Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: DEILPRX Wordo: LIONS

  • Fantasy Life i downloaded!

    I turned my switch on before bed and it downloaded Fantasy Life i for the pre-release! I was beginning to worry that it was going to be delayed. It’s supposed to unlock by Sunday for early access for anyone that pre-ordered. 1500 GMT on Sunday the 18th. I hope it was worth the multi-year delays and waiting since the original announcement back in 2023.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Repairing Our Way out of Commodity Fetishism

    It is safe to say that the desire for new things is essential to the continuation of the capitalist system. This is a desire we are so used to that it can be easy to forget how bizarre it actually is.

    The 'new' object is one that has no history. It has no fingerprints, no marks. It comes in a glossy, self-contained package that is reminiscent of an egg. It needs no explanation. It came from nowhere. It is there only for your evaluation and consumption.

    The designs of luxury stores tend to evoke the imagery of limbo. They are abstract, geometric, intensely lit and weirdly empty. They are not places, and the things inside them were not made anywhere. They are intermediaries between you and the product. You should not see the products coming in on palettes through the back, or the workers rearranging them on the shelves. To do so would suggest a friction and history which interferes with your desire. It is for this reason that the moment of payment is always awkward, and we are in a hurry to get the actual counting of coins and tapping of cards over with as soon as possible¹. It is uncomfortable to be confronted with the reality of capitalist exchange.

  • thinkpads and coreboot/libreboot

    With the Thinkpad line, nothing newer than a Core 2 Duo can be booted without vendor firmware/binary blobs.

    This works out to all of these:

    * R400 / R500

    * T400 / T400S

    * T500 / W500

    * T60, X60, X60S, X60 Tablet (only Intel GPU)

    * X200 / X200S / X200 Tablet

    R500s pop up on Ebay, pre-librebooted, for around $100-$130. But I can’t justify buying such old hardware at that price. Even if they were sub $100 I don’t like the 15” screens, they’re too big and it makes the laptop too large for me.

  • libre bootloades

    They all make use of Coreboot. Coreboot is what came of LinuxBoot, which aimed to put the Linux kernel directly into computer firmware. Though I’m not sure if LinuxBoot was the name of that original. This is just a vague recollection. It makes me sad that it was relegated to being a bootloader. I still think it would be cool if the firmware were home to the kernel that the system was running.

  • Reflecting on Art, AI and coherent arguments

    Is AI generated art, art? This has been a question asked by many since MidJourney dropped the revolution product: Stable Diffusion. Now you can easily generate images by asking a chatbot like Gemini or ChatGPT to do so. Using interface via the many consumer minded products. Or via a quick API call to providers like DeepInfra. Artists thinks their work has been devalued and wants to ban AI. While the AI artists think that "well, obviously it works". I want to be honest to myself and explore the topic. And this is the log of my thoughts.

    Obviously, I am a computer scientist. I work on AI. So I both know how these things work internally and I have strong opinions based on that.

    Let's be honest for a moment. Painting isn't the only art form that has been performed via an automated mean. Singing for one has been very doable by computers since 2008, when the very popular signing synthesizer VOCALOID2 and the still very popular voice bank Hatsune Miku. Later on new synthesizers also shows up. Notibly SynthesizerV and DiffSinger. SynthesizerV for being indistinguishable from real signing by default, automatic multilingual and rap support. DiffSinger for being very good synthesis quality while also remains as an open source project.