Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • My music life's new direction

    A few months ago my daughter passed away. Since then, I have been evaluating what is really important me. I decided that getting my MA in Ancient and Classical History was something I wanted to do. I enjoyed going to college later in life, studying what I love, and the benefits of getting my MA is that when I retire, I can teach part-time and along with my pension and my music life (more about that directly) I will be in pretty good shape.

    I also decided that musically I have been running myself ragged and, like I did in 2012, am starting to feel the onset of burnout. The past 15 years I have been leading, fronting, constructing, marketing, promoting, organizing, singing, playing guitar, purchaseing PA gear, setting it up, running it, tearing it down, booking all the gigs (that alone will drive someone insane) and just a bunch of other things basically on my own. If you are a local musician, you know it is not a living and most venues still pay like it's 1985. I wanted to play as much as I could. And in the process completely wore myself out. Something had to change.

  • A dam fine colony

    My ceremonial coffee and laptop on the patio. The air is smoky, the sky has been covered for many days. There aren't too many local wild fire, but still the smoke reached our lake.

    Lee has been visiting since Monday. She seems to like the energy around the house. From music and dj'ing to tattoo talk and evolution. We traded treatment yesterday again, last time was at Julie-Ann a few weeks ago. It wasn't as powerful as last time, but it did re-calibrate my awareness of the other. I undulate between craving and hiding from carnal pleasure, and a clear message came in, what about staying in the middle?

  • Ten random facts about me

    Without preamble and in no particular order:

    I thrive in small groups and can be extremely chatty and even somewhat gossipy under the right conditions. In groups larger than 6-8 people, I generally recede into the background and become one of the quiet ones that listens but doesn't contribute much to the conversation.

    Creativity, questioning, defiance, compassion and thoughtfulness are traits I admire in others and try to embody in my own life. Conversely: obedience, cruelty, carelessness, unjustified belief, and narrow-mindedness are characteristics of people that I prefer to avoid.

  • Can't Sleep, Make Stuff

    So much stuff going on in my life. Most of it not great, some of it mundane. But mostly it is stuff that keeps me up at night. And I am already prone to never sleeping. Rather than wasting that time, I've been burying my head into random one night projects for Smolweb. It makes my lack of sleep feel a little bit more productive.

    I understand why they say you need to take time for yourself to decompress and process things. I never feel like I can take that time unless its past midnight and the rest of the family is asleep. And at that point the benefits have diminishing returns over sleep.

  • On completing my bucket list

    I'm not sure whether this term is used outside the UK, but here a "bucket list" is all the major things you hope to achieve during your mortal life. The term has become something of a cliché, and it's starting to take on an ironic edge, as in: "I'm not eating that under-cooked steak -- getting dysentery isn't on my bucket list." I'm not sure whether dividing life into a sequence of goals is even particularly healthy, Nevertheless, for most of my adult life I've had such a list, formally or informally.

    [...]

    To be honest, I've only been able to tick this one off by applying a fairly generous interpretation of the word "adequately". And also of "sport".

    By the time I was thirty, my bucket list contained several hundred items, and I'd already ticked off about half of them. By the time I was fifty, there were nearly a thousand items on my list, and all but a handful were complete.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Community building for free software

    Anybody who wanted to know, already knows: Large language models are often wrong, are not suited for all tasks, destroy the livelihood of artists, dumb down our communication, flood the zone with blather, are best suited for cheating and scamming, waste electricity and water, worsening the droughts and delaying the transition to renewables. If you think those are ethical issues that don't concern you because you're benefitting from the large language models, then that's an ethical decision. I personally happen to think that the freedom to choose does not mean freedom from consequences, but that is a different discussion.

    Instead, I want to talk free software and large language models. I have rejected a contribution from a large language model to one of my projects. The bug was real but the solution was long, the argument made was long, and the prospect of arguing with a large language model led me to close the issue and pull request and write my own fix. I am not interested in talking with large language models.

  • A New Lidar Sensor Could Check Electric Cars for Gas Leaks, Temperature, and More, Researchers Say

    Researchers from China's Harbin Institute of Technology have developed a multifunctional light detection and ranging (lidar) system that, they say, is able to both provide high-precision ranging information alongside multi-parameter sensing — from ambient temperatures to liquid densities and gas concentrations.

    "A multifunctional FMCW [Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave] lidar system is proposed for the first time," the team says by way of introduction to the work, "which has ability of 3D imaging of objects in free space and sensing of multi-parameter simultaneously. In the lidar module, the distance of the target can be calculated from the optical path difference between the collimator reflection peak and the target reflection peak. [Other paramters] can be demodulated respectively from their reflection peaks in spatial domain by IFT [Inverse Fourier Transform]."

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The OpenWeb needs diversity, not monoculture

      So, if I am being frank, I am the last person you would expect to tout "diversity." That is a WHOLE other post, but in a nutshell, I think the current worldview of diversity is fucked up and is highly, I mean HIGHLY, hypocritical.

      That being said, when it comes to the OpenWeb, I think I agree with Mr Hamish Campbell on this. He posted online (that I found through bubbles.town) a pretty spot on article called "The #openweb needs diversity, not monoculture."

    • Gmail might partially be to blame for me receiving emails from other Sean Conners

      I was reading the Lobsters thread [1] about the article “A researcher bought noreply.net. Companies started sending him secrets [2]” when I left a comment [3] about my own struggles with receiving emails for other Sean Conners [4]. That started a thread that swamped the comment section about other people who had similar stories, so it's nice to know that I'm not alone. Also, here's one of my favorite comments in that thread (for reasons that should be apparent):

• Programming

  • Scripting over sleeping

    There's this annoying duality in my metabolism that makes me love coffee and, at the same time, be very sensitive to caffeine. And its effect on me is not what I'd expect. I can, actually, sleep. It's just that I never try.

    For a long while now I've been fascinated by the concept of web pages generated by CGI scripts. I ran into some arcane URLs with the ".cgi" suffix right on my first job as a computer engineer, and the seniors told me those were the ancestors of the services I was coding, and they had been written in C. I had been taught C in college, or so they told me when I passed the data structures course. Why, then, couldn't I even conceive the idea of writing a web page in that language?

  • 2026-08-12 - software engineering at the tipping point

    Just found this talk from a guy at google. He talks about many of the problems that software engineers are encountering and will be encountering over the next few years.

    I left my job a few months ago, but when/if I go back into software engineering after my current hiatus, I will most likely be dealing with LLMs again and the problems he is addressing would become applicable to me too.