Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Wavefunction Collapse #3134

  • "Angel plays the numbers"

  • "vulture"

  • "crepuscular"

  • crave

  • Tired but Good, Man

    A Thursday that feels like a Friday. Out to a little food festival with my partner and friends. A handful of tickets, doled out for chickpea curry, mini bison burgers, tourtiere, and so on. Wasps everywhere. An epi-pen in my pocket. I got out unscathed, but one of our friends was stung. Luckily, fine. We ate, we tried to find shade, we went inside the little building and had overpriced beer around tall tables.

• Games

  • Dragging names through MUD

    Four approaches to playing MUDs are identified and described. These approaches may arise from the inter-relationship of two dimensions of playing style: action versus interaction, and world-oriented versus player-oriented. An account of the dynamics of player populations is given in terms of these dimensions, with particular attention to how promote balance or equilibrium. This analysis also offers an explanat for the labelling of MUDs as being either "social" or "gamelike".

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Online safety, maybe

      The longer I provide web services to strangers, the more I feel that data is toxic. I used to think I only had to worry about spam and vandalism, but with every regulator thinking that far more terrible material is just waiting to show up, and that they need to go after the recipients instead of the perpetrators, I'm really starting to feel it.

      DMCA and its descendants all over the world were pretty bad when it came to the anti-circumvention clauses but pretty OK when it came to a lack of moderation. And I know, moderation is good. But I also like the fact that I can host a lot of wikis without having to moderate. Luckily, it wasn't necessary in the last 20 years (other than spam and vandalism). It's getting somewhat harder to be excited by it all, though.

  • Programming

    • Java 25 Performance

      There's a new version of the language everyone loves to hate coming in September. I downloaded a preview release to try out some of the performance enhancements.

      First up is ahead of time compilation. You basically set a parameter and then run the app through it's paces. On exit, an aot file is generated. If you specify that file on subsequent runs, a lot of warmup work is bypassed. I've found that Alhena startup is at least a half second faster on MacOS M1 and a bit more on my old 2012 Windows PC. Startup now feels "snappy" on that machine.