Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • confined

    I am as soft 
    as the moss under feet
    after a long winter
    waiting, hiding 
    under layers 
    protected
    confined, rather
    feel me 
    the softness
    and break me free
    

  • that hot librarian content you crave, part 3: shelf ranges

    My library shelves are organized by genre. There about 14 subdivisions. Within each subdivision, books are arranged alphabetically by author's last name.

    Each shelf has a tag indicating its range (which authors, alphabetically, are on each shelf). The ranges use the last three letters of the authors' last names, since that's what is also on the spine label.

    All this creates a lot of opportunities for shelf ranges to spell silly things.

  • A nice chat

    "I actually miss the times before cellphones, when you'd go to a bar and talk to people around you!"

    That's what I told John tonight, when he asked me if he was bothering me. We were both by ourselves, sitting at the bar. I had asked the bartender if the veggie burger was vegan — he heard the question, sitting next to me, and asked if I was vegetarian.

    "Vegan", I said.

    "My wife has been a vegetarian for 10-12 years", he told me.

• Technology and Free Software

  • 1.6.4: out, damned bug! out, I say!

    *removed all Sweet Sausage Seasonings references. as it turns out I already thought that ingredient was bs & removed it but just forgot to remove it EVERYWHERE

  • Artificial Stupidity

    Some people are worried about generative AI becoming so smart that it takes over the world and tries to execute humanity. How they can believe this, while at the same time critically examining the output being produced by generative AI, is beyond me. In any case, I think a much more plausible dystopian story is that we hand all the control of our lives, and everything we depend on, over to AI, only to realize that it is incapable of pulling off the job. But at that point it is too late.

    Recently this issue came home to me, when I needed to purchase an expensive oven part. As you might know, I'm not fond of Javascript, the Big Web, or doing business through Web portals. In the past I've had a good experience using searspartsdirect.com, which allowed placing orders over the phone, although this did cause you to miss out on a small discount they were offering for Web-only customers. So, I called up the company like normal, and worked my way through the phone tree, only to find, at the tip of the branch, a message stating that the company is no longer providing orders over the phone, and that it is necessary to go to searspartsdirect.com to place an order. I was bummed, but I still needed my part, so I spun up the Web page.

    [...]

    I go back to the Web portal, trying to contact the company through that. The support agent turns out to be an AI bot, a very unhelpful one. The AI bot is unable to see any order under my name or phone number and doesn't understand what the problem is. I ask to speak to a human. The bot says that it will connect me to a human, but only if I explain what the problem is first. I do my best to summarize. Afterwards, the bot gets stuck in this loop where it keeps telling me, over and over again, that it stands ready to assist, if only I will provide more details on what the problem is. When I finally shut down the bot in disgust, it asks me to complete a survey on how well it did. One out of five stars, of course. Ironically, it asks me why I gave such a low rating, and one of the options I can select is "could not connect to a human".

  • From no cell phones to the collapse of capitalism

    Pretty crazy that I grew up without a cell phone or the internet and I will probably live through the AI fueled collapse of capitalism.

    Just thinking about how AI isn’t really the problem, it’s symptomatic of western society building entities that are solely motivated by profit, and now those entities have found the master key to eliminate humans from the equation.

  • I want to know more about icons I see daily

    I have some history with "funky" desktop environments.

    Back in 2004 while still a kid my uncle showed to me one of these programs that change the look of window frames, I think it was StyleXP? And then another one to change these familiar Windows XP icons into something that blew my mind.

    I did not know about existence of mac back then, it was just not a thing, but what a joy it was, fast forward a few weeks, this kid spent hours searching and downloading all icon packs she could get hands onto — installing them, checking how things look now, maybe change window theme colors, scroll through wallpapers, rinse and repeat, a whole new reason to live, phaha.

  • Spring Cleaning

    I've been clearing cobwebs off the Doomsday codebase recently.

    The project has been on hiatus. I last worked on this code 5-8 years ago. It's amazing how much of it I've forgotten. Doomsday represents a solid 20 years of invested time, and it shows. There is so much stuff: an amalgamation of Doom/Heretic/Hexen, a complete GUI framework, a smaller widget framework for the game menus, a scripting language, a document processing tool, partially finished next-gen renderer, scriptable 3D model system, and heaps of UI for configuration and package management.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Leaving Session

      I list a few methods of contact on the "About" page of my capsule. The one most people use is e-mail, which is fine with me. I used to list Session Messenger as a form of contact as well. Session^ is a decentralized messaging app and desktop application that uses an onion-routing network to hide IP addresses and maintains user privacy by avoiding external forms of identity like phone numbers. I've used Session for about a year and a half now, but as of yesterday, I've removed it from my preferred contact methods.

      The Session Technology Foundation, the non-profit dedicated to developing Session, announced in April that the organization is rapidly running out of money. Though the protocol has over a million active monthly users and the team has been working to implement features like post-quantum cryptography, a lack of donations is putting pressure on the foundation. As of 2026-04-10, all the full-time staff have been furloughed, and if the funding goal is not met, critical infrastructure like the push-notification server and file storage server will go offline on 2026-07-08.

    • Alhena 5.5.7

      Alhena 5.5.7 is out. This release has a lot of small fixes and enhancements. The biggest noticeable change is that subscriptions and feeds are now part of the database restore/merge functionality.

      There was a bug with a database connection being left open. The end result was rare but exhausting the pool would freeze the app. It's the closest thing to a crash I remember in ages. Now it's fixed.

      I moved the MacOS, Windows and Linux installs from Oracle to Eclipse Temurin. I also updated the FreeBSD install to the latest OpenJDK 21. If you use the base install or build from source, you need Java 21+ to get things going.

    • Hello Gemini

      New month, full moon, empty wallet. What a better time to write my first post? Honestly I am loving the simplicity because it stops me from trying to make *the perfect website capturing the entirity of my personality* and instead I can just... write. And even tho the simplicity seemed very limiting I have come to realise that is simply not the truth. I have made a rust server that supports dynamic gems and I already have plenty of very fun ideas in mind to implement. Really hope it's not one of those momentary motivations that will quickly run out qwq

    • migrating client certificates (identities) to offpunk