Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 21/07/2023: Gemtexter 2.1.0 Released, Birth and Death of the Yesterweb



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

    • Politics and World Events

      • Neoliberalism, Co-Production, and the Social Factory

        Understanding the problems around care requires us to look back and more nationally than just Maine. Many of the other elders I interviewed seemed to agree with Emma [pseudonym] about the importance of community and “care networks,” sharing a nostalgia for times when local communities and extended families cared for each other over and above both state welfare and corporate market consumption. 69-year-old Lucy (pseudonym), a core organizer in the Hour Exchange project and one of my interviewees, spoke to me about how “society used to work very much on this kind of basis of mutual aid but since modern capitalism and especially globalization, people are more isolated from one another.” Similarly, 64-year-old Peter (pseudonym), a long-time member of Hour Exchange I also interviewed, outlined how

    • Technology and Free Software

      • Automatically checking for new iris messages on ^C - 2023-07-21

        One of the unique features of ^C is iris, the message base written by calamitous. It's relatively low-traffic, and while I could keep it open in interactive mode and issue the 'f' or 'freshen' command occasionally to check for new messages, I don't want to.

      • Using AI to Generate Images for Articles

        Let's start with the basics. You might be asking yourself "what is a meta image?". It's the image that shows up on LinkedIn, Facebook and other sites when you post a URL. It's usually accompanied by the title and a summary of the website being posted. These images are defined in the code of a webpage using a "meta tag". This might be an OpenGraph tag (Facebook) or a Twitter card tag.

      • can i say something mean?

        disclaimer upfront: i have no qualms with synthetic images themselves. quite the contrary lmao i've been interested on "ai art" for a couple years now. i've used a lot of digital ink on it. also physical ink and acrylic paint and stuff on my thesis. i am critical of several things, yes, but that's just what art is like. not gonna go into it rn.

        anyway all this to say i don't mean this as an attack or whatever it's nothing personal i'm literally just being annoying online because i hate the ubiquity of useless stock images <3

        anyway i find meta images (and hero images and stock images within articles in general) *fascinating*. they're so so useless but also not? what does a stock photo of a guy in a suit communicate? it's just filler, a waste of everyone's time and bandwidth. but also it communicates very well that you're not really trying to say anything. like brightly colored poisonous animals. [1]

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Gemtexter 2.1.0 - Let's Gemtext again€³

          I proudly announce that I've released Gemtexter version `2.1.0`. What is Gemtexter? It's my minimalist static site generator for Gemini Gemtext, HTML and Markdown, written in GNU Bash.

        • The Birth and Death of the Yesterweb

          When I started out, I was looking for some HTML resources. I wanted to make a simple, clean site - pleasant colours, a little CSS to make things easier to read, that sort of thing. And around then, poking around neocities and seeing what Google would give me that wasn't outright SEO bait or spam, I found sadness' site.

          There's a particular segment of people for whom personal webpages imply a particular aesthetic. Pixelated images, garish, dithering artifacts, that sort of thing. And sadness, the alias of a woman now in her thirties, seemed to be someone around to whom the adherents of this aesthetic flocked. Her site is retro, in a way that carefully hews to expectation. It has all the right accoutrements of a particular kind of 90s website: shrines, a webring, an About page, a chatbox. Themes. In a way, her site represents a distillation of the GeoCities aesthetic. And while there are a lot of aesthetics from that era (the unstyled, text-only academic web; the magazine layout-style web; the artsy, made-in-Paint Shop Pro web; the "Apple ][ green text/Tandy orange text" web; ...), people always seem to come back to GeoCities. I mean, I get it. I had a page there, for a couple of years. But I never quite got the allure because the vast majority of GeoCities pages were kinda dreck, and I absolutely include my own in this.

