Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • Math + CS = HPC — The Slop: 0001

    It seems you can offend people by agreeing with them that AI all knowing and great for coding. So instead of venting to people about how stupid AI is, let's just went into GeminiSpace!

  • Square Function with Diode Network

    I would like to see if I can set up a simple flight model on my THAT that calculates horizontal-and-vertical lift, drag, acceleration, and velocity, based on adjustable Angle of Attack and thrust inputs. I scribbled out a simple model for this, making many simplifying assumptions such as: straight flight (no banking); mass remains constant (frozen fuel); and air pressure does not change with altitude.

    One of several obstacles to this is that numerous multipliers are needed, related to the calculation of the lift and drag, which both need the square of velocity as an input. The simple, and most sensible, trick is to get the square of a voltage is to feed the same input twice into the same multiplier. But THAT comes with only two multipliers. How to get around this? One idea is to buy another AD633 multiplier chip, and build a small expansion board. However, the AD633 chips are about 20 USD each, which is a lot on my tight budget. There are a few other less expensive chips out there which can produce a product of a signal, but they generally are intended for different use cases — for example, manipulating radio signals — and I am hesitant to buy any of these chips to experiment with them.

  • The Limited Utility of Reticulum

    I've been playing with the Reticulum mesh network since early last summer. My ROOPHLOCH entry last year was powered by Reticulum, and I currently operate, to the best of my knowledge, the only LoRa RNode in my town. The premise and design of the project fascinate me. However, I strongly suspect that Reticulum will never gain enough of a foothold to be a viable communication system to rival existing cellular and WiFi networks. Why is that?

    Any time a new technology is introduced, it faces the challenge of adopting new users. Eventually it reaches a critical mass of both size and functionality that it becomes a mainstay. But those two factors--size and functionality--are conspiring against Reticulum, and they work in tandem.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • If you love me, you'll follow me on Mastodon

      I want to leave Discord, because I want to avoid the ever approaching tide of online age verification. But if I'm being honest with myself, I know I'm not going to.

      All the people I care about are on Discord. For a long time, it's been my "compromise platform," the one I can use to talk to people who aren't on the nerd messaging apps that don't require I sign up for a service owned by Meta (WhatsApp is, to this day, the only platform I will hard-refuse to talk to people on, even if I really need to. If it's really that dire they can send me an email).

      I can hope and pray that next month, there'll be enough people to jump ship to make "I'm not on Discord on principle" a viable social argument but I've been through this before, so I'm not really holding out hope.

    • Discord is not a good product

      The other day, someone told me that “Discord is a good product”. And I’m grateful for that phrasing because it helps me explain why I’m having such a cow about Discord.

      Because it’s not a good product. The worst part about it is how mandatory it is. As an analogy, let’s take some soda… what’s a really gross one? Pepsi? Pepsi has a lot of problems but it would be a heck of a lot worse if it was a “mandatory” product. If everytime you went past a grocery store you would loose all control over your hand and it’d drag you into the store and grab a bottle and you’d physically be forced to get it, even though you have water at home—or you’ll lose your friends or not be able to access product support or an event or even in some cases housing.

      While normal, free, common-sense alternatives like email, IRC, XMPP and Fediverse are “products” in some senses of the word (they are produced things that exist and you can use them; and this goes extra for commercial but FOSS-friendly forums like Discourse or Vanilla), they’re products the same way breathable air is a product. If someone were to take away your lungs in order to sell you bottled oxygen that’d not be a product I’d be a happy customer of. I might be buying but I’d be pretty sad about what they took away.

    • a toast to dokuja

      it's disheartening. I'm the kind of creature that's more excited by other people's energy, not so much what they produce, so when things are done in isolation and just silently appended to the end of a list of files with no pomp or fanfare I struggle. there's exceptions obviously, but broadly I'm only as excited about what you make as you are, if you just plonk it down and shrug then I just shrug but if you get fired up I get fired up.

• Programming

  • Final ex Post

    Or most likely not, but /tech/ex-command-reference.gmi took a bit to put together, and surfaced at least one bug related to the #l ex command (number lines with literal display, obviously) and an even shorter way to display all lines in a file, the range % which then defaults to calling the print command: [...]