Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Flight

    A family member yesterday who is going on an aoroplane vacation said “I know you don’t like that” and I was like... it doesn’t matter what I think. It’s not my opinion that matters. I actually think flying and travel is fun and fascinating. The problem is that millions of people have died from climate change already and many times more that is set to do so unless we change, and the single biggest thing most individuals can do (outside of voting, organizing, and rioting) is to fly less.

  • Stillness

    I live in a quiet rural area, very little traffic passes my house, and sitting here this morning all I can hear is birdsong and the fridge running in the next room, which is a low background whine. It'll stop shortly. Later in the day I might hear neighbours' children playing outside, but mostly I'm used to a considerable degree of stillness in my everday life.

    Perhaps my baseline for what constitutes troublesome noise is low. I'm quite sensitive to sound and to distraction, and I always struggle with focus in environments where there are multiple sources of sound, especially if there is a radio playing in the room or in the car and then someone says something to me. It takes me several seconds to shift my attention from the voice on the radio to the voice in the room, and many times every day I have to ask someone to repeat what they just said.

• Politics and World Events

  • Polarization

    Sometimes you still hear that society is polarized and we need to move towards the middle.

    Pretty messed up considering how everything’s moved towards the right these past forty years, further than I ever would’ve imagined.

  • Making maps representative

    The world map we see most often, the Mercator projection, greatly exaggerates the apparent size of Europe, and makes Africa appear much smaller than it is. The bias wasn't introduced on purpose, but it has suited the colonial purposes of European (and later, North American) powers to have a map which overstates their importance in the world. The solutions aren't new either: a predecessor of the UN's chosen 'Equal Earth' projection was published in the 1880s, if my memory serves.

  • Re: Making maps representative

    Short version - Europe small, Africa (for example) really really big, but you wouldn't realise it from the Mercator map projection that everyone knows. A new projection which corrects this misrepresentation has been tried before, but the one I recall made the continents appear to be thin and elongated, almost melting down the globe like a Dali pocket watch.

• Technology and Free Software

  • They want you to be just like them

    Generative AI continues to encroach on every corner of my life. With friends, I discuss its atrocity more and more frequently, complaining about how every single person - even those we once thought to be competent and even demanding - has seemingly started to abdicate all care in favour of simply accepting whatever nonsense it outputs. At work, I cannot escape the endless conversations about AI tooling and half-baked ideas for AI features. I'm exhausted, demoralised, and depressed by the whole thing. It has ever been thus, I suppose. Each time the capitalist class funds a new mechanical loom, we loomers are forced to abandon craft for the sake of saving money and reducing reliance on expertise, lest we be replaced by untrained children and amateurs.

    One question, however, has been rattling around in my mind. The capitalist class has tried time and time again to replace workers, to reduce the power of workers by removing their reliance on them piecemeal, and yet generative AI feels different. Part of it is the scale, but I believe a larger part of it has to do with jealous anger. A few key personality traits seem endemic to the ownership class: boredom; apathy; a complete lack of curiosity; cruelty; isolation; petty jealousy. I believe all of these to be connected to the lack of challenge they face in their day-to-day life. Not satisfied with making our financial situations and security worse (which is, let's face it, their heretoward raison d'être), they now desparately want us to feel the same disconnected misery they do.

  • log: installing offpunk from source using uv

    my small workaround post for the absence of v3.2 from pypi

• Programming

  • TIL: Emacs rectangle-number-lines

    Note from the "today I learned" department.
    
    
    Emacs never cease to amaze me. This time I ran into the nifty command
    
    
        C-x r N rectangle-number-lines
    
    
    Which exactly does what it says on the tin.