Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • in time

    which way to move            
                    in time                 
              to make the pieces            
                      fit                   
               do I fix the past            
             or embrace the future          
                   uncertain
    

  • Nocturnal Pulse

    He paused. Yes, there it was again. He had just gotten down to work at the best possible time, slightly past midnight, when his ambition ran the highest, and his nerves were frayed enough as it was from the aromatic blend of caffeine that rushed through his veins. Two little capsules in his machine and he was off to the races, filling out the Excel spreadsheet with relative ease.

• Politics and World Events

  • The Collapse Is on the Way

    I don’t know what you think or know. I think—and am even certain—that within a few years we will find ourselves isolated, ostracized, boycotted, and hated by the entire world—us as Israelis and as Jews, and also as a state, a people, and a society. After U.S. President Trump finishes his term in particular, the United States, just like all of Europe, will turn its back on us. Our enemies will continue to establish themselves, entrench themselves, take root, and win the narrative battle over global consciousness—the narrative that “Israel is the root of the world’s problems” or that “the Jews are the root of all the world’s problems.”

    The global Generation Z already entirely hates us, and within a few years it will become the voting public and the elected leadership around the world. The world is becoming Islamized; Western countries are increasingly being colored with green flags of Islam, of the Palestinians, and of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. There are large waves of conversion to Islam among native Western populations—whether out of ignorance, naivety, or the understanding that it is very worthwhile to join the winning side in the West. The scale of Muslim and Arab immigration to Western countries and their gradual transformation into a majority leaves no doubt. As for Christianity, it is a religion and a civilization in deep crisis. Most locals in Europe see themselves as atheists altogether, and in the United States as well there is a growing movement drifting toward appeasing Islam and Muslims, conversion, and politicians sense the shift in the wind like sharks smelling blood and begin to flirt with the pro-Islamic narrative.

  • Unpersoned Outlaws

    A new proposal from the Swedish government is to stop welfare and other social help to those convicted of severe felonies.

    I’m not onboard with that idea.

    We’re not supposed to have the death penalty in Sweden and I don’t like the “once a thief, always a thief” mentality. If they’re not in prison or in psychiatric care, we still wanna prevent more crimes. Not create more homelessness or relegate them to the “shadow society” they’ve been given so much lip service to opposing.

    This proposal will create outlaws and lawlessness.

• Technology and Free Software

  • AI prompts for stuff I don’t know enough about to have my own opinions about

    There’s an emerging norm of “don’t paste unedited LLM output — paste your prompt, and/or MAYBE a quick summary of what it said” that I’m mostly in favor of. Still, I’d like you all to see what I’m seeing, but I don’t want to easily re-feed ChatGPT output back into other LLMs; my hunch is that LLM autocoprophagy benefits nobody honest. So if you want to see what this thing spat out, you’ll need to copy and paste filenames and stick them on the end of this URL.

  • Joule Thief, Stirling Engine

    The basic circuit with the LED worked great. I was able to light up the LED with as little as 0.5 volts from the desktop power supply, although you need to bring it up to around 0.9 volts to get full brightness. Interestingly, once the LED is lit, you can bring the voltage down almost to 0.3 volts before the light will go out.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Monaspace Lagrange Fontpacks: Neon, Argon, Xenon, Radon, Krypton

      Not a typo. Monospace fonts named Monaspace, with an “a”. I added those fonts to my Lagrange fontpacks page.

    • Curse of the glog

      There's another newcomer (I say on this capsule's venerable month-and-a-half anniversary), calling himself Big Bungo over at frooplet.com, and he has brought with him a curse.

      [...]

      In Scandinavian languages, the word ‘log’ (as in journal) is spelled ‘logg’, which also means that a blog is a blogg. This is relevant because the word glog, silly as it already sounds, is also dangerously close to the word gløgg (or Swedish glögg, which English Wikipedia apparently prefers). So naturally a Scandinavian glog must then be not only a glogg, but a gløgg.

    • I’m pondering about self hosting a small gopher hole on my raspberry pi.

      I’m pondering about self hosting a small gopher hole on my raspberry pi. It’s mostly for #meshtastic (I’m using it as a BBS), but I’d like to show it off to people without a mesh of their own. Would it be a bad idea to open port 70 on my firewall? I’m intentionally avoiding any cgi so the surface area of attack in smallish.