Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Cursed Number #3137

• Technology and Free Software

  • Digital minimalism, 1978

    In digital minimalism I’m always like “could people in 1978 do this?” Could they send letters and place calls? Then it’s okay that I use the digital equivalent of that. Were they always reachable? Nope. So then it’s okay that I walk away from internet sometimes. Could they listen to headphones? Maybe not audio books on tape then outside of the home (no walkman yet), but certainly pocket radios. Could they read on the train? Yes, but, slow media like books and comics. No reco algos. Were there discussion forums? Yes, in magazines, you could write in, but a lot of it was hobby clubs or study circles in real life.

    I chose 1978 not because it was a good time or people were happy. They weren’t. It was hard times but people were taking that seriously in a way that I appreciate. I chose it because while I was born two years later, in 1980, my mom’s magazine collection (which I have read and reread many times) start in 1978 so it’s the oldest history that I am thoroughly familiar with.

  • GUI Land Mines

    the problem being what I call GUI Land Mines, or that there are now two arrow icons that overlay PDF file icons. Given a file icon, one might possibly want to click on it to open the file. Big target, easy to click on. Right? But, no, someone at Apple added some land mines that blow up on you, and it being a mine field there's no easy way to clear said minefield. This leaves avoiding the minefield or careful mouse-work to avoid accidentally clicking on (or mousing over) something that's going to blow up on you.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The Week in Social Media: I'm Still Convinced Mastodon's Going to Outlive Everything

      OpenAI has acquired Statsig, an analytics platform that allows companies to do things like A/B test, feature flag, and do user session replay. When I did web work at the end of the last decade, we used a bunch of different products and approaches to do these things, so I get the appeal of having it all in a single place. But now OpenAI has acquired Statsig, giving them access to all the human-generated data that company has built up.

      OpenAI claims that Statsig will continue to operate independently. Uh huh. While I don't doubt Statsig were acquired for their suite of applications and expertise around such, I also very strongly suspect that access to their data was the key thing. Bluesky uses Statsig and all user interactions (what you click on, etc) get sent to the platform.

      The search for novel data means that I suspect there are going to be more and more of these types of acquisitions. And until I hear otherwise, knowing that everything I did and do on the site is going into OpenAI's data vacuum...gives me pause. I think I'll be more active on Mastodon, and I was already more active there already.

    • Little problem (bug?) of surf

      For a while now, I notices that surf (commit 48517e5) has a little problem, it display button and text input as a small circle. Luckly it is very easy to fix with a single css rule, set input font-size to 1em. Here is my surf's default.css