Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Ableism for reasonable people.

    Thanks for demonstrating, Kurt. The basic idea is that for many people, there is a line when it comes to disability. If you have a disability that crosses that line, they will think of it as "admirably unselfish" of you to decline to have children.

  • Muistiinpanot kirjasta: Al-Ghazali On Vigilance and self-examination

  • 🔤SpellBinding — YDIPTUC Wordo: PRIME

  • Tornadoes down the ridge

    Yesterday we lead a third as many people through the cave as we did at last year's open house. Less than 700 people. It was hot. I was miserable from pollen. I wanted to be in the cool damp.

    All us volunteers slept poorly the night before. Some partied, some tried to sleep but the storm was ferocious. My daughter was awake many times in the night. Water found its way under our closed-cell foam ridge-rests, dampened my sheet where it extended past the mats. In the morning the water over the road between our camp and the cave was waist-high, swift and very dangerous.

    Thirty km to the south, tornadoes killed twenty people and destroyed a neighborhood subdivision. This morning at the hospital where she works, Evy may have injured survivors. I haven't seen news, and won't til I get back to town, but I looked at Randall and Thor's pictures and listened to Randall on a quiet walk in the cave last night. He worked forty-five tornadoes this year. This is the one that got to him.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The Silicon Monkey

    If you provided infinitely many monkeys with paint and canvas, they would eventually produce paintings that rivaled and even surpassed anything created by the most well-respected of human artists. If one or more of those infinite monkeys make a pixel perfect duplicate of Van Gogh's Starry Night or whatever, does it imply that monkeys can produce art? I don't think it does, and I'll discuss why I don't in just a moment.

    Likewise, if you throw enough silicon at the problem, and train it with the knowledge of every human artist, it can give you "art" for the asking. It's even getting iteratively better at doing this sort of thing, unlike our monkeys, the overwhelming majority of whom ignore the paint and simply fling their feces at the unfortunate canvas for the LOLs.

  • Productivity

    As part of my ongoing initiative to reclaim my digital agency I've made a couple of strides today that may not seem important in the grand-scale, but are significant to me. First, I installed a minimal launcher on my phone in hopes of reducing its pull over my attention. I want my phone to return to being just a phone. Primarily a communication tool with the ability to look up information if need be - nothing else. No doom scrolls, no algorithmic social media, none of those fast fucking videos that go on forever - none of that shit. I'm fighting a battle against companies that hired legitimate top of their field psychologists to design the perfect brain trap. Measures like this are necessary - I'm not better than anyone, and I'm certainly not immune to the allure of these devices. If the minimal launcher approach doesn't work then I'll just do something a bit more drastic and ditch the smartphone all together. I'll admit, losing navigation would be a difficult transition for me, as it plays a massive role in reducing my driving anxiety - but there are alternatives if that bridge ever needs crossing.

  • How I ported Bulls and Cows to HP 12C and why it is important

    Yes, I promised to return to the topic of tiny VMs in the next post but I still think this story needs to be told sooner, and you can, by the way, consider this one a direct precursor to the next post about tiny VMs. Because it is about a game that's my all-time favorite when it comes to numeric-only I/O, and can (arguably) be viewed as the ultimate benchmark that sets apart computers from calculators. Yes, Bulls and Cows return, now on the programmable financial HP 12C I told you about in the previous post.

    If you just want a short form listing, the setup and the gameplay rules, this game has already been published in my HP 12C software collection text document ([1]) under the name "SlowMoo12". But I assume everyone who's been reading my phlog for some time already knows how to play Bulls and Cows. Today, I want to discuss all the technical challenges that I had to overcome in order to fit it into 99 program steps of a not very advanced instruction set, with just the seven main registers and the five financial registers left at my disposal. At some moments, the mission felt impossible but I still managed to accomplish it. Let's talk about how and then get to why.