Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • outside these pages

    if this summer
    slips away like the last
    if I forget to live
    out there 
    outside these pages
    do I survive another winter
    with no hope
    of warmth
    

• Politics and World Events

  • False Maps

    Every so often my dreams show me maps. I remember one where Canada was stretched impossibly far north, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut four or five times taller than normal. Last night, the map started off inaccurate (a land bridge from England to France labelled "Haiti"), and then drifted off to the invented. A whole southern continent circling the southern pole, divided (in my mind) between Norway and others, all the names nonsensical. Little landlocked countries, marked with green and blue. False forests. Purported lakes.

• Technology and Free Software

  • "Competing" With LLMs

    This topic reminds me somewhat of the move towards offshoring about 20 years ago. I expect the same outcome, a lot of executive bounuses paid for meeting quarterly targets but no real long-term benefit. But we'll see.

    I mentioned a few times that if I saw LLM-generated code committed to my employer's equivalent of master/prod, I'd reconsider some of my opinions. In particular, the use of 3GLs like Ada (or almost any other commonly used). Well, this finally happened. So it's a step back (or is that forward?) to logic programming. The cost of this is that you lose the ability to rapidly onboard someone to a project, but perhaps we need to move to a Sith-like "master/apprentice" model instead of paying managers based on how many direct reports they have and building mini-empires. Documentation can definitely help here too.

  • Gratutides part 1: a 90's story of online love and music

    In the mid 90's, I was young and bored and had access to the internet via the family computer. It had a 386SX processor, a turbo button, and ran Windows 3.11. Dialup internet, of course. Privacy when using the computer? Rarely.

    What did teens do online in the 90's? We made websites on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, and a bunch of others. Super nerds like me played MUDs and other text based games (that's a different post, someday soon).

    ...and we chatted of course, in chat rooms, or via the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) program. Yes, we later used stuff like ICQ too, but mostly it was AIM.

    I was really into punk music at the time (still am). I frequented all the webrings and was subscribed to at least one email newsletter that shared around news of the hot new "underground" bands.

  • Failure to Implement Outgoing Email Server from Scratch

    It has been a goal of mine for a while now to implement my own outgoing email server. I thought "How difficult could this be? I can already set DNS records for vigrey.com, so this should be possible, if not decently easy." Oh, how wrong I was...

    [...]

    While a *Receiving MTA* would need to be a server, in theory I shouldn't even need a server of any kind to send emails. As long as I sent the email from the same IP address as vigrey.com, an SPF record of `v=spf1 a -all` along with valid DMARC and DKIM TXT DNS records should have been enough to get that email sent.

    All I thought I needed to do write a program that can connect to the email recipient's *Receiving MTA* and send an email.

  • Numbers

    Hopefully the 7.9 part is obvious, unless the context of OpenBSD version numbers has been lost to history, in which case they will here remain mysterious. Others may wonder where the 449 came from. This is not so mysterious, as part of the kernel build process a number is incremented somewhere, incrementing integer counters being something computers are rather good at (up to various limits, consult the fine manual for details). Assuming no funny business such as someone starting the count at 420 this means the kernel was built something like 449 times. I'm being vague because the count might start at 0 instead of 1 and fencepost issues are traditional in computer science.

  • On Automation of Any Kind

    Automation isn't necessarily bad. But I think there is something that is important with doing automation.

    When you automate things, those things go out of your head. Think about calculating. When you were 10 (or 9, or 8) years old, you learned how to multiply big (>1000) numbers without a calculator.

    Then you got into mid and high school and you got a calculator. And having a calculator is very good, indeed (because in the high school, you don't want to worry about big number multiplications when talking about derivatives of function).

  • Games

    • Multiplayer Rogue

      Easy answer: Diablo (before Blizzard ruined it?). And also MAngband. However there are other (and probably better tools) for running D&D campaigns on computers than trying to shoehorn things into a roguelike interface. A MUD such as Ancient Anguish offers plenty of combat, though MUD may not (by default) have the top-down grid and @ to move about that roguelikers might expect. Not impossible, but maybe with a fancy MUD client and blah blah blah it could work? But there's nothing special about the rogue UI, mainly it's a random outcome of the original game being written for VT100 or so, so sticking to something like that would be more tradition than utility. Also MUD (and computer games in general) tend to replace the Game Master with server logic, though depending on the MUD an admin could fiddle around with things as need be.