Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 06/06/2023: OpenKuBSD, GrapheneOS, and More



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Duolingo Progress

        Finished the first section in my Irish course on Duolingo. I'm still woeful, but I can read a bit of Irish. To a lesser extent, understand it when spoken. I'm a long ways from being able to read stuff outside the application, but, I'm getting there? It feels like progress, and it feels good to make progress on something which, if I'm being honest, is kind of a useless goal. Would it be better for my career to grind the rust off my French? Absolutely. Am I doing something else instead? Absolutely. I can talk about owls and beer (ulchabhan agus beoir). Say "I like Irish" (Is maith leom an Gaeilge). Important things.

      • Tanana River Trail Photos 2023-06-06 (Fairbanks, AK, USA)

        I took these photos yesterday during my lunch-break walk.

      • The Laundry Asymmetry

        When preparing for a longish trip I packed six sets of socks, underwear and t-shirts, so I could do the laundry weekly (six plus the clothes I was wearing). Sadly, I miscalculated.

      • Going to the Psycho Ward

        A married man with children goes and visits his wife's family. He tells the people there about the trip in the south of the country to which he goes by his car in the morning. Old Gruffandgrim*, his father in law, reminds him that he needs to work so he can make a living and have enough money for his trips.

      • Dory progress and Misfin thoughts

        I guess I'd call this a milestone achieved. I've successfully sent a couple of Misfin messages to the reference server with a small binary that uses Dory under the hood. Getting there was a little more difficult than I expected, as these things often go.

      • Taking the Measure of the Place

        A weary and dusty traveler shuffles into the bar, slips a business card back into his jacket pocket, and takes a look around to get the measure of the place. A motley crew of vagabonds, salesmen, entertainers, writers, and freethinkers fill the Midnight, chatting in small groups over lukewarm beer. Among the various patrons of the bar, one particularly odd creature stands out, balancing upright on long tentacles with constantly moving eyestalks scanning the scene.

      • Contextual Pizza

        I've been finally losing weight after years of simply refusing to deal with the problem. It was nothing too terrible--just an extra 40 pounds and change, but it definitely made itself felt in my feet and knees when running or doing tai chi. After about 4 months I'm finally getting close to the target weight I set, which upon reaching I promised myself a single piece of pizza. I shouldn't have done that.

        [...]

        Conflating the symbolic representation with the actual is fraught in so many unexpected ways.

    • Technical

      • OpenKuBSD design document

        I got an idea today (while taking a shower...) about _partially_ reusing Qubes OS design of using VMs to separate contexts and programs, but doing so on OpenBSD.

        To make explanations CLEAR, I won't reimplement Qubes OS entirely on OpenBSD. Qubes OS is an interesting operating system with a very strong focus on security (from a very practical point of view ), but it's in my opinion overkill for most users, and hence not always practical or usable.

        In the meantime, I think the core design could be reused and made it easy for users, like we are used to do in OpenBSD.

      • Pixel 7a & GrapheneOS

        I'm testing a phone for work, and it's an Android, which is new to me. I swapped the OS for GrapheneOS, which is a security-focused minimalist Android distribution, and the phone hardware is a Pixel 7a. Here's how someone fairly familiar with iPhones views a current-generation Android phone as their daily driver...

      • New order in /dev/pts

        Previously, I had one global session of terminal multiplexer, and that was where everything lived -- plain text accounting, news, blogging, different personal and $dayjob projects. Since you can have only so much tabs before it turns into complete mess, context switching meant closing them all and opening ones relevant to task at hand.

        [...]

        Actually, it is even more than that. Ever saw "normies" to struggling to put two browser windows side-by-side? Well, I can't do any better on their soil. But I can use tiling window managers, and they don't. The same satisfying feeling. I found my highground.

      • Striking mods

        First Reddit, now Stack Overflow; moderators are fed up with the admins of the sites they dedicate their labor to. Unpaid labor, to be exact. After decades of witnessing social media platforms rise and "fall" – some underwent a significant revamp and shrank to a healthy size, others shut down permanently, few just became plain irrelevant to former users, yet still exist – and how people react to such things, the latter in particular has become ridiculously predictable, for the sole reason that too many people merely decide to be vocal, rather than vote with their feet in a quiet manner.

      • The Search For An OSR System

        NOTE: I started writing this around New Years not long before the whole WotC OGL situation got started. I was holding off on publishing it because I wanted to find a happier ending to send it off with. The longer I wait, the more certain parts are going to make less sense, so I'm going to get it out faster.

      • Programming

        • The Urge

          One of the unhelpful things that I commonly experience when I read things about software (and very occasionally other things, but usually software) is the urge to make my own version of whatever the thing is.

