Gemini Links 03/02/2025: Art is Process, Smartphones, Internet, and More
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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Tiny gemlog
I spent yesterday working on my tilde.club site, adding more pages and copying over some stuff from here. I do want to keep this capsule active but I also want to maintain a more easily-accessible space on the WWW. In other news, I've been putting together a playlist of 80s and 90s Cantopop covers of Western songs, which is immensely satisfying and another time-sink.
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Squid Game
Yes capitalism is not all terrible, it is the people in it that are, regardless of how they partake in it.
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Art is Process
Whenever anyone says "Art is this" or "Art is that" they're probably just talking through their hat. Nobody knows what Art is. Nobody even knows if it exists. Nevertheless, I'm going to lead off with a phrase that became my mantra all through art school and a couple or three years afterward, "Art is process, not product."
This might sound puzzling or even wrong. "The Raft of the Medusa," "Starry Night," "Melancholy and Mystery of a Street" ... these are all paintings, right? And paintings are most definitely products, the end result of the activity, the process if you will, of painting. And if these paintings aren't Art, then what is?
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Against psychological reductionism
Reducing every phenomenon to psychology is prevalent everywhere, yet nonsensical when looking more in depth. You have all these PhD professors explaining historical events or current happenings just by reducing everything to an individual and his psychology, altogether ignoring economic conditions and politics. As a liberal psychology professor famously said, the October Revolution has happened because Lenin had daddy issues, not any of the horrible circumstances the people were living in at that time and legitimate grievances. Might be a hyperbolic example, but this is how the widespread interpretation of important events, or even small ones, is shown and publicized.
More often than not, this veers into eugenics or genetic reductionism. Arguments such “X people are inherently lazy/foolish/underdeveloped” go hand in hand with this “psychology” to explain their reasoning. Imperialism and its extractive processes are masked yet again, instead the victims are blamed, that they are not worthy for a place in what is called Civilization and its fruits, instead the victims need to internalize that they wholeheartedly deserve to be in that inferior position. This has been present in every society from the god given rule of monarchs to now in Imperialism. A good contemporary example of this is the ex eastern European bloc countries, vying to be recognized as “civilized” (white) and not be discriminated, and in the meanwhile they are letting the West step on them in the hopes they will, eventually, appear as equals. This is a delusion of grandeur, and indoctrination. This is where people are led astray: searching for answers to understand why they are in their current state, the psycho-reductionism comes in handy, telling them it's in their genetic makeup, or a fault in their cultural psychology.
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Technology and Free Software
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My ideal linux build
I've been brooding this for a good while now. Actually, throughout my linux journey all I ever wanted was to build my ideal dream distro, if that is at all possible. I would like to build the best I can with the tools I have available, as parametrized by my own standards; what are those?
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2025-02-02
Hello! This is a placeholder while I figure out the best way to automate some bits.
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I Have a PGP Key Again
I really didn't expect to use PGP again... It has always been clunky and complicated, but unfortunately it's the battle tested solution we have...
It has been probably about 7-ish years since I used PGP to any capacity, except maybe signing Git commits before I started using my SSH key for that. There were, in my opinion for quite a while, a lot simpler methods for secure communication with others, like Signal or end-to-end encrypted messages via Facebook Messenger. Unfortunately, I plan on getting rid of Facebook Messenger (and my total Meta account) sooner rather than later, especially now that one friend of mine successfully took the plunge. Also unfortunately, my cellphone is a Nokia feature phone, so Signal isn't in the cards.
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It's not nostalgia
Like many here I'm trying to wean myself off the modern web and engage more with the personal internet. It's not about going back to a perceived "better time" but instead a reaction to a number of different things:
* The corporatisation of social media
* The modern social media algorithm
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Ugh, Smartphones Again
I haven’t owned a smartphone for nearly ten years, and I haven’t missed them one bit. I consider them to be dangerous for multiple reasons, some practical and some spiritual. Their widespread adoption is one of the sadder developments I’ve been witness to.
My friends are all terminally online, though, and they consider my refusal silly or dramatic. This never really mattered until just recently, when they decided to stop communicating via SMS/MMS for security reasons. I understand completely--some of my friends are at-risk for depredations from the new government, and they need to be kept safe.
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Ideal-OS idea graveyard
I have ideas about what my ideal operating system is. On this page are ideas that got removed or never made it into the ideal-OS page, but I think are still interesting and relevant.
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Programs
I use Homebrew to get a lot of random small programs that I otherwise never would have bothered to get. However, the output of `brew list | wc -l` is currently up to the mid-200s, and a lot of these are mere dependencies of things I actually care about.
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Internet/Gemini
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The Internet
Sure, Gemini is part of the Internet, but, well, if you read the things in here you’ll get an idea of why my Gemini stuff isn’t in here.
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Rip in peace
Lots of capsules disappear in Geminispace. These are all ones that got yanked out of my bookmarks for not responding anymore. I’m not entirely sure why I’m keeping them around. Maybe there’s a teeny chance that more than one will come back.
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Programming
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And now some metacommentary on the artisanal code I just wrote
When I wrote the two programs [1] to retrieve output from syslog from my public server, the thing I did not do use was any AI (Artificial Intelligence) program (aka (also known as) Cat [2]) to help with the design nor the code. It was a simple problem with a straightforward solution and it's sad to think that more and more programmers are reaching for Cat for even simple programs.
I wonder though—is the popularity of Cat because of business demands that incentivize quick hacks to get new features and/or bug fixes and deincentivize deep knowledge or methodical implementations? Because of the constant churn of frameworks du jour and languages with constantly changing implementations? Because of sprawling code bases that not a single person can understand as a whole? Because businesses want to remove expensive programmers who might say “no”?
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Artisanal code to solve an issue only I have
I'm still using my ISP (Internet Service Provider) [1], despite the repeated letters that my service will go away at some point. But in the meantime, they keep reissuing a new IP (Internet Protocol) address every so often just to reiterate their dedication to their serving up a dynamic IP address at no addtional cost to me. One of the casualties of their new policy is the monitoring of the system logs on my public server. I used to send syslog output from my public server to my development system at home, just to make it easier to keep an eye on what's happening. No more.
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