● 05.03.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 03/05/2023: Scepticism of ‘the State of Modern Computing’

Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• This morning I went back to the same spot on the east side of the UAF hill and took some more sunrise photos. This time I did not get as much of that purple twlight effect, owing I think to the clouds being at a lower altitude. But I was still able to get a good number of nice photos from twilight to dawn.

• Fear your wishes for they might become true, they say, or something of that sort. In my case I’ve got two: a promotion for which I had worked for so long and, on top of that, it seems I’m a game-master again. The curse with the first wish is that I have to go to another office. This came unexpected as there’s actually a lot of work to do where I’m currently stationed. [...]

• It’s that I’ve been posting less often. Not a big deal, to be honest, I don’t want to be a slave to the Gemini, but it makes harder to come up with ideas for a new post. So, you see, that’s the main reason for this one.

Technical

• I’ve ranted quite a bit on my phlog on the state of modern computing and the direction we’re headed. And now with LLM being a fad, things have gotten so much worse yet again. A few weeks ago the Washington Post released an article (1) with therein a widget that lets you look up whether your website has been scraped by AI or not. I was dissapointed (but not surprised) to find out that they had scraped, not only my websites (ignoring robots.txt), but also gopher proxies, and presumably gemini http proxies as well. What this means is they likely slurped up all of gopherspace and gemspace as well. I do not consent to this. Anyhow,…

• My bookmarks situation – across a variety of readers/browsers on a couple devices – is already an unknottable tangle of URL entropy. No time to go through it all, and possibly organize. And it goes without typing there’s likely plenty of link rot therein. We’re talking several hours of wading, renaming, deleting, nesting, becoming dissatisfied with organizational choices along the way, forgetting initial nesting guiding principles, etc.

• Going back to 2010-2012, I was new in the industry, and I was so, so proud to be a programmer. In a time where a lot of rough things were going on in my life, I latched on to being a software hotshot as a core part of my identity and my self-worth.

• [...]

• It’s all fucked up. I don’t want to live in the future that Microsoft/Alphabet/OpenAI/Meta are selling, and I’m scared that many people will be badly hurt by it. Those companies are trying to push a narrative of inevitability so they can manufacture public consent for developing and releasing these things. I don’t really know what I can do about it, but ever since I first read the small things manifesto, I’ve felt strongly like I need to do something. The truth is, I’m badly disillusioned by computing in general, and I’d like to accomplish at least something toward making computing work for people, not just companies. I’m just a person, not terribly bright and with a large number of regrets, but if I can, I’d really like to help work toward the right thing.

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