Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • on the deaths of things, and their life

    I used to be a colorguard director. I used to be a very good colorguard director. I've taken kids to Indy and Dayton (iykyk). I've won awards. I've trained champions.

    Normally, I'd be busy as heck for the next couple weeks, preparing for band camp at the start of August. But I'm not. Because for the first time in over 15 years and over 25 seasons, I do not have a program to direct this fall.

    The implications of that are only just starting to sink in. Today, though, what's hitting me is that I don't lack a program because of anything I did or failed to do. I lack a program because the band director killed it.

  • Silence Doesn't Mean Abandoned - Life Happened

    I'd rather publish something I've enjoyed writing than force myself to post just to keep an update schedule. This little corner of the internet has never been about chasing algorithms or engagement metrics. It'll get new posts when there's something worth saying and time to write the post.

  • Silence Doesn't Mean Abandoned - Life Happened

    If you've noticed that sava.rocks has been unusually quiet, you're not imagining things. Between work, the usual summer activities, and trying to spend a little less time in front of a screen, I simply haven't had much time to update my gemini capsule and gopher hole.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Re: AI-assisted development vs. feature bloat

    I think this hits upon a key consequence of coding with AI. Disregarding all the negative externalities, the hype bubble, drive toward wealth inequality, and social posturing related to GenAI/LLM usage, as a practical result, you are able to dramatically lower the initial cost of software implementation. In software development, this cost is a big gating factor in what gets done, forcing developers to be meticulous about choosing what features to work on. However, with AI taking care of much of the work, the software can grow quickly, limited only by the developer's guiding vision. The true problem becomes apparent at a later stage when the software needs maintenance to remain viable for the long run. Feature-laden bloatware is difficult to keep up and running, let alone glitch-free.

  • Still more fun with PalmOS

    I keep falling further down the rabbit hole, and I wonder if I'll be able to get back to 2026 again.

    I sometimes use the original Palm Desktop for Windows to sync Palm devices (it works on Win10 with a driver installation) and recently I wanted to try syncing expenses. There's an Expense program for PalmOS (built in) that I find clunky, but at the same time useful. When you sync it produces a .pdb file, but I could not figure out how to import or extract that .pdb into something where I could get the data. I wasted a good deal of time going through help files and Palm handbooks trying to figure it out on the Windows side, then I gave up and looked into jpilot.