Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — AMNOSWT Wordo: FLUID

  • on angelina jolie

    In 2023, with a renewed interest in actually watching movies, I came up with Movie Marathon Month: watching at least one movie a day for 31 consecutive days. For the past two years there wasn't a unifying theme between the selections, although there were some whole franchises watched (2023: Starship Troopers; 2024: Taxi (French)). However, as I found myself watching both Wanted and Hackers again earlier in the year, I realized that Jolie's filmography was a major cinematic blind spot for me.

  • tippy toes

    2 a.m. on my tippy toes through a house too dark for this time of year summer not quite here the grey in-between the night not quite dark enough either to disappear into

• Technology and Free Software

  • Reducing the digital clutter of chats

    I hate modern chats. They presuppose we are always online, always available to chat. They force us to see and think about them each time we get our eyes on one of our devices. Unlike mailboxes, they are never empty. We can’t even easily search through old messages (unlike the chat providers themselves, which use the logs to learn more about us). Chats are the epitome of the business idiot: they make you always busy but prevent you from thinking and achieving anything.

    It is quite astonishing to realise that modern chat systems use 100 or 1000 times more resources (in size and computing power) than 30 years ago, that they are less convenient (no custom client, no search) and that they work against us (centralisation, surveillance, ads). But, yay, custom emojis!

    Do not get me wrong: chats are useful! When you need an immediate interaction or a quick on-the-go message, chats are the best.

    I needed to keep being able to chat while keeping the digital clutter to a minimal and preserving my own sanity. That’s how I came up with the following rules.

  • computer brain versus compost brain

    At one point, Hao describes how the people working on generative AI start to buy the idea that everything is computable. Everything can be emulated in terms of a computer model.

    "Everything" here includes human minds. Ergo, they decide, if we throw enough resources at making a computer generate outputs that sound like thinking, we have made a computer think, just as a human mind does. Everything is computable; therefore human minds are computable; therefore if we work at it long enough, we can make a computer that is indistinguishable in any meaningful sense from a human mind.

  • My perfect music synchronization solution

    I'm buying DRM free music for a long time, and I synchronized those music files across my devices using Syncthing. But my library weight growth, now weighting 60G… Some of my devices can't afford this! I had to find an alternative.

    Years ago I switched to NFS and FS-cache. NFS is a pretty common folder net mounting. We just have to write a line in "/etc/fstab" to mount a remote folder locally. FS-cache is an additional layer to keep cache on the client machines. It will automatically store and invalidate cache, and will prune the less used blocks before the filesystem start to suffocate. This will considerably reduce the bandwidth usage for clients when you listen the same albums by example. But in the same time, you still need an active internet connection to access the files.