      • Programming

        • Strings in Bash

          $ STR="0123Linux9" $ echo ${STR:4:5} Linux

        • Redefined

          Forth is a bit unusual in terms of word redefinition, which are something like subroutines in other languages. In most languages the previous definition is clobbered, and sometimes you'll get a warning to that effect.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Manchester United Dumped Microsoft Because Qualcomm Sort of Did
The Windows PCs were an utter failure
Kazakhstan Doesn't Need GAFAM Datacentres (Spy Hubs)
Suffice to say, as far as we can gather nothing came out from the empty (false) promises of GAFAM's "data centers in Kazakhstan"
Christmas Music Project: Back to When Music Was Music
now Canonical (or Ubuntu) says we should make available tens of gigabytes of disk space
Browsing Techrights With a GUI and 10 Megabytes of RAM Per Tab
Some people say it's not possible in 2025, maybe in part because they depend on very bloated software
Gemini Links 25/12/2025: Hibernation and TV Detox
Links for the day
 
Tossing Embarrassing News Under the Christmastime Bus
This isn't just some coincidence; those are conscious choices
Victim-Blaming in Debian
Verhelst previously did blame-shifting when Debian suicide clusters happened
IBM Cuts in Japan, Red Hat is Attached to a Sinking Ship
IBM, which controls Red Hat, is a rapidly shrinking company
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Supported by Unconventional Digital Bartering Communities
But no strings attached
Geminispace: 5,000 Capsules in 2026
There are 4.8k now
Gemini Links 26/12/2025: Careful What You Eat and "My Secret Santa"
Links for the day
The Indigenous Community Versus Corporate AstroTurt and 'Cancel Culture'
Good people will recognise exactly what's happening here and respond to it tactfully
Richard Stallman: Epstein is a Serial Rapist. Bill Epsteingate: Epstein is a Friend.
Supporting the FSF (or Richard Stallman) is supporting those who asserted Epstein had serially raped women
The Paradox of GAFAM: Saying You Protect Women, Appointing Abusers of Women to Run the Company
older articles
Censored by FreeBSD Core Team Secretary, Reinstated After Talking About it in Public
FreeBSD misfiring a CoC?
Links 26/12/2025: Chatbot Toys Terrorising Children, US Undeclared "War on Terror" Unilaterally Extends to Nigeria During Holidays
Links for the day
Links 26/12/2025: French Postal Services Under Russian Attack, U.S. Cheetos Accuse People Who Obstruct Information Warfare by Russia of "Censorship"
Links for the day
Debian's Daniel Kahn Gillmor is Wrong, Signal is No "Gold Standard" (It's Also Promoted by Proponents of Back Doors)
I'm not too sure why Debian or the ACLU would wish to associate with this
Next Year Will be the Year of Quantum, Just Like 2020, 2015, 2010, 2005 and So On
"Quantum" is the future
The Silent Power of Coercion Over Speech
The important thing is optics
So Simple That You Can Touch and Feel It
In light of recent experiences
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Under Attack by Cross-Network Spam Floods
So far we've been spared (our network has not been targeted at all) [...] Let's hope the spam won't discourage the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who still use IRC
An "AI-Infused" Windows
Microsoft Windows isn't becoming a worthless pile of garbage by accident
Microsoft Laid Off Over 30,000 People This Year, Coders Are "Too Expensive"
Go get some popcorn. Microsoft "slopware" is about to get real!
Critics Have Long Said Microsoft Produces "Slopware", Microsoft Wants to Prove Them Right
Slop instead of code is a step in the right direction?
The Top 8 Innovations of IBM in 2025
What innovations will come out from IBM in 2026?
And as the Year Turns...
The significance of new years isn't based on geology or astronomy or anything like that
Appliances Versus Computers
Replacing a computer inside an object of some kind or inside an appliance (which nowadays includes "modern" cars) isn't simple and isn't cheap
A Dark Side of Europe
They try hard to silence people who speak about these issues
Why People Love Techrights (and Also Loved "Boycott Novell")
