● 05.10.23
Gemini version available ♊︎
● Gemini Links 10/05/2023: More on Gemini Killer App
Posted in News Roundup at 1:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
GNU/Linux
Gemini* and Gopher
Technical
Internet/Gemini
- Classes started up again recently and I’m taking the last university course I’ll ever have to take. There’s not a ton of offerings during spring/summer, but I saw an intro to AI course was being offered and I figured it would be a fun one to end things on.
- It’s pretty chill, even despite the condensed schedule that spring and summer classes at my school take on. I think that’s owing to it being a senior-level course (which I find tend to treat students more like adults) and the smallish class size which lets the lectures be very discussion focused. And the fact that it’s the only class I have to focus on doesn’t hurt at all.
- To perhaps get bogged down in the technical details, I think Gemini owes a lot of this to its thoughtful design. Specifically here by not having allegories for CSS or Javascript. All that’s left at that point is the text. There are no design or interactivity knobs to tune to make up for poor writing.
- But I believe it’s bigger than that. Gemini’s design eschews extensibility, and a lack of styling options or a client-side programming language are just 2 examples of this larger choice.
Programming
- I learnt about smolweb circa 2020 and lost all contact with it. Now after a chat with some friends at a Ruby irc, I discovered Gemini and fell in love. After a while I found here. So nice to meet you all
- Now I’m feeling a little motivated to evict python from this script, because there’s some friction in doing this task partly in bash and partly in python.
- Python isn’t the greatest scripting language for one-liners, and using the -c switch isn’t really useful any more beyond that. So for now this script (1) creates a tempfile, (2) dumps mostly hard-coded python into it (from a bash HEREDOC), (3) executes it, (4) captures the return code, (5) unconditionally removes the tempfile, and (6) exits the script if the return code was unsatisfactory. That’s…not great.
- But I haven’t written any zig in around 4 months, and never did it daily for any sustained period. So going through ziglings is supposed to refresh my memory and get my skills back up. With recent advancements in the tooling and standard library (in particular package management and TLS) I’m interested in starting to use it for small web applications.
- What I really noticed about going through ziglings is that I’m *flying* through this. I got through 50 in a day, and spent maybe 20 minutes today getting through another 20. That’s probably partly because I have some experience here already, but I know that the structure of this project (over 100 tasks) would push me towards prioritizing speed regardless. I barely read the comments (some of them are quite long), and I’m mostly kind of banging on it until the build is green. This is what concerns me.
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