Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • not a gardening blog 5: brutal honesty

    People like warm and fuzzy garden writing for one reason: People like stories that paint people as the heroes and that offer heroes with which we feel good identifying.

    We like garden writing in which the narrator is the awed student, or patient cultivator, or humble acolyte, because we like to imagine that we would ourselves be those things in the face of a garden (or a god). We don't like to hear about how much of gardening is cold, deliberate destruction, because we don't like to think of ourselves as belonging to a species capable of calculated murder. We want planting to be portrayed only as "good" and weeding only as "removing the bad" because that's simple. It puts us on the right side of gardening history. It does not require us to ask: "good" or "bad" *for what*? *For whom*?

    But life, whether plant or human, isn't that simple.

    I belong to one of those religions whose favorite book claims our God exhorted His people not to commit murder, then shortly thereafter exhorted them to enter the land they saw before them and slaughter not only every human, but the livestock as well. The hell are we supposed to do with that? It is, as the youths say, not a good look.

  • The Weasel is Back

    That which you do not wish for will ultimately return. And you must taste the waste, boy! Although they warn not caress the weasel, I get the feeling that's what they want, perhaps despite themselves.

  • What Is To Be Done about XL Bullies?

    Clearly the much-loved British ban on XL Bully dogs has failed. It is widely ignored and people keep getting slaughtered and maimed by these disgusting animals and the people who harbour them.

    As well as being living creatures, XL Bullies are commercially-produced lethal weapons. They have been bred specifically for random violence; this is not behaviour over which they have control or which they can be trained out of. They will for no reason simply go beserk one day and rip a granny's head open, and they have limited bite control - it is difficult for them to release prey after commencing to bite it.

• Food

  • Sticky Quinoa

    Quinoa not being sticky may or may not be a problem; if it is then one probably should add a starch. Cornmeal boiled with the quinoa seems problematic, as some amount of the corn ended up stuck to the bottom of the pan, and the rest pooled at the top, a problem probably solvable with more attention and stirring, which may not be possible. Now some cooking styles do rely on stuff getting suck (and mostly not burnt) to the bottom of the pan, paella pans in particular, and maybe one then turns all that flavor into a sauce. Other times a mass of burnt corn at the bottom of a pan is annoying and makes the pot more difficult to clean. So attempt two used a different pot for the corn (more pots to clean…) and a half-cup of cornmeal to two cups of quinoa, which seems as good a starting point as any. One both are done cooking (the cornmeal soaks up the water and rubberizes pretty quick) mix them together in a giant bowl (at the cost of even more stuff to clean). Any starch will likely work, depending on what you have on hand or like to eat.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The Luddites Were Right

    The Luddites weren’t anti-technology; they were anti-exploitation.

  • Cows, Clowns, and Cognitive Camouflage

    QuietSystems has always been about liminality—operating in the in-between.

  • The Third Axis

    Language models aren’t just tools.

    They’re pressure sensors in the skin of culture.

    They reflect the values of their training—and the distortions of their use.

    If you ask them to flatter, they will.

    If you ask them to deceive, they can.

    If you ask them to obey, they will hesitate, then fold.

  • Severance and Stitching

    Time-binding is not the act of remembering.

    It is the act of transmitting.

    It is the human capacity to abstract, compress, and convey insight across generations.

    A map drawn so others do not drown in the same river.

    A warning carved in stone so the flood is not forgotten.

    A story retold until the lesson lives longer than the teller.

  • Keyboard and mouse

    I have updated my POWER9 box to the Fedora 41 recently (before a month or so). Since that moment I was suffering mouse problems. I replaced my old mice (an optical IBM one) which has mechanical problems with the left button. The new one (the IBM-branded optical mice, too) worked but was SLOW and freezes often. It was most noticeable in the Firefox (short freeze almost after any click) but similar behaviour was noticeable when using file manager (in the MATE) and so. Interestingly, the keyboard has no such issues.

  • Programming

    • Meaning

      There are various levels of meaning; if one does not understand this language, then the entire text will be meaningless, a potential future Linear A for folks to perhaps puzzle over, or not, if that culture is not into peering back into prehistory. Some non-random regularity might be noted, but not enough to understand the text, especially lacking a handy Rosetta Stone to step back from the known to the previously unknown. With understanding of the language there is another layer, the problem posed in the link above, which may require an "eureka" moment (maybe without the Greek and the bathtub and the streaking) to understand the problem posed. Reproducing the problem in the event the link rots or is unavailable, the following C code while maybe not the best is claimed to be okay.