Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Break/Fix

    Now is a particularly shitty time to work in tech. Never mind the fact that software development is becoming more and more of a machine-aided thing, people are now using Claude/etc to find severe flaws at scale. This is, in a sense, good - who doesn't want more reliable software? - but it puts a tremendous strain on developers/admins (I do both) everywhere as they scramble to fix things. A couple days ago, it was php2shell. Literally one day later, node2shell. I had a thought, yesterday, that as companies pressure their staff to use generative AI or get fired, and as the corpus for these models is all the pre-existing code that ever existed, this cycle isn't going to end. The average piece of code doesn't have security holes, but on average, there are security holes. Who knows what kind of issues will come from machine-generated code.

  • Pelos Pizza

    Driving back from the middle of nowhere, in a small town surrounded by the nether, I stopped at a lonely neon flickering pizza shop.

    The grumbling, now my best friend for the past 400 miles, had my ear and twisted my arm as I grew faint and weary. With an average of one point two stars on all the major review sites, the choice was starve until the following unknown town or indulge in the offerings of Pelos Pizza. The latter offered much more satisfaction. Let me tell you that it was the absolute delight.

  • slow days

    so this is a little sad, but joining my partner on a slow day yesterday sucked for me, even though they had the perfect time, exactly what they needed. we had few "together" activities, i didn't have to join them, i could have done whatever i wanted, but i fell into the story of it being a luxurious treat i wanted to partake in. alas...

    i did plenty of things i liked, including a very interesting guided meditation combined with tarot reading, so i got to dabble in my special interest. cooked a nice lunch from scratch. but most of the day was repetitive in switching between familiar nice activities. i didn't even think to run the laundry in the background or anything like that. it was raining all morning so i didn't go outside. and since it was a "mini holiday" sort of day i thought i'd see how much of tumblr i have to catch up with before actually reaching the official weekend tumblr time-slots.

  • anchor

    wake up at 4am
    a feeling of dread
    head buzzing 
    heart pounding 
    heavy thoughts 
    use you as the anchor 
    it'll be alright 
    I'll be alright
    

• Politics and World Events

  • The Thorites

    Just imagine that some people would come here to Sweden from I dunno Minnesota or Wisconsin something and be like “okay, this is our ancestral home, our ancestors are from Sweden, we have kept the faith all these years, we believe in Thor, Loki, Hela, Captain America and Iron Man, you guys are the invaders threatening us existentially, you are an extinction level threat to us, we’re gonna kill you by the thousands, shoot your kids and fell your trees. We need our homeland as promised by Odin. The whole world is out to kill us and that’s why you must die. Your holy sites and cities are belong to us.”

• Technology and Free Software

  • Finding uses for vintage laptops

    I got accidentally sucked into #retrocomputing (or maybe more accurately #vintagecomputing) when some spring cleaning uncovered two old 2004-era laptops that were in storage. This coincided with my main laptop dying, and I wondered if I could possibly find uses for them, so I challenged myself to avoid buying a new laptop and put these to use instead, if I could.

    Amazingly, they still work fine, hard drives and batteries included! So I booted one up and started exploring. I was immediately hit with nostalgia as I had last booted up this laptop in 2008, and all my documents and photos were still there. About 3 hours later, I was still having fun exploring this laptop with it's installation of Simply MEPIS running KDE 3.5 (not connected to the internet). It just feels fun to use compared to modern laptops, and I don't know why. Maybe it's the sheer amount of ports, the DVD/CD drive, the wonderful 4:3 aspect ratio screen, the amount of effort the manufacturer went to make the laptop repairable/upgradable, the fact that all the software works without an internet connection, or just nostalgia. Perhaps it's that it is so limited in computing power compared to modern laptops that every application launch feels like an accomplishment. The most perpective-changing thing is how an old Pentium 3 running at 700MHz, with only 256Mb of RAM and a 10Gb spinning hard drive could feel productive and fun to use. I mean, Firefox 2.0 and OpenOffice launch about as fast as they do on modern laptops.

  • the joy of contributing to open street map

    That feeling when you add a public drinking water fountain, adjust the position of a fire hydrant or add a ping pong table for everyone to use. Priceless.

    I'm running around a lot these days. Screen on, SCEE open, draining my battery. It's like Pokémon Go, but you're actually contributing to the public good. SCEE is Street Complete with advanced features. Street Complete shows you questions from OpenStreetMap about the environment around you.

  • X-Hinges Creates "Self-Sensing" 3D-Printed Objects — From Gloves to Game-Controlling Sharks

    Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Tianjin University have developed a "self-sensing" system capable of turning everyday items — including gloves — into motion-sensing "self-aware tools:" X-Hinges.

    "It's kind of like adding a conscious element to everyday objects," explains electrical engineer and computer science postdoctoral researcher Jiaji Li, a senior author on the X-Hinges paper. "What you get is objects that better understand how they're being used and have more ways to respond. In the same way an AI [Artificial Intelligence] agent is programmed to make certain decisions based on our instructions, these creations have built-in sensing to adaptively react to human touch."