Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • On the back foot

    The climate aware intersectional justice movement is on the back foot, and the fascists have (for now) won the propaganda war.

    The vast majority of folks outside of the ivory towers have no idea of what we’re going on about. They get their misinformation and fake news from group threaads on WhatsApp, Facebook and X. The right wing owns media right now.

    And it’s not about “our team vs theirs”; the stakes are the survival of the world. We wanna save it for everyone, they wanna end it, for everyone. And why they wanna end it, nobody knows but I’d bet it’s a triumvirate of weird religious “accelerate Revelation” nonsense joining forces with good old “fuck you I’ve got mine, après moi le déluge, I can cash in on the apocalypse and then die rich” joining forces with just plain uninformed.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ADILMPU Wordo: VOCAL

  • Stirling Who? 🏁

    It came to my attention that young people don't know who Stirling Moss was. Fair enough, I suppose, because his fame as a racing driver was in the 50s and 60s. He came up when discussing falling down a lift shaft with a colleague at work. Moss had a lift in his house, and fell down the shaft while in his eighties. He broke bones, but survived, and was quite light hearted about it. The incident highlights two things about him. First, he was someone who wasn't overly concerned with risk, and second he was the sort of person who had a lift installed in his house just because it's a fun gadget.

    I've seen archive clips of him being interviewed about being a racing driver. He calmly explains driving on a knife edge of grip as if he were talking about growing begonias, when in fact making a mistake would involve a high speed crash and probable death, not missing out on a prize at a village show. He retired from racing when he had just such a crash that put him in a coma for a month. He'd finished second in the drivers' championship four times, and is often called the greatest driver never to win it. He also drove and won in many other categories, sometimes driving over 50 races in a year.

  • Lantashi Dance - Kingdom of Joy

    Below is my latest log for my Cosmic Voyage story Lantashi Dance. It has been a long time since I've done one of these logs. I forgot how much fun it is to write these! I definitely need to create more adventures for the crew of Lantashi Dance!!

• Technology and Free Software

  • The Dystopian Hellscape of Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator Concept Video

    He has a ton of message notifications.

    He also gets a few appointments and is expected to remember them himself. The appointments are pretty big deals but they’re completely last minute shocks to him, like having to prepare a lecture that he’s supposed to have in a few hours or getting a cake for a family gathering.

    For his actual work, the lecture, he throws something together in three seconds with the LLM and mooches off a friend, asks her to come do the lecture. Actual thinking: nadita. I’m not denying that an LLM like he has could help him come up with some great insights and ideas, that’s not one of the problems with LLMs, they can be great (and the "What was his name, Fleming something" and the LLM understanding that certainly rings true to a lot of us). But that’s not what he’s doing. He’s just pasting some maps together...

    And he’s tasked to do the remembering part while the LLM does the thinking.

  • Perplexity's Deep Research is a Hallucinating Mess

    Perplexity (perplexity.ai) loosely is a ChatGPT competitor that focuses on incorporating online search into its responses. This supposedly helps with reducing hallucinations and allows the LLM to have up to date information. Very recently they lunched "Deep Research" which instead of basically querying (I suppose) Bing then RAG on the search result. They use some Chain-of-Though and iterative refining to dig deeper into the search results. Interesting but how well that actually works?

    I happen do have a subscription that give me access to the Deep Research feature. I use Perplexity from time to time as it is genuinely helpful solving difficult questions. Let's try. I also happen to be quite familiar with what Tenstorrent is doing, so let's ask Deep Research about Tenstorrent:

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Blog activity for 2025

      First, I decided to stop the Patreon page for multiple reasons. It was an interesting experimentation and helped me a lot in 2023 and a part of 2024 as I went freelance and did not earn much money. Now, the business is running fine and prefer my former patrons to support someone else more active / who need money.

    • Blog activity for 2025

      The way I implemented Patreon support was like this: people supporting me financially had access to blog posts a 2 or 3 days earlier than the public release, the point was to give them a little something for their support without creating a paywall for some content. I think it worked quite well in that regard. A side effect of the "early access publishing" was that, almost every time, I used this extra delay to add more content / fix issues that I did not think about when writing. As a reminder, I usually just write then proofread quickly and publish.

      Having people paying money to have early access to my blog posts created some kind of expectations from them in my mind, so I tried to raise the level higher in terms of content at the point that I came to procrastinate because "this blog post will not be interesting enough" or "this will just take too long to write, I'm bored".