Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Sunday Stream of Consciousness

    Wellllp. Woke up kinda late. Slept a really long time. I was sposed to go to my Mormor's with my brother to do some garden work or whatever she needed but ... yeah. Sorry. I like... just did not have the spoons to exist with other people.

    Woke up 20 minutes before we were supposed to be there, but dog needed a walk so... went to do that and ditched my brother to go do the garden work. I saw her last weekend so, I'm not THAT bad.

  • Notes on replacing a Torbeck diaphragm washer

    Common advice for a continually running toilet fill valve is to dismantle the valve and check for debris. I didn't find any, but the black 32mm rubber washer inside was leaving black residue, which I now suspect was indicative of failure.

    The old washer was labelled TOR WPE II C.

    The replacement was from Epson (presumably not the printer company), sold at Toolstation under SKU 62694 for £3.95, manufacturer ID RDT02999B-TL, and was labelled TOR XW 6. It came with a small plastic pin, unlike the old one, but this pin could be easily pulled out to turn it into the old style washer.

• Politics and World Events

  • While You Were Watching ETFs, Africa Quietly Became Bitcoin's Biggest Testing Ground

    Nigeria processes more P2P Bitcoin volume than any country except the US. Kenya runs mobile-first Lightning payments. South Africa's central bank is integrating Bitcoin into its regulatory framework. The continent Western media ignores is building the future of money.

    The Western Bitcoin narrative runs on a predictable loop. ETF flows. Fed policy. MicroStrategy purchases. Institutional adoption. The conversation is almost entirely about what rich countries do with Bitcoin as an investment vehicle.

    Meanwhile, 1.4 billion people across 54 African countries are answering a different question entirely: what happens when Bitcoin is not a portfolio asset but the only financial infrastructure that actually works?

  • Iran Just Put Bitcoin on the Hormuz Strait Toll Booth

    Iran is demanding Bitcoin payment from oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The world's most critical energy chokepoint is now a live proof-of-concept for censorship-resistant money.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Pronouns for an LLM

    IT as in Information Technology.

    IT as in Stephen King's IT.

    Seems entirely appropriate.

  • the contenders

    i decided on two decks a month and tried to pair up the decks in such a way that each month has at least one comfortable/familiar reading style (RWS or TdM) in addition to any "experimental" decks (decks that don't really follow one particular school or use the picard system i'm not too familiar with), and so that they don't "double up". additionally, i tried to get them to somehow match the month/season i'd be using them in, although i couldn't apply that to every deck.

  • Bitcoin and Hormuz

    Yeah. But above all, we’re arguing against it because of how it has an incredibly disproportionate energy cost and climate impact for its benefits. We hate it because it wrecks the planet. The more people use it in the real world, the worse off we all are.

  • a voxel engine, part 6: shaping memory access

    The renderer spends most of its time reading the map. Not computing, not drawing, but fetching data. On this platform, RAM access is slow enough that layout matters more than arithmetic.

    A simple 256×256 map already shows this. Access in one direction is much faster than in the other. Sequential reads follow the layout and stay in cache. The other direction effectively jumps with a stride of 256 bytes. The difference is large, close to a factor of two.

    Combining height and color into a single 16-bit value improves this. Both are fetched in one access, which reduces bandwidth pressure. The downside is a larger stride. Interleaving now happens in 512-byte steps. This still works, but it does not scale well.

  • Your Face Is Now a Search Query

    AI-powered surveillance went from science fiction to city infrastructure in under three years. Your face unlocks your phone, and now it unlocks your file in a police database. This is not a drill.

    You walk into a convenience store. A camera above the door captures your face. Software matches it against a database in 0.3 seconds. Your name, address, purchase history, and known associates populate a screen in a room you will never see.

    This is not a dystopian novel. This is Edmonton, Canada, in 2026. The police department is testing real-time facial recognition on live body-cam feeds. Not after the fact. Not with a warrant. In real time, on the street, as officers walk past you.

    Edmonton is not special. It is early.

  • Signal Might Leave Europe. Nostr Can't — and That's the Point.

    The EU's Chat Control law is pushing Signal to exit Europe. But Signal is a company with servers, employees, and a jurisdiction. Nostr is a protocol with none of those things. You can't regulate what you can't find.

    Signal drew a line. When the European Union's Child Sexual Abuse Regulation — Chat Control — moved toward final adoption in early 2026, Signal president Meredith Whittaker did not hedge. "We will leave," she said. Not we will comply. Not we will negotiate. Leave.

    It was the right response from a company that takes privacy seriously. It was also a demonstration of the fundamental weakness of any privacy tool operated by a company.

    Signal can leave. That means Signal can be pressured. It has offices. It has employees. It has a nonprofit foundation registered in a specific country. It has servers with IP addresses. It depends on Apple and Google to distribute its app. Every one of these is a pressure point. The EU exploiting them is not a hypothetical — it is the explicit purpose of the regulation.

    Nostr has none of these. And that is why it matters.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: Announcing Satellite Antenna (SA)

      @gritty mentions that this new instance replicates posts from my new instance at ucant.org, which is kind.

      I've updated the 'about.gmi' page on Ucant Antenna the better to reflect the status of my instance.

• Programming

  • Note to my future self: Running C as a script

    I, sometime use C as a glue language for processing lots of data, because it is very fast, however, I can't remember what gcc flags I use from the last time I compiled it. Sure, I can write it in the source, but that require extra step to copy it to the shell (I'm too lazy for that).