Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: DGUORTH Wordo: GARDE

• Technology and Free Software

  • The Wrong Biennale

    No, it's not generative AI just because it was generated with the aid of a computer. Digital musical composition and sound synthesis, as well as algorithmic image generation go back to the 1950's and 60's.

    The hype is tiring. The bubble must soon be popping. This will cause massive unemployment. Or maybe not, maybe there will be huge demand for janitors of AI slop.

    Anyhow, I submitted some mail art and a "mathematical poem" in response to a call for such things which I later learned was part of The Wrong Biennale, this year specifically devoted to AI art. This biennale is focused on digital art and it predominantly takes place online. Its networked organisation allows prospective curators to apply with their projects, and artists then submit their works to these curators. Each curator writes their own call for works, or hand-picks what they want to include. A striking tendency in many of these calls is their often uncritical enthusiasm for AI art, sometimes mixed with an appeal to criticism within limits: Generative AI is good and should be pursued, let's just make it ethical! The elephant in the server hall is ignored as usual; no mention of environmental consequences in terms of electricity bills and fresh water consumption.

  • Golem and other incomprehensible modern games

    Okay before we get into it, for people not familiar with my review style: I’m not really doing good “consumer advice” here on which board game you should buy. I’m doing reviews more for other design nerds like myself who like to pick apart and study board game design in and of itself. For making new games or new editions, or for its own sake because it’s fun to consider how things tick. I’m looking at a design more like “okay what went right here and what went wrong and how can we learn from that?”

    Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Golem, which I hate, but its problems aren’t unique to it so I’m not trying to say that it’s an exceptionally bad game. Instead, the issues are pretty typical for most new school board games. I’m not trying to say that Golem is an outlier or pick on it especially. Every time you see a complaint below and go like “but that’s not any different from [list of twenty other popular complex euro games]”, I get that. That is the bigger point I’m trying to make here. Not that Golem in and of itself is bad or worse than other games, but that the gaming hobby is in a space where I don’t like most of these games.

  • 2025-09-27

    What to do about the Tesla Cybertruck? I know that's a question that few people really care to ask these days. But by now, the cybertruck has demonstrated that it is a clear commercial failure.

    The sad part is that the Cybertruck could have just been a regular failure of a vehicle but because of Elon Musk's political shenanigans, the Cybertruck will probably be remembered as that crappy Tesla vehicle that failed at the same time that Elon Musk sucked up to our pedo-in-charge and 34-count convicted felon of a president.

    But enough about politics. Let's talk trucks.

    Is there any way to salvage a gigantic electric pickup truck with a polarising industrial design and comically bad quality control and assembly?

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Tablets, acorns and clicky clacky typing

      Well, this is my ROOPHLOCH post for 2025. Fully compliant with the challenge conditions and, and posted via a setup I've never used before, but nevertheless falling far short of what I had hoped for. In my head I was going to push my 433 MHz ISM-band setup from a few years back further - build a small Yagi receive antenna out of hardware store aluminium tubing to get some better range, at the very least.

    • Tablets, acorns and clicky clacky typing

      Instead I'm using boring old mobile data for the internet side of things. I thought maybe I'd at least try to make the post more than 10km from home which would at least make a new distance record for me, and maaaybe I'll still try for that some evening this coming week, on one of the final possible days, but we'll see. This one is coming from pretty close to home, from a field next to a local park, the same place I wrote about watching somebody fly a model glider in last June[2]. I'm sitting under a very large and I suspect really rather old oak tree. Acorns are falling all around me, every so many minutes. People are walking their dogs, or walking or cycling around. The woman one oak tree over seems to be taking a nap. Someone else, out on the grass in the sun looks like she might be meditating? It's a nice day, not too hot, not too cold, no wind.