        • things i wanna do (in no order)

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



Recent Techrights' Posts

When Short is Way Too Short (Superficiality, Lowering of Entropy)
Demonstrating how truly worthless social control media was all along
NVIDIA's Crisis Has Only Just began
NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA) is set to open in the red tomorrow
IBM Has Destroyed Red Hat and Hashicorp, Insiders Say It's the Usual From IBM:
Bluewashing is a death wave
Techrights Was Right About Slop Destroying Development Communities and Projects
Slop does not improve your project. It kills the community. Without community, what is left? A 'botfarm'?
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXXI - Harassment Law and "Things Are Unfairly Asymmetric" (Exploring the Boundaries of Death Threats and Various Threats From America)
the sort of "technofascism" that our country must learn to confront rather than facilitate
 
Microsoft XBox at 25 and All-Time Low
XBox will be "officially" dead (not the brand) when sales fall below some threshold and then production is halted, sort of like Apple's Vision Pro
Links 15/11/2026: Microsoft Already Emitting Chaff to Distract From Its Catastrophe, Jensen Huang Deemed Just 'Fall Guy' Amid Collapse of the Pyramid Scheme
Links for the day
Gemini Links 15/11/2026: CD Players Live on and Self-Hosting from Home Fallacy
Links for the day
Techrights Hates Slop Bots
They benefit nobody
The Economy is Fine! (If Only for China!)
The future is slop! If not, then it's China's fault! It's "sabotaging" the "Western hey hi" in this "hey hi arms race!"
"IT" as "Musical Chairs" (on the Deck of The Titanic)
Each generation will get worse for "IT"
Salesforce in Trouble, Debt Nearly Quadrupled in 9 Months
Salesforce is perishing in a deep pool of debt
"Microsoft is Next IBM"
The words of a Microsoft insider and responses to that
IRC is Decentralised
Bye, Microsoft Teams/Skype
Links 15/11/2026: Murdoch's "WSJ Buries Stephen Miller's Racism" and "America Has Entered a New Age of Propaganda"
Links for the day
In the UK, GNU/Linux Usage Soared During Microsoft Downtime
since the massive outage GNU/Linux usage soared to over 10%
Google Slop About Richard Stallman Shows Stallman Was Right, LLMs are BS Generators
Google slop is the "new Google"
Spouse of Garrett Needs to Get "Several Firearms" to Feel Safe Amid Divorce (Garrett Has a "Girlfriend" Now)
Seems like Isis and my wife have a lot in common when it comes to Garrett
Vista 11 is Small
Can Microsoft survive the fall of Windows?
Six Richard Stallman and FSF Talks This Month (FSF Staff at Ohio State University)
Dr. Stallman's talks in Ecuador are well timed because of the collapse of the LLMs (slop) pyramid scheme
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, November 14, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, November 14, 2026
Gemini Links 15/11/2026: "The Bastards Can Never Win" and "The Last Low-Tech Generation"
Links for the day
Links 14/11/2026: Wuhan Corruption and "Aid Isn’t Reaching Ebola’s Epicenter"
Links for the day
Rahul Kumar Has Turned tecadmin.net Into a Slopfarm That Promotes Slop and Microsoft (as Usual)
Slop promoting slop - a death knell of once-active "Linux" sites
Large-Scale Layoffs - Not Just PIPs - at Red Hat and IBM This Month
Mainstream media has quit covering mass layoffs
Links 14/11/2026: "The Claude Delusion" and "The Microsoft Outage is a Warning for the World"
Links for the day
Ethics in Perspective, Free Software and Morality
top clients of Jeffrey Epstein are one happy family
Richard Stallman (RMS) at Universidad Central del Ecuador (Guayaquil), Cuenca, Campus Sur Universidad Politecnica Salesiana (Quito), and Ohio State University
Long live the message and mission of RMS
They Paid Workers in 'Shares' (That Lost Almost Half Their Value in One Month)
Welcome back 1999 or 2007
The Register MS Made Millions of Pounds by Participating in the Slop Hype Campaign (It's Still Doing It), Now It Admits That It's Just a Bubble
the slop frenzy played a role in the Microsoft meltdown
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXX - Pyramid Schemes (Planned Plunder) and Canceled/Botched Surgeries Aren't "Funny", They Cause Serious Harm and Distress
We were right about Microsoft
Links 14/11/2026: "OpenAI Is Sustaining Enormous Losses" and Slop "Loses the Popular Vote"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, November 13, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, November 13, 2026
Gemini Links 14/11/2026: Code of Conduct, Back to Gemini, and Gemlog to Inbox
Links for the day
