize, and to fix bugs as they come. Since October, we released 1.15.0 which include the hook unification. What it means is that we now have one "version" of the script hooks for all devices, which include the desktop mode, and the e-reader mode with the new Kobo Clara support. A lot of changes was required for that to land.
Also, since the latest Sway 1.9 release, I have dropped our sxmo-sway fork. A lot of discuss was needed on the Alpine packaging side to make this as smooth, transparent, and secure as possible. I tried to avoid the issues we had last time, when we moved to this fork.
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Emacs: English Dictionary Completion With Dabbrev (publ. 2024-03-19)
I'm very fond of fuzzy completion and am currently using the Helm system which is layered on top of completing-read. Usually when I am writing a post or some documention, at least once or twice I'll begin to type a word which is long and/or it is hard to remember the exact spelling, and I think that it would be helpful to be able to autocomplete the word.
For a while I have been using dabbrev-expand, which completes the word using words found in the buffer or in other open buffers. This is often helpful, but if it does not get the correct word on the first attempt, you have to keep running dabbrev-expand until it does. I recently discovered Emacs has a dabbrev-completion command as well, which starts a completion for the word selection. Since on my system completion is handled by Helm fuzzy completion, then it is generally fast to select the word I want.
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The OSI model of reality
If you aren't familiar, the OSI model is the way we usually conceptualize the Internet under the hood. It's a series of layers, or maybe, a stack of plates, each supporting the one above it. The layers are, generally, from most fundamental to most abstract: physical (electrical pulses on a wire, radio waves, etc.), link (concerned with the physical connections between devices), network (moving information through the network), transport (moving information between applications on different devices) and finally application.
The nice thing about working in the application layer is that you don't need to think about any of the layers beneath it. For all you care, there is literally a portal in space inside your progressive web app that you're using to pass chunks of data to the other side of the country. For all you care, every time you issue an HTTP request, I personally receive the complete message in English, in the mail, and I bike it 6000 km on the shoulder of the Trans-Canada highway to wherever it needs to go. In other words, at a given layer, the layers beneath may be treated as a black box that provide certain guarantees, if any.
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Internet/Gemini
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IRC choose your own adventure.
IRC servers can listen on whatever port they like and they'll be either plaintext or TLS (SSL). port 6667 is usually the plaintext port and 6697 or 7000 being the TLS encrypted ports. in almost all cases you will want to use the encrypted port. in the cases you don't, you'll know.
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notes on using hexchat
another client that expects to have a handful of servers setup, but can still be asked to connect without configuration.
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Gopher File Names (continued)
Well, I tried out that idea from yesterday's post[1]. Below is what my current gopher hole would look like with categories added to the filenames, and no spaces. It looks like a hideous mess to me. It would look better with spaces, I realize, especially around the brackets (" [category ] " vs "_[category__]_". In my example below, the brain has to replace "_" with " ", and that's tiring.
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Re: Social Media, gallowsgryph
User gallowsgryph recently wrote about "dumping social media"[1]. Though I still have a facebook account for work pages, it has been a few years since I deleted all of my person content (not easy to do, and some of it kept showing up randomly years later; in other words, it isn't really deleted). I remember the feeling of freedom after finally exiting that world.
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The Precarious World
I am starting this new capsule on a day filled with misery for myself, but not by any means more miserable than any other day in the history of our species, of our planet. I look around me and I see war and famine and death and illness and all those apocalyptic omens and I feel crushed by grief. I look at my life, I look at how small it is, how plain and empty, how bad I am at making the world better in the face of all this pain instead of worse and the black hole in me grows, and grows, and devours everything warm.
I'm not a religious person, my faith lies in the mundane and it ebbs and flows like the tide. I'm okay with this, on the good days, and that's all I can ask for. Today it's meagre and wobbly like a weak flame, I have talked to old friends turned strangers, turned thorns, and I am grieving.
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Programming
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C Arrays
It's a three by three array in C, how hard could it be to have a function to loop over that array and show what's in the grid?
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.