Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • rot

    the air is thick with the smell of rot
    of leaves, mushrooms
    the hopeful dreams 
    born on fragrant spring mornings
    they turn into the ache of yearning
    as intense as the nettles
    

  • in which i love food and hate capitalism

    There is nowhere capitalism is not pissing me off more right now than in food.

    July-September is my annual season of Personal Projects, in which I pick something in my life that needs an overhaul and overhaul it. Past seasons of Personal Projects have featured home repairs, gardens and chickens, personal finance, and Relearning How to Walk.

    This year, it's been food. Gotta do something with this garden produce. Also because my annual health exam came back tens across the board, except that I have high cholesterol. My doctor isn't terribly concerned (my ratio is fantastic, apparently), but it's the only health project I have so I'm gonna obsess about it. I started reading about what cholesterol is and how it works, and I fell down a rabbit hole.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Command line applications and AI tech support

    Does it really matter if I use Linux with a graphical UI rather than the command line? After all, for me Linux is just a replacement for Windows which allows me to use 10 and 15 year-old laptops without any problem, and I've been using it since Windows 7 was current.

  • Software that I used to love but are gone… 😢

    Have you ever had that nostalgia, when you use some specific software, that you feel you were happier with something else?

    To me, this happens often. Especially when I use GNU/Linux, that is much more transformative than FreeBSD (and BSD in general) and because I have been using it longer than the latter; as a matter of fact the my diving into FreeBSD has the same age of this capsule.

    It is not exactly the "old good days were better" attitude, but perhaps a variation, who knows? I'll let you decide.

  • omarchy

    Recently in the FOSS world, Omarchy has gained a lot of attention. It's "opinionated" Arch with a bunch of AI slop built in. This is just plain disgusting.

    1. AI is the Antichrist of computing and human beings. It is wrong. It is expensive. It is dumbing people down even more after the fucking moron people addicted to TickTalk and other 10-second or less videos.

    2. It has a ton of security flaws. I guess when you're getting AI slop-shitters to generate and check code, you're going to have issues like any program being able to perform tasks with root permissions despite not being a sudoer or root.

    3. In the irony of all ironies, the creator, DHH, is a deep state conspiracy theorist. So evidently the governments and other PTBs are out to get us (I guess there is truth in commercial companies stealing our data), and his solution is to have those same PTBs' AIs code "his" OS...

    [...]

    Regardless of DHH's politics, which are too far right for my tastes but certainly not the worst I've seen, an insecure OS is pointless except in a toy situation: you want to play around with it. As incredible as Terry Davis is, his TempleOS is a toy OS. Its usefulness is crippled by a lack of a network stack. I'm not even sure if it has the ability to transfer files to USB drives since I've never bothered to try it myself. But yeah, I'm pretty sure there aren't many people using TempleOS as a real OS and expecting to get things done.

  • Life in Plain Text(2): A Plain Text To Do List

    There is no end of software, apps and systems that all claim to offer the route to a well-organised, "mind like glass" life. Many of us will have been down this rabbit hole. You know how it goes: you read the blogposts and such, become convinced that *this* is the software that will solve your personal organisational problems. You try it with enthusiasm for a while and it goes well at first. You've found what you were looking for. You know exactly what you're doing, when things are due, all your priorities are in order.

    But after a time, a few days, or weeks, or maybe months, your enthusiasm starts to fade. The new system isn't quite working for you anymore. And then you read about another app that promises to get you organised. You jump in with enthusiasm and it goes well at first. And so it goes, round and round.

• Programming

  • Picking randomly from a list

    On reflection this comment requires more work than may be necessary. Since the picked item is "going away" we need not move it elsewhere. This simplifies the lack-of-splice to: copy the last element of the list into the slot of the picked item (unless the picked item was the last element in which case there's nothing to do), and reduce the list count by one. More typical might be to shuffle the list first and then pop or shift off the head or tail for a random element, but shuffling a list correctly can be tricky to get right.