Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • define: Houseplant programming 🪴

    This resonated with me because, for the past 13 years I've been trying to write the "perfect" blog engine. With announcers, assistants, builders, publishers, and many other interfaces that try to be the ideal abstraction so that it can work in any imagineable scenario: "You want to store your files in FTP, deploy using NNCP, and serve it on Gemini? No problem!"

  • Can We Make Simpler Software With LLMs?

    Growing numbers of abstraction layers, vast amounts of dependencies and general complexity are what annoy me most about modern software development. LLMs are powerful tools, but in practice they often lead to even larger, more complex projects with even more dependencies. Can we use them for the opposite: small, simple software without dependencies? I tried this recently when I wanted a specific piece of software to do simple calculations inside short texts. Not all the approaches I tried are ones I'm convinced are a good idea, but I intentionally wanted to experiment a bit.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Announcing OFFLFIRSOCH 2026

      I am pleased to announce that today marks the beginning of the third ever annual OFFLine-FIRst SOftware CHallenge, OFFLFIRSOCH 2026. Let us once again reject modernity and embrace tradition, specifically by remembering that the entire gosh darned revolutionary *point* of the personal computer is that you actually have your very own, well, personal computer, right there on your desk, or in these most decadent of times in your very pocket, with all of its capabilities right there for your exclusive use at your whim and fancy whenever the need should take you. Sharing some invisible, distant computer which you don't even own with countless other users by means of a dumb terminal and a long serial cable is a primitive, brutish way of life that we gladly left behind. LARPing those times with would-have-been-supercomputers and wireless networks is an absurdity. The ever-online computer is weak and vulnerable, to network outages and to attacks, and constantly changes at the whims of people who are not you (many of those people don't even *like* you!). Constant change is the enemy of reliability, and robs you of your birthright to master your tools through a lifetime of use. The offline-first computer is strong, resilient, dependable and able to be mastered. It works today as it worked yesterday, which is how it will work tomorrow, unless you will it otherwise.

    • Announcing OFFLFIRSOCH 2026