Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • christy's 5 qs

    It's always fun to see her show up in anonradio's chat room (com) it feels a bit like a superstar of gopher is visiting. I'm always happy to read her question and sometime gets to answer then!

    1. Anything special for Halloween?

    I went for a sauna with a friend. Later at night, I woke up, I was sure the person I was seeing at that moment was cheating on me. I realized that I have PTSD from one Halloween were I was cheated on!

    2. Great Grandparent in WW2

    During a family constellation, a couple week ago, it resurfaced that my great grandfather was in WW2, survived while his platoon all died. That feeling of not deserving to live was planted then, and has been passed on for 3 generations.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Don’t Do Snake Oil Writing

    In computer security, it is often said that the fact you don’t see any vulnerability in the code you write is no proof that your code is secure. It is proof that you are blind to all the mistakes you made in your shitty code.

    The less competent you are, the more confident you will be and the more vulnerable code you will write.

    And people will exploit vulnerabilities of your code. Even if you honestly believe in your aptitude, you will end up writing "snake-oil" security systems.

  • KDE going all-in on a Wayland future

    Another important desktop environment is leaving away from X11.

    Today KDE announced that the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive [1].

    Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Shutdown the ZNC server

      I used to have a ZNC server running as an IRC bouncer.

      This server gave me a 24x7 presence on IRC, and cached the messages in a few channels.

      The caching became less useful, as the ZNC server only caches so much messages, and then starts flushing (first in, first out). By the time I logged in, most messages were flushed already.

      Also, the 24x7 presence gives the wrong impression.

  • Programming

    • Understanding Side Effects in Haskell: IO Isn’t a Contradiction

      When promoting Haskell, people often emphasize pure functions. They start by saying that, since there are no side effects, the same input will always produce the same output. However, for a program to be ultimately useful, it inevitably needs IO. This often leads to a self-contradiction: “If there are no side effects, how do you handle IO?” But when properly explained, Haskell doesn’t actually have no side effects—it simply separates side effects into a type called IO, unlike other programming languages.