I will continue to publish for many decades to come
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 25, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, December 25, 2025
A Tribute to Richard Stallman
It's about knowledge and sharing
Links 26/12/2025: Impermanence, Salt and Thermometer, Freetube
Links for the day
Canonical is Making the Cost of PCs Very High, Due to Unnecessary Ubuntu Bloat
They say the reason for the price surge is LLM hype/frenzy
Canonical's Ubuntu is Bloatware
How did Ubuntu get so fat?
The EPO is a Very Vicious Organisation You Neither Wish to Join Nor Stay in for "Too Long"
Consider what the EPO thinks of its own workers, the staff that actually does real work
2026 Will Hopefully Turn Out to be Slopless
we seem to be starting the post-Christmas period on the right footing
Links 25/12/2025: Mail Carriers in "a Murky Future", Dihydroxyacetone Man’s "Chip Embargo Against China Backfiring Spectacularly"
Links for the day
The Register MS: All I Want For Xmas is Microsoft
they actually put effort into it
How to Win Nobel Prize for Peace
Do you get to Heaven (or peace platitudes) by sleeping with 72 virgins?
The Right to Repair (Especially When Products Are So Poorly Made)
Many electrical appliances fail often/quick and are nearly impossible to repair
Links 25/12/2025: Ample Cover-up Found in Jeffrey Epstein Files; ChatGPT Causes Psychosis, Not a Good Use Case
Links for the day
Giving Money to Free Software
In life, people must make sacrifices to do what's right and just
The Register MS: Don't Use Linux
That really says a lot about The Register MS
EPO People Power - Part XV - EPO Cocainegate to Resume This Weekend
The next installment (number 16) will probably come out this weekend
Microsoft: XBox is Going "Online", "Cloud"...
XBox as a console is pretty much dead
The Year of the Bubble
We hope that in 2026 the marketing liars will find some new buzzwords to latch onto and quit calling everything "AI"
Mozilla Firefox is a GAFAM Browser With Slop, Move to a Free Software Web Browser
on mobile the options would be more limited
libera.chat Was Under Attack Last Night
Several months from now libera.chat turns 5
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raises Over $300,000 Before Christmas
the FSF made it past $300,000
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, December 24, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Sounds Like Microsoft 'Open' 'AI' (Slop) Ran Out of Money to Borrow
Maybe in 2026 slop will be scarce enough that eventually, maybe by year's end, we'll manage to just ignore it.
In India, Staff Works on Christmas Eve, Becomes Unemployed (Last Day)
The company fires based on how "expensive" workers are more often than based on their productivity
Links 24/12/2025: US TACOs on "China Chip Tariffs Until 2027", Russian Snickers in U.K. Convenience Shops
Links for the day
Links 24/12/2025: Cheeto President "Accused of Rape in Jeffrey Epstein Files", Windows to be Replaced by Slop?
Links for the day
Gemini Links 24/12/2025: Tea, Love During Pain, and Gaming This Year
Links for the day
GAFAM is a Bubble, Nothing is Free in This World
Nothing is free in the world
My New CD Player/Stereo Didn't Even Last a Year, My CD Player/Stereo From the Early 1990s Still Works
That helped reaffirm what I said in recent years about production/manufacturing standards of "modern" things
GitHub Isn't Free, Microsoft Subsidises It (Losses) to Entrap You Inside Proprietary Software, Now Come the Fees
GitHub was never free
XBox Console is Dead, "Microsoft is Rethinking What XBox is"
So XBox is now "cloud"
IBM SkillsBuild: Teaching Slop to People
What skills does that give? Making more slopfarms?
Maybe 2026 Will be the Last Year of António Campinos
Europe's patent system is run by thugs and it serves thugs
2025: The Year LLM Slop Rose to Prominence and Then Fell
the slop hype is bound to end
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, December 23, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, December 23, 2025
Links 24/12/2025: Spotify Surveillance and Shadow Over Rule of Law in Hong Kong
Links for the day