Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Love

    This will be a short one.

    If love truly exists, it either manifests in a form of a person assuming what others think and act as if they think that way, or it's in a form of knowing exactly the things that a person or group needs and act accordingly.

    And there can only be one actual answer to it.

  • Swallow's nest

    In recent weeks, a swallow couple has been constructing a nest on the exterior of our house. It is located in the upper corner of the roof bargeboards. We are quite grateful that they have chosen our home as a nesting location.

  • Fiction: fanfic of a failed leader

    The other night, I couldn't sleep, so I played Alpha Centauri for hours - yes, the 20+ year old scifi game. And somehow, I got one of the most evocative play through I ever had.

• Technology and Free Software

  • what I really want an "AI agent" to do (MBA Tears edition)

    It's always amazing me how these pro-AI-future guys reveal what they think is pointless busywork through these tweets. "I'll have the AI plan my kid's birthday party and my vacation with my wife! That's pointless bullshit no one has time for!"

    LIke many of the commenters on that Bluesky thread, I do not want an "AI agent" to plan my kid's party or my romantic vacation. I want an AI agent to do things that actually benefit me.

    Let's pretend for a moment than an "AI agent" could actually do tasks. Let's pretend it can do them without hallucinating or screwing up. To these guys, this world is imminent, so let's humor them.

  • That AI and copyright debate [Ed: It's not "AI", it's slop, and one must not conflate ripoffs with "AI"]

    There are ongoing debates about the use of copyrighted material in AI training datasets.

    We went round these buoys in the 2000s over fair use of digital works; since the 1980s, even the USA treats digital text as generally copyrighted, albeit with a liberal regime for re-use of the material.

    It is sad to see people arguing for restrictions on re-use. Some of them are literally the same people who were arguing *for* fair use 20 years ago. What is worse, some of these arguments rely on the Labour Theory of Value fallacy, known as "sweat of the brow" protection in US copyright law (which is largely a list of reasons not to allow it). Still others argue that the identity of the person operating the AI system should make a difference. I'm glad they hadn't switched sides when we were still fighting the DMCA and EUCD.

  • Cargocult

    So the irssi configuration block in question had been copied from who knows where, in turn copied from who knows where. The easy solution is to continue to cargocult the configuration, as if you haven't broken it then there's nothing to fix. This saves time, but is weaker on the understanding front, and you may need understanding when something Doesn't Work™.

    The configuration might be stored as a hash or struct, a bag of key and value pairs, in which case the order in the configuration file should not matter. Even here there can be complications as to whether the first or last matching entry wins, in the event there are duplicate keys. This causes some amount of incompatibility between unix programs where some pick the first environment variable when duplicates are present, and other programs pick the last of the duplicates. Yes, environment variables can be duplicated. The variables are in a list, so an arbitrary program could put both "key=foo" and "key=bar" into the array of strings that is the extern char **environ.