Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: GUIMNPH Wordo: BEVVY

• Politics and World Events

  • The senator

    He said "Kentucky first, anti-corruption, and anti- war" enough times it stopped being a slogan, or even a policy container. It became a rallying cry. Wasn't til late in the race he got much traction, then it came all at once.

    "Our last Senator did some good things for Kentucky," he said. "He got on committees and built seniority that let him bring in a lot of money. But he served power itself, and served the National Republican Party. We got the turkeys that fell off the truck at Thanksgiving. The National Republican Party got the whole truck."

• Media/Deceit

  • Prepare for That Stupid World

    But what appears to be journalism is, in fact, pure advertising. For both WSJ and Anthropic. Look at how WSJ journalists are presented as "world class", how no-subtle the Anthropic guy is when telling them they are the best and how the journalist blush at it. If you are taking the story at face value, you are failing for the trap which is simple: "AI is not really good but funny, we must improve it."

    The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is. Think for one second. One full second. Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine? The video states it clearly: the vending machine must be stocked by humans. Customers must order and take their snack by themselves. The AI has no value at all.

    Automated snack vending machine is a solved problem since nearly a century. Why do you want to make your vending machine more expensive, more error-prone, more fragile and less efficient for your customers?

    What this video is really doing is normalising the fact that "even if it is completely stupid, AI will be everywhere, get used to it!"

• Technology and Free Software

  • Re: Don't call it a "Zoom meeting"

    I'll have to respectfully disagree, otherwise I won't be able to take any aspirin, hoover my carpets, or ride my jet ski.

    OK, I don't have a jet ski, but I have a hoover made by Bosch and I have aspirin with a supermarket own brand. Using a brand name as a generic name doesn't strengthen the brand. If it did, companies wouldn't have lawyers trying to stop it.

    So I'm going to carry on photoshopping things in Gimp, googling things on DuckDuckGo, and putting drinks in a thermos made by... I have no idea who. I'll also be using velcro on my hi-viz jacket that I bet isn't isn't Velcro, but it's hard to tell. I probably won't be using heroin, though.

  • The Great Website Rebuild of 2025

    My website setup has been more than a little janky for a while now. It's been very gemini-first: all my posts are written as .gmi files with the date in the filename. I then used nytpu's gemlog.sh to generate the feed and index page. This worked well when I wanted my site to be gemini-only. I eventually decided I wanted to expose things as an atom feed over https, so I hacked the gemlog.sh script to generate 2 feeds: the gemini feed, and a second feed with content to serve over https. This had the drawback of the "canonical" link being to gemini, though many feed-readers only support https; several elements of the feed wouldn't work properly.

  • Running OpenBSD in hostile environment

    I haven't blogged for quite a while.. Well, life is happning and I just don't have the time or energy to sit down and write posts. Until now.

    Lately I had a work strip to China, where it's known for the hostile internet the the GFW. So.. I decided to upgrade the long-untouched OpenBSD on my laptop and seek security there. Turns out OpenBSD 7.8 is great!! Firefox now has hardware accelerated video decoding and doesn't crash randomly anymore. `sndio` is now also stable on my Framework 13 and doesn't crash randomly. And WiFi is more stable than ever.