Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Extreme metal lawn sculptures, Boca Raton edition

    [A well manicured lawn next to the street, with a collection of metal rods all askew forming some form of structure] It kind of, sort of, looks like a headless version of the Burning Man sculpture. Or perhaps a loose interpretation of a Feynman Diagram. Hard to say … [1]

  • Empirically measurable problems

    The last place I lived... well it wasn't literally a frat house, but my friends and I liked to joke it was, and I think there was a lot of truth to it. I lived in the basement of a frat house.

    It wasn't exactly a good deal for a number of reasons; it was more or less what my partner and I were able to find in the cut throat housing market at the time. We were desperate, we saw an opportunity, and we took it without asking too many questions. The landlords didn't tell us it was a frat house, unsurprisingly; they didn't tell us a lot of things. They didn't tell us a year earlier the upstairs tenants held a massive party that got shut down by the police. And, most importantly for today's article, they didn't tell me that the developers didn't insulate the interior walls. They didn't tell me that until about a month after I'd already moved in, and by that point, I had learned the hard way.

  • [art] beetoo sings the blues

  • 🔤SpellBinding: EHMNPTY Wordo: BILLY

  • Into August

    So now we are in August, and there are only 5 months left in 2024.

    For my internal network the next thing I wanted to do, was to duplicate this photography website I had in the past. I asked AI to copy the theme of the site but unfortunately it wasn't able to. The results I got were not what I was looking for, so it's back to the drawing board.

    For a while I watched all the AI hoopla from the sidelines, never intending to use it myself, especially when I heard what its energy requirements are.

    [...]

    AI being nice and patient is appreciated because one major source of burnout at work for me is dealing with other people.

  • Shambal Dreams Surrounded by Radial Ruins and Sessile on Triton

    Shambal Brambel was part of the first group that arrived. The goal was terraforming and experimental neutronium injections to increase the moon's gravity. He observed and was nominally a part of the quick rise and fall of a cobbled topography that at its peak consisted of pragmatically identical structures for housing, processing or atmosphere production. The so-called city was webbed with motorways. Vehicles of every sort streamed along them almost like fluid, casting whorls of grey waste in their wake.

• Technology and Free Software

  • From Philly

    Back in the City of Brotherly Love ;-).

    [...]

    The Programmer's Guide

    Two sections drafted. Now off we go into hard content. Nothing up anywhere yet.

  • Why Do We Have Licenses If Everything's Available For Free?

    Over at The Register, Thomas Claburn writes that Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, claims that ML companies can basically scrape the web with impunity because anything put online that doesn't have a notice stating otherwise is essentially "freeware".

    This is horseshit, and emphatically not how copyright works. The creator of the work can decide how it's used, or assign these rights, but that's it: there's nothing in copyright laws that says, "I saw it, so I can use it."

  • Crowdstrike

    Much ink has been spilled about the complete cluster f*ck the Crowdstrike outage was and still is. I'm not going to beat a dead horse about it though.

    One thing that I notice is that there's a lot of jawing and spitballin' about how Crowdstrike has 50% of Fortune 500 market share and that's a risky thing.

    But hey man how about Microsoft Windows? Certainly the Crowdstrike thing was bad and we should look at diversifying our endpoint security but are we just going to ignore that 99% of all corporate desktops are running the same operating system?!?

  • Old Computer Challenge

    As usual, I have enjoyed reading everyone's Old Computer Challenge phlogs here on SDF. I still did not participate due to a lack of an old computer that would have provided an actual challenge. A few years ago I was infected by minimalism as everyone seemed to be and I got rid of a lot of old computer hardware including my Asus netbook, a few G4 PowerMacs, and some old 32-bit Atom nettops.

    But even then, I don't think the netbook or Atom nettops would have been much of a challenge. My strategy would have been to install AntiX and if it couldn't handle that, install netbsd.

  • Drained

    Some would call my week a week of indulgence, a trip into comfort via gluttony, a trip into oblivion with the help of the old crutch. Today I suffer the katzenjammer of withdrawal, head and heart pounding from too much of a bad thing, my liver fighting the good fight against the poison of overindulgence.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • youtube etc

      In my last phlog I asserted that any computer that couldn't run a modern browser and render youtube would be what I would consider old and more challenging to use.

      I've already got some great feedback from a fellow SDF member. I won't replicate the entire post so you guys can read it here:

      gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/gallowsgryph/phlog/2024-08-03_OCC_and_youtube.txt

      Based on his post I wanted to explore a little more into whether rendering youtube is a good benchmark for whether a computer is old and challenging to use (as I asserted) in my original post.

      youtube is the #2 most popular website in the world according to some random wikipedia table that I googled for. Speaking of which google itself is #1 according to that same table. (as an aside, could there be 2 more different philosophies of websites owned by the same company?)

    • Re: YouTube as the "Challenge" for "Old Computer Challenge"

      So, I've been getting some things properly running on my MacBook, and one of those little features has been my Sheepshaver install with Mac OS 9.0.4. And one item I've been toying with in that old OS is an even more obscure internet "suite" of sort called /Cyberdog/. To test it, I pulled up my personal website, my gopherhole, then SDF's gopherhole. I checked the latest posts in the Phlogosphere, and one from canfood stood out regarding the Old Computer Challenge[0]. I

    • The two copyright questions in practice

      I usually watch Atun-Shei’s YouTube channel and I paid for the VHX release of The Sudbury Devil just hours after it was up since I had been looking forward to it so much: [...]

      [...]

      And these are even relatively speaking “success” stories, even though one of the films isn’t in the black yet. The situation is even worse for the long tail of “failed” or struggling independent artists. (One interesting note from his video is his friend with a more well-known movie that, after years, still hasn't seen any money.)

    • small tests under native MS DOS 6.22

      small tests of the web site, admin panel, and mail under DOS