Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Window Screen #3151

  • 🔤SpellBinding — BCHKUSO Wordo: STABS

• Science

  • 🎮 The Addictive Pull of Evony: The King's Return

    I never thought a mobile game could get under my skin the way Evony: The King's Return did. At first, it was just something to fill a few spare minutes - build a little city, train some troops, join an alliance, and watch my kingdom slowly grow. It felt harmless, even relaxing. But somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling casual and started feeling like a responsibility. It started taking me a lot of time doing everything necessary in the game ...

  • More Fun with Slide Rules

    I thought it ways interesting to see, on the Internet, that some slide rules had common conversion factors marked out on a scale, e.g., inches to centimeters, lbs to kilograms, and so forth. Something that sounds useful would be a small, compact circular slide rule, with just log scales, and a bunch of conversion factors marked out on one of the scales.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Brainstorms for AI Poisoning Techniques

    I've been reading a lot about various defenses against AI scraper bots. I trust that if you're the kind of person who reads my website, the problem needs no introduction - essentially, thousands of startups and established companies around the world are trying to invest in AI and LLMs, all of them want their own dataset (since that's the only thing remotely of value), and hence each of those companies run thousands of bots every day in an attempt to scrape the entirety of the publicly available Internet, which all too often brings down smallweb and Indie web sites that were never designed to handle a load of visitors who are only there to desperately recoup their venture capital funds.

  • Revisiting My Modern Retro Console Idea

    A while back on my blog, I wrote a few articles brainstorming ideas for a modern 8-bit retro console - something sharing the same processor as stuff like the NES, the Atari VCS, the Apple II, and the Commodore 64, but including fun modern amenities such as multiprocessing and a triangle rasterizer!

  • Programming

    • Batch vs Bash and the Pages branch

      And this does not actually rewrite `testedit.sh` in place as far as executing the script is concerned, because on Unix systems, once you have opened the file, you have long forgotten about using the file's path and are instead referring to the file's inode - a structure on disk with a unique ID that points to the file's contents. The inode structures on Unix are reference counted with both the number of hard links in the filesystem to that file and the number of times that file is currently open, and it is only once both counts hit zero that the file is actually deleted from disk.

      In sed's case, since it is creating a new file to write output to, it is creating a new inode that is separate from the one that the shell has open. Moving that file over the original file deletes the hard link to the original inode referenced by the shell, but leaves the inode itself untouched, for the shell to happily continue executing it (then allow the filesystem to delete it once it exits).

    • Self-editing scripts 📜

      Thrig suggests that I was wrong about shell scripts being read in their entirety at start up ...and talks about tracing and IO in a convincing way, and it sounds like I'd got it wrong. So I experimented.