Slop Promotion, Including Paid-for Slop Promotion for So-called 'Linux' Foundation (Its Clients Are Slop Companies)
We've noticed a lot of this lately in "It's FOSS" and to a lesser degree in "FOSS Force"
Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Productivity Metrics and Antenna Outage
Links for the day
The Real Issue With The Register MS is Not the Politics of Some Staff's "Tweets", It's That The Register MS Publishes Fake Articles for Sponsors (50,000 Pounds Minimum)
AWS and Google each pay millions for fake articles which beget journalistic bias too (they literally pay the salaries of the 'reporters')
Microsoft Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): We Need Accountability Because Many People Die and It's Because of Microsoft Diehards or People Bribed by Microsoft to Deploy Microsoft Where Lives Are at Risk
They're trying to save face right now
What the Media Misses: It's Not an NVIDIA Issue, Super Micro Computer Inc Also Fell From $45 to $26 in the Period NVIDIA Lost 33% of Its Faked 'Value', NVIDIA is Collapsing Like Intel
History goes in circles
It's Not About China or Sex, It's About Corruption at NVIDIA and a Pyramid Scheme Perpetrated Under the Guise of "Hey Hi Revolution" (That Wasn't, It's Manufactured and Hyped by Bribes, Subsidised by Multi-Trillion-Dollar Loans, People's Pension Funds and More)
What's at stake here is a lot bigger than the "Ponzi hub" of Jensen Huang
No, You're Not a "Most Valuable Company" When Everything is Down for Half a Day in the Entire Planet
Still down, still no explanation (maybe they too aren't sure)
Waste of Money: Giving More Money to Toothless Regulators That Don't Even Examine Evidence
Shame in SRA
"Techrights Statement on Phoronix" Still Valid Five Years Later
Our position as stated in early 2022 has not changed
Vista 11's 'Growth' Has Stalled, It's Measured at Only 17.9% in the US This Year
That helps put in perspective Microsoft's attempt to discard almost 30% of its remaining workforce
"NVIDIA is Enron" (Subsidising the Pyramid Scheme That It Profited From), Microsoft is Next to be Down for the Count
Microsoft increasingly looks like the "next NVIDIA"
Richard Stallman Travels to South America to Give Talks About Free Software in Spanish, FSF Raises Money
The FSF is raising money (goal is $400,000) and the FSF has just mentioned the upcoming talks by the FSF's founder
United States Adding ~300 Billion in Government Debt Per Month, Wall Street Shaves Off Trillions in 'Value' in Less Than One Week
cushioning "assets" by helping them fake "value"
Microsoft: Pay Us for the Stuff That's Offline and We Cannot Fix
Learn to take control of the technology that you rely on
Links 13/11/2026: "Copyright-Strike-for-Hire" and "Stevie Wonder Photo Lawsuit"
Links for the day
The Slop Bubble (or Pyramid Scheme) Relied on Trust and Patience (Being Patient as Losses Grow and Debt Explodes, Trusting the Roadmap of Cheaters and Frauds)
Remember that it all began with trust
Anthropic's IPO Depends on $895.4 Billion in Debt (Money It Doesn't Have, It Loses Over 100 Billion Dollars Per Reporting Period), NVIDIA Has Just Lost Almost 2 Trillion Dollars In Value and Its Debt Trebled in Three Months
This coming week will be very, very entertaining for slop critics/sceptics to watch
At Microsoft, "Buyouts" or "Global Voluntary Separation Agreement" (GVSA) Not Much Different From Layoffs (Severance Shockingly Low)
From what we are able to gather, many people are leaving Microsoft 'voluntarily'
Is Microsoft the Next Fake-Valued Corporation to Lose 35% in "Market Value"? Is Slop Bringing Microsoft Down?
Will NDAs prevent people talking or journalists finding out the true cause?
Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) the Latest of Many to Quit Linux Development Over Linus Torvalds' Obsession With Slop (Linus Wants to Work With Bots, Not Humans Who Understand Whatever Code They Write)
Linus caught the 'brain virus'
Silent Layoffs at IBM (and Red Hat) Continue in November 2026
IBM's CEO is "a Palliative Care Doctor Who Slides [IBM] Gently Into the Night"
Microsoft Asks 60,000 Workers to Leave, Some Leave, Services Go Down
Microsoft laid off about 40,000-50,000 people in past years
Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Roku Exits the Smart Home Market and Poor Reporting/Journalism Regarding Slop Plagiarism
Links for the day
Links 13/11/2026: "Apple Support Community Forums to Permanently Close" and "The Slop Market is Getting Nervous"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, November 12, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, November 12, 2026