Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • low energy

    I feel drained today. I felt unattractive yesterday. I kind of like that.

  • Karate grading

    I am not testing, but helping. I am thinking I should go for my black belt, even if we're not connected to SKA anymore.

    During the pandemic, the association asked the teachers to vaccinate. Where I live the number of people against the mrna shot was pretty high. My two karate teachers were part of that cohort. They stepped out of the association at that time. Since then, I was supposed to stay connected to SKA, find another teacher that would vouch for my black belt, go to special training in Vancouver twice a year, and finally get my black belt in a couple years.

    That was many years ago!

  • They call it luck (Re: Prepare For… What?)

    I'm not saying ‘just living’ is a bad philosophy, by all means. But I don't think preparations are worthless. I keep paying for the travel insurance I've never needed, as I keep preparing for things that never happen.

    First of all, preparations can be useful, interesting or even fun in themselves. They make me develop, maintain and improve skills and knowledge that might come in useful later – even the meta-skills of planning, preparing and problem-solving.

    Many things I prepare for or think about never come to pass. We don't get long power outages, so my always-charged powerbank and torches have never been needed as an emergency backup. But keeping them charged also means they always work when I need them for less urgent tasks that pop up every now and then. Leaky sink? Something fall behind the drawer? Going camping? No scrambling for batteries, the torch just works.

• Politics and World Events

  • Meet Harry - Spelled Hairy

    In Romania, the 1st of June is officially Children's Day. My daughter wanted to take a trip at the local Jumbo store and buy some toys, gadgets or other silly Made in China stuff.

  • The Right Wing

    But the system’s sickness is such that whomever in the deep caves under the Misty Mountains happens to find the Exploitation Loophole of Power will float to the top. This is called emergence.

    Oh, they are evil all right. Don’t get me wrong on that. They have mauvaise foi. “I have a fiduciary duty to plunder the Earth and the public coffers.”

  • notes on communism

    Karl Marx can be viewed as a historian of production. He studied how capitalism emerged from feudalism in Europe, and in turn how feudalism emerged from the system of e.g. the Roman empire, and finally how that system emerged from hunter-gatherer societies. He formulated a general theory of how this works, called dialectical materialism. In dialectical materialism, a 'mode of production' (a particular stage in the progression) is characterised by how production works and how different economic classes relate to each other. Technological development destabilises a mode of production and gives a particular economic class the opportunity to restructure society and obtain a better position, and when they eventually seize this opportunity it leads to the next mode.

• Technology and Free Software

  • More on withered technology, part I

    Back in April I wrote about Gunpei Yokoi's philosophy of "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology"[1], with prompted Anna (agk)[2] and The Free Thinker (freet)[3] to write responses of their own. I have been meaning to write them both responses ever since but got distracted writing about other things first. It's taken me much longer than I wanted to get responses out, and I'm still struggling, so I'm switching to an instalment plan strategy rather than trying to find the time to get one giant response that covers everything into a state I'm happy with. This post will just be my response to freet's post. It's not so much a detailed point-by-point response as it is my long musings on aspects of this whole permacomputing thing which have arisen as a consequence of my reading their posts, and that'll be true for my response to Anna (hopefully next weekend) as well.

    Of the two responses, freet's was the one with the most with concrete instances of using various particular withered computing devices in novel ways. Specifically, video game consoles (a PS2 and the Nintendo DS) were mentioned, as were routers and other home networking devices which can (or could) run OpenWRT. I think both of these categories of withered device warrant serious thinking about. They have historically been kind of off my radar but now are very much on it.

    All the way back in 2020, I wrote a post about the so-called "standard salvage computing platform"[4], arguing that we ought to think of Android smartphones as constituting this. My reasoning was simply that these were absolutely ubiquitous, approximately free (most people, if they really tried, could probably score an old and somewhat-out-of-shape but functional smartphone off a friend of family member who has it sitting in a drawer somewhere, for free or in exchange to buying them a drink or whatever), had integrated I/O (the touchscreen being built right into the device serving as the primary channel for both), had lower power requirements and also very well standardised physical connections for power.

  • Well dang I just discovered...

    Well dang I just discovered IndiePass, which is the Android client I use to publish short posts and images to my blog, is now unmaintained. Do I dare adopt yet another orphaned project...

  • Overcooked

    There's this development process failure mode that is core to my experience of coding with AI - overcooking.

    (I'm just going to say AI because it's shorter than qualifying 'LLM in a harness'.)

    There's this boundary between "AI assisted" and vibe coding. Between "I didn't generate all of this code, but I understand the modules and interfaces and I know where everything is" and "Shit, I've lost the plot."

    It's easy for me to fall into this trap because it's so easy to dream up features, and an AI tool will gladly draft an implementation specification for 7 new features at the same time, create a plan, and start chugging through building out the scaffolding.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Calling out for Lynx first developers

      Two times now have I let AI loose on trying to implement a more advanced web browser for Skiff. Two times have I aborted the attempts and made do with the very basic one I've already got. The one that doesn't even attempt to understand CSS. The most recent attempt got passing grades for the old acid tests (acid1 and acid2) as well as implementing basic flexbox and grid support. Still both times I've just come away with the same conclusion. Just ignoring CSS and doing a reader mode pass of the document yields much more readable results than a poor mans CSS-aware browser.