Gemini* and Gopher

• Technology and Free Software

  • Task Samurai: An agentic coding learning experiment

    Task Samurai is a fast terminal interface for Taskwarrior written in Go using the Bubble Tea framework. It displays your tasks in a table and allows you to manage them without leaving your keyboard.

  • Backup vs. Mirror

    rsync has somehow gotten itself into the chatcycle, and maybe not in a good way. The particular point here is that a mirror is not a backup. Consider the following timeline:

    TUE file is accidentally corrupted

    WED a mirror is done to "backup" the filesystem

    THU file is discovered to be corrupted

    The problem here is that you need to remember that a file was corrupted before the next mirror is done, as following the mirror the mirror will also have the corrupted file, whoops. A mirror can work if you push an entire version control repository (that has local history) as in that case you can `git bisect` or whatever to work out the last version of the file prior to the corruption. A proper backup with depth works in a similar way by providing the depth or delta of changes so the pre-corruption-Tuesday version of the file can (probably) be obtained.

  • Haiku

    Carefully smiling
    from out a dirty window –
    on another bus.
    

  • tapping

    tapping is a guitar technique where your strumming hand joins your other hand on the fretboard, using hammer-ons and pull-offs to continue phrases without any normal strumming or picking. it lets you do some pretty complex riffs, since you don't have to slide and contort your fretting hand to move across the neck, and sounds pretty dang cool.

    [...]

    tapping is a guitar technique where your strumming hand joins your other hand on the fretboard, using hammer-ons and pull-offs to continue phrases without any normal strumming or picking. it lets you do some pretty complex riffs, since you don't have to slide and contort your fretting hand to move across the neck, and sounds pretty dang cool.

  • 2026: Year of the Death of a Euphemism

    This is 2026. People have been contributing to FLOSS for decades. It has had its highs and lows. Giants such as Microsoft have been trying to undermine the movement by buying FLOSS products, orient developments, flood maintainers with issues they should have patched themselves or even by replacing the community's tools with their own (looking at you VS Code, among others). But these days, something feels a bit different to me, and I'm not talking about companies but about us, developers.

    [...]

    Just like Google services before (and continuing) or Microsoft document formats, slopware has become virtually impossible to escape, from being forced to use it at work to not get fired to updating your OS and get little an AI commit as a treat. VIM itself now ships with AI-written code.

    Even though I took some time to talk about AI adoption in FLOSS projects, this entry is not just a rant about that new shiny tool ruining my hobby. What I want to talk about is who is embracing it, why, what it says about FLOSS and what the consequences are for everyone.

  • Slop

    • `gt` calculator - a calculator built with local LLMs [Ed: Slop = worthless stuff, done again while wasting lots of power and water. It looks like even this intro (text) is LLM slop.]

      I created a calculator. Not because the world needed another one, but because I wanted to test something: how well do local LLMs hold up as pair programmers on a real project?

      The answer is: well enough for small projects like this.