Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • Copilot is the peak oil of high technology

    February 5, 2026. ChatGPT told another old friend to take their life. Someone intervened. Others haven't been so lucky.

    I go to class and see hundreds of people with nothing open but a dialog box. In their 2024 paper, Aylsworth and Castro argued that to outsource your critical thinking to a computer is to fail to treat yourself with dignity. It's principally a harm done to yourself. Others, such as Laura Gorrieri (2025), have countered that it's not clear how things like writing essays intrinsically support the cultivation of one's own humanity, but that central idea feels harder to refute. And equally so, it's hard to see how the goal of large language model providers is anything but the sacrifice of one's own autonomy.

    And yet, people are still asking me to take up prompt engineering. Or they're telling me not to. Or they're throwing up their hands and fatalistically accepting that this is the new normal, that we all ought to find ways to live alongside it. Unless it's Chinese.

  • Home Assistant 2026.2 Brings the New Home Dashboard, Quick Search, New Integrations, and More

    Home Assistant's Franck Nijhof has announced the release of Home Assistant 2026.2, which brings with it a shift to the new Home Dashboard default display, a rebranding of add-on packages, redesigned quick search, and the ability to opt-in to data gathering for a planned public device database.

    "The new Home Dashboard is now the official default for all new installations," Nijhof says in the new release announcement. "If you've been using Home Assistant for a while and never customized your default view, you'll get a suggestion to switch; give it a try! Add-ons are now called Apps! After a lot of community discussion, it was time to use terminology that everyone understands. Your TV has apps, your phone has apps, and now Home Assistant has apps too. My personal favorite this release? The completely redesigned Quick search! If you're like me and navigate Home Assistant using your keyboard, you're going to love this one. Press ⌘ + K (or Ctrl + K on Windows/Linux) and you have instant access to everything."

  • Valid Ex Commands

    What exactly the command does depends on the flavor of ex. The first order of business is to know that ex commands can have optional : before them and it's pretty easy to skip over a lot of those.