Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • What I didn't say

    Yesterday three undergrads interviewed me for their "Oddcast." They're thinking about archives, the role of universities, queer studies, and Palestine.

    They asked good questions, but didn't get across to me what the stakes were to them, other than getting the assignment done. Their meekness when it came to personal disclosure and when it came to pushing back on anything I said meant I took too much control of the interview. It wandered. I'm proud of and excited by some things that came out of my mouth, but there were things I wish I'd said.

    They're undergrads! They're exceptional, they're learning, and my criticism is about their learning edge, what I think they can lean into.

• Science

  • Jupiter

    The last few evenings have been cold but with clear skies and Jupiter has been bright and noticeable as I'm riding home from work. This week it was sitting in the east, practically aligned with the streets of my neighbourhood, guiding me home.

• Technology and Free Software

  • I am an AI sceptic

    After initial curiosity, I am an AI sceptic and I don't use it myself.

    Moreso, I talk about my reservations with colleagues and such. Maybe not surprisingly, I'm met with raised eyebrows and puzzled looks more often than not.

    The two main reservations I have are easy to explain but both do have far-reaching consequences.

  • Resuming fantasies

    I am still thinking about building a BBS-style alternate internet. The client fetches lua scripts over https and executes them. Server-side is just regular https.

    A basic API allows the script to display monospace colorized characters in a terminal-like interface. Being a client, this raises concerns about security and privacy.

    There are two ways of making network requests:

    1) load a script or data from the same server and use it within the current script;

    2) load a script from a different server and execute it after terminating the current script.

    This precludes involving a third party to interfere with a site, disallowing a range of tracking practices. But the server can communicate with third parties to fetch data or functionnality.

  • Plan 9

    While i am writing this the first snow of the season is falling, and finally something in me starts to "accept" the somewhat forced pre-christmas mood that is growing here in the company (little snowman on coworkers desk, a little Sana here, some pine cones there...). Lets see if the falling snow is an omen for a "real" winter this time...

    Yesterday i was talking with a friend about my dabbling into Plan 9 and how interesting this little OS is in my opinion, we speculated a bit in which way it would have developed if it had been proper commercialized and if it had found a decent user base. Well... we came to the conclusion that there is an OS around which we thought resembles as much of an end user version of Plan 9 as possible: Chrome OS

  • Regular Expressions

    "… and now you have two problems." One problem is when people want to do complicated things with just one regular expression, such as to match some filenames, while excluding (or also including?) certain substrings that may or may not be present.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Search Engines

      A concern I have about Web search engines, in particular the engines that index the entire Web, is that they become a substitute for actually possessing, and/or knowing how to find, important information that we rely on. E.g., instead of knowing how to find a particular Elisp function for my Emacs install, we might just "google" something like "elisp insert value into <some data structure>". Taken far enough, this approach has you utterly dependent on the World Wide Web, and the algorithms of some company's search engine, to get anything done on your computer. At that point, the search engine becomes effectively a SaaSS threat.