Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Annihilation of Self

    So there's a "Me" that exists inside of me. My mental self image, if you will. There's also a "Me" that exists inside everyone who knows me - the image other people have of me. All of these "Me" are the real me, because that's how we exist as a society.

  • The Future Eaters

    So my version of the Omelas story would have a city, not especially utopian but comfy enough for the top sixth or so. The other five sixths are working their knuckles to the bone to support the comfy ones. Even among the comfy ones the wealth gaps are intense with one guy having many times as the others combined and then similar ratios all the way down to the edge of comfort.

• Opinions, Politics and World Events

  • In defense of the glowing rectangle

    Evil foreign policy and arms shipments (along with climate denial and queerphobia) can thrive in a world where we just suddenly take away all phones without building other communication networks and approaches.

    [...]

    In hacking there’s this idea of “bootstraps” from the old joke about how you can’t lift yourself off the ground by pulling on your bootstrap. For example, if you wanna build a new OS, you’re working on an existing OS while you’re doing that, and if you’re making a new language compiler, you’re using an existing language compiler to do that usually.

    Same goes for building a meaningful offline life.

  • The pedantry of the Dutch proletariat

    Pedants can be found anywhere, and they take on a wide variety of subjects towards which they direct their pedantry. One such group which I have always found particularly frustrating are Dutch language pedants. Folks who insist on `correcting' `mistakes' made by other native speakers. While I have always found these types frustrating, I have never spoken out against them, as they are -- by-and-large -- well-educated and respectable people. Now that I have finished the first half of my masters in linguistics however, I feel both a right- and even stronger need- to refute some of the points made by these people.

    Firstly, let me make clear who I am speaking about. I intentionally use the term `pedants'. I do this not in an attempt to demean or belittle this group of people, I do it simply out of a desire to be precise. Many of those who fall under this term might rather be called grammarians, linguists, language-lovers, or the like, but I contend that much of what they maintain actually has very little to do with language at all, let alone grammar.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BHIYSUR Wordo: HELPS

  • back to school

    september with its "back to school" feel, the cooling down after summer, brings back a little bit of energy. it's when i personally feel the New Year's energy the most. i'm inspired to try all sorts of things and this year it started gently and reasonably.

    first i thought about what i'd like to start/re-start. restart an art practice (following the advice from "we need your art" by amie mcnee). start any sort of exercise, kind of using that same method (two weeks of smallest actionable steps). alright, two small projects - manageable!

• Science

  • Leaving academia, at least for now

    Unlike many graduate students, I never dreamed of being a professor. When I was finishing my undergraduate degree in computer engineering, I was depressed by the state of my field. The impression I had was that the jobs and money were not in actually trying to improve peoples' lives in any meaningful way, but in manufacturing widgets that would weasel their way into the daily life of as many people as possible. By making a product feel indispensible, clever developers (and they do have so much more in common with property developers than engineers) can sell ads, sell incremental updates, or best of all collect a monthly subscription.

    I wanted no part of this, and instead found a research assistant position developing software in a music technology lab. As I was realizing that the university environment created a space where it was seemingly possible to work on niche problems faced by real people, I also took a class on human-computer interaction that greatly expanded my vision of what computer science or software engineering could be. Because of these two experiences, I became a graduate student hoping to find a way to stay as a research assistant on projects I felt would have a positive impact on people.

    [....]

    With a few years of hindsight, I realize that what I saw of the university as a place where work in the public interest can occur is really quite exceptional, at least in an engineering department. Research funding is awarded to projects by government entities or the private sector. It is impossible to escape the need to justify one's work on the basis of economic productivity. Even projects focused on creating assistive technologies need to be framed as allowing some group of disabled people to become more effective producers or consumers of goods, or as inevitably leading to a commercial product with some return on investment. There is less of this pressure to get returns than in a company, but it still exists.

    [....]

    Finally, there is the paperwork. To be a research professional of any kind in a university, you must publish or perish. Funding is rarely guaranteed and never present for very long, so you must constantly apply for new grants and search out new partnerships if you want to get anything done. I don't think anyone actually enjoys this part of the job, and will not dwell on it any longer.

• Technology and Free Software

  • My elite hacking skills at 9 years old

    My oldest brother got a computer when we were young. It was an old office pc from my dad's job that was closing down and being acquired. It ran Windows 98. My brother used it to play video games, of course: C&C Red Alert, Deadlock: Planetary Conquest, Starcraft, and Half-Life are the ones I most remember watching over his shoulder as he played; There were some simulation/city builders in there, too, Pharaoh, SimCity, SimTower and the like.

  • Initial Thoughts About Using Tails Linux as a Daily Driver

    I'm a huge advocate of online privacy and I've always thought about using Tails linux as my daily operating system.

    Tails is not really designed for daily use. If you DuckDuckGo using Tails as a daily driver you'll probably find dicussions saying that it should not or could not be done. Of course it can be done, but if you should depends on your needs and what you use your computer for.

  • Pipers piping

    There are hype around n8n recently, they said it is a automation tool which let you design your automation by connecting nodes togather, route that node's output to this node's input, selecting which node to use based on some parameter, and many `intregration`. But do you need it? No, because everything they advertise can be done with simple, non bloated, bash script and unix pipe.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I made a template tool for this

      Of course I did. It's not enough to make a gemini capsule that underdelivers on its premise and ultimately holds less than ten gemlog posts. You have to also use this project as a contrivance to build other, secret, invisible things.

      Anyway: mine is written in Rust. My first Rust. It's like six lines and it took me three hours and it will save me from copy/pasting the header and manually typing today's date twice each time I make a new post.

    • Please think of the children!!!

      This article concerns the intentions of governments to monitor smartphones, the cloud, and all communications with artificial intelligence. Ostensibly to combat the possession and distribution of CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material). It's mainly a rant about mass surveillance.