Gemini Links 03/02/2025: X-less English Alphabet and antiX
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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A message to copycats
I didn't even suppose that I'd have to write anything like this at any point in time. Yet here we are. This is a post for a specific parts of my audience, as that part recently got surprisingly large.
As you know pretty well by now, I am a strong proponent of open source and *absolute* software freedom. That's why I usually release my own code into public domain. That's why I totally do not object to usage of my ideas in the others' projects. However, you know, sometimes it really hurts to see how the projects employing those ideas are... mediocre at best. As soon as I abandoned KaiOS-related development, I hoped that practice would cease. Alas.
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🔤SpellBinding: CIYOPSM Wordo: TINES
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Muleboy, scene 6
What's that? It looks like a caravan moving slowly through the valley. From this distance I cant make if they're goblins or what? I'm still half a week away from human lands... I'm guessing on what it took Old Grump to take me to the place he died. But I took another route. These might be human lands.
I have to be careful either way. I need a story... OK, dad's a peddler but he got sick and died. Simple enough, right? Only what was he doing around these parts? Wait... we're picking stuff from the ruins to sell back home. Because we're poor. Just look how I'm dressed up. And yes, we found that copper in a... in that paladin castle!... hmmm St Konan wouldn't like me lying, I guess, but this is what we slaves do! To survive! It's not fair!... I'll try not to lie.
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Plague of dryness
Sometimes I ask myself what is there to say when “others know better”. Obviously, a result of my own insecurities and impostor syndrome. But, it truly is a stump in my writing process. To feel that there is no creative spirit, nothing to say, only to learn. What good is there when one is like a sponge for information but cannot create, synthesize, and give back that information? Dogmatic learning and without any type of practice it leads to abysmal failure.
Is it an inferiority complex to want to learn from others? I don't think so, but when you undervalue yourself all the time it can be. Of course, we always learn and such, but being in the position of a learner doesn't need to lead to a suppression of one's ideas just because you are learning at the same time. Could say there is a dialectical relationship between learning and applying it, of course, but in this case between learning and expressing the ideas.
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Politics and World Events
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Valvepunk Liberalism
There's a type of classical liberalism which amounts to "do whatever John Stuart Mill would do, unless there exist transistors, in which case do what Carl Schmitt and Friedrich Nietzsche would do". Basically, the availability of transistors, and their downstream consequences, tacitly licenses extreme authoritarianism for some people.
I've decided to dub this "valvepunk liberalism". Maybe "hydraulic liberalism" would also work.
Valvepunk liberals are not in the business of actually *denying* mainstream economics, merely of selectively *ignoring* it. The widespread availability of programmable computers and internetworking means that, without intervention, pretty much everyone's lives will be interfered with by digital technologies that they have little control over, due to economies of scale and extreme network externalities. These computer systems will crash from one first-mover-advantage near-monopoly to another, with very little possibility for individuals to resist. Think Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Word, Android, "install the app to search this database", "to search this database, let us send you SMS messages in perpetuity", etc.
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Teiresias — It's Time to Eliminate the Letter X from the English Alphabet
For the people out there who don't have a funny bone, this is satire. But I'd argue that satire is at its most ekscellent when it is grounded in some truth. The truth is that English orthography is an absolute disaster and Elon Musk is an objectively terrible person.
With Elon Musk making the Nazi salute to Trump and Trump's crowd, I think it's a mighty fine time to improve English orthography. Eliminate the letter "x". It is utterly useless, and all of its uses can be replaced with either the cluster "eks", "ks", or the letter "z". I.E., after removing x from the English language, the name Xerxes would be spelled Zerkses. Boxing Day would be Boksing Day, and X-ray would be Eks-ray.
Of course, now we have a little problem. The letter x is frequently used in mathematical equations. I'd suggest replacing it with χ, but that one is already used in statistics, so maybe it would cause some confusion. I wonder if צ would work? Someone with a better grasp of knowledge in the fields of mathematics and linguistics might suggest something better.
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Technology and Free Software
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antiX
Installing antiX Linux did everything I wanted it to do for my old de-googled Chromebook. It was easy to install, all the windows open up in a snappy fashion, and it boots in about 25 seconds. And because it is still in the Deb family, I was able to use apt to easily restore my command-line comforts [1].
Also, it has surprised me in a lot of pleasant ways. I love the aesthetic choices; the theme that comes out of the box is beautiful, and icewm rules. It was just so easy to customize with a file simply called keys in the .icewm directory[2]. But the most pleasant surprise was how quick the shutdown is. I have always found long boot up time to being annoying, but I didn't realize how much time in my life I have allowed systemd to waste, when the processes can just be knocked down, end.
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