Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Magic house rules, again

  • the hat

    I'll wear the hat
    I'll wear the dress
    and hope the bubbly
    calms my nerves
    

  • Justification

    Sound without a purpose is just noise. There is nothing wrong with noise. But noise doesn't justify one's existence. It's a mere by-product of one's life.

  • No TV

    Music, tattoo, connecting with friends, cleaning the house, working, invoicing, meditating. What a full day! All that without watching tv.

  • Giving in, giving up

    My addiction to watch a show before bed is lingering

    I held up pretty good but then caved in

    Watched a clown laughing at clowns Maybe I'll be one of these one day

  • Overlay world

    Sometimes I see the world as it is and a clear overlay world. Especially when I'm tired, like driving many miles home from work tonight.

    The 30-year-old thicket of woods is also the WalMart that will be there next year (breaking my heart, but the old WalMart's foundation was poured wrong) and the primeval oak and chestnut forest the founder of my church rode through 180 years ago.

    Somehow it will return, with its elk, bison, and porcupines.

• Games

  • Words I learnt from Spellbinding in May

    Players are required to find words involving the central letter, of minimum length four, complying with a dictionary that contains a large number of common words, and also some that are less familiar - to me, at least. Here are some of the latter.

• Technology and Free Software

  • 🔌 Installing and configuring NUT (Network UPS Tools) for your home lab

    Do you have an UPS ? And a home lab? Awesome. This post is about configuring all your servers, raspberry pi's and even your gaming PC to shutdown gracefully in the event of a power outage.

    The thing is that you can plug in the power cord for multiple devices in your UPS but, usually, an UPS comes with 1 data cable and, wait for it, a Windows application. With the USB data cable the UPS communicates with only one computer.

    To connect all your computers/servers to the UPS you are going to install Nut. Also known as Network UPS Tools.

  • The enshitification of institutes for project management

    This model describes how tech platforms work, but if you're in project management, I think you can see similar trends in famous institutes for project management! In our context,

    * end users are those who use their standard/guide/method/etc to improve their projects, and * business users are those who pay to take their exams as well as trainers for those exams.

  • Active Code

    Why do the modules need to be "relatively active"? We might guess that some folks think that active is good, and inactive bad. I take more or less the opposite stance: active modules have increased risk of breaking changes, will consume energy to recompile and retest, and someone (or ideally multiple someones) should audit all the changes to increase the odds that bad or malicious additions are spotted.† And are the changes worthwhile? Worst case we might imagine Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde forever reworking the same code-base to have the correct indentation style, which will result in a very "active" and thus "desirable" module. Code with actual changes can also be bad: annoying features that cannot be turned off or reverted (or how many times do you have to go and manually disable copilot before defenestrating Windows?), dark patterns, a twizzled UI because someone was gunning for that big promotion (lucre is often contradictory to illustrious code), experimental or just plain flawed ideas that never should have reached production (*cough* given/when in Perl *cough*), regressions, etc.

  • Some of my issues with LLMs and generative AI

    I thought gemini would be a kind of positive ‘web for humans’, meaning human-written content about human interests. But I suppose humans are very human and will talk about human concerns. And so I find that even here, there is no escape from one main thing I had hoped to avoid: ‘AI’ and LLMs.

    I had originally planned to avoid writing about this, because I want more content about good things, not the things I want to escape. It's like using the Fediverse only to complain about Elon Musk. So I should advise you to stop reading here. Go do something that brings joy instead. Because this certaintly isn't it.

    I suspect the rest of this post will mostly be preaching to the choir or shouting into the void, but apparently it needs writing, because there are a great many people out there who still aren't convinced.

    If you believe AI ‘is here to stay’, that LLMs are beneficial or that they ‘democratise’ anything, I kindly ask you to consider the following.

  • AI FROM EACH END

    LLM AI seems to be the one prop still keeping the USA's stock market, and perhaps the global economic order, up these days. At the same time it seems to be getting forced down everyone's throats with increasing intensity, although it's possible that the majority of people are blindly willing to accept this while ignoring its glaring flaws. Here are some snippets of my own experience in this new world of artificial thought and investment.

    [...]

    However with these AI/LLM code generators I'm aware I might have become an inadvertent user, bogging my computer down with inefficient, buggy, and inexplicable AI-generated "slopcode" inserted into programs I've long trusted. The list of AI-infected software projects Ben Collver linked to in a recent phlog post (below) was insightful. I knew Firefox was embracing it, with Mozilla even labelling themselves an AI company, but I only use that as a begrudging last resort when Javascript is unavoidable anyway. Rsync was more of a surprise, and of course I already knew Linux was quickly heading down the AI rabbit hole but I didn't realise many of the BSDs were also following. I've already been thinking of ditching Linux for other reasons, but this might make picking alternatives even trickier.

    [...]

    Since these AI/LLMs took off, reading Web access logs has become incredibly distracting. The amount of nonsense crawler requests, either those identifying as bots or trying every trick to avoid bot-blockers, has gone off the charts. Here's a recent one I experienced: [...]