Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: SCEIPRB Wordo: COOKS

  • kryptowrite

    Shit like this is my kryptonite. \ wait, how does kryptonite actually work? it makes superman weaker, right? not like that. is there an arc where superman gets addicted to kryptonite because he just loves the way it makes him feel? superman thinks about it...often. when he's not holding those beautiful, smooth, glimmering crystals in his square hands, he's counting down seconds until the next time. it's easier than the problems in front of him that he doesn't know how to confront yet. idk.

• Science

  • The skyrocketing space travel, a (not-so) fictional story

    "Space tourism really skyrocketed back then. Car ride platforms eventually began offering it, the Uberocket, from Uber, was one of them. One must imagine stratospheric prices. "Space is not for everyone", people often parroted, including those among the "not for everyone" portion of everyone. Governments around the world started to push for public space transportation, especially countries with exclaves, such as France (with French Guiana) and the UK (the Commonwealth).

    – Next station, Kárman Line. Access to LEO, Geostationary Orbit and paid transfer to the Sidereal vicinity. Exit on no definite side. Don't forget your belongings.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Hey-Hi (AI) Isn't Your Friend or Lover or Partner in Crime

    A friend of mine visited recently, and he was showing us Musk's Grok on his phone. Yes, eww yuck, I detest Eugenics Boy, government wrecker, swasticar salesman, and public Nazi saluter Elon Musk, so I'd never use this thing, let alone pay for it. For that matter, I won't use or pay for Chat GPT, Claud, or any of the rest, because I think this shit's stupid, just more surveillance in different clothing, wasteful, overhyped, too centralized in the hands of the oligarchy, and so forth. Anyhow, my friend was demonstrating it for us, and at some point, he mentioned its "personality."

    I nearly blew a gasket. No, no, no! This thing is basically a read-eval-print loop, where the reader reads English queries and statements, the printer responds with English statements, and the evaluator is some huge pile of complexity including neural nets, statistical models, and a bunch of other things I am too dumb and too sick to understand. It doesn't think; it makes statistical predictions based on past input and training. To invert Descartes famous statement "I think, therefore I am": "It doesn't think, therefore it isn't." It has no ego. It cannot feel emotions either, so if it expresses them, they are just fake and based on mathematical models and statistical predictions. Without an ego, it cannot have a personality. I was chilled to the bone to hear my friend, who is very technically capable, anthropomorphizing it to the degree he did.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Mastodon, again

      A few years passed since my last attempt to get on Mastodon without it negatively impacting my life. There are much more interesting people on Mastodon now. And I haven’t stopped lurking on various fedi instances looking for news from the FLOSS world, which usually ends with doomscrolling.

  • Programming

    • Adventuring into Tenstorrent SFPU Programming (Mandelbrot rendering)

      After my previous post about Tenstorrent programming, I am curious about how exactly am I supposed to write my own LLK (programming the vector engine/SFPU). I tried it once back when I was still using Grayskull. Wanted to give it another try and see where I land. This time I set out to write a simple Mandelbrot renderer as the task is embarrassingly parallel and does not require complex cross-lane operations.