● 06.02.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 02/06/2023: Vimwiki Revisited, SGGS Revisited

Posted in News Roundup at 11:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• On the first day of June, it’s a good time to reflect on the past season and make intentions for the coming one.

• For me, looking back is the harder part. I’m less used to that; I’m always thinking about the future, but spending time on the past is less obviously useful.

• Worker-owned cooperatives aren’t a new idea. I should really find a good book or web site with some case studies about how they’ve been done in the past. In particular, I really ought to look into the Mondragon Corporation, which I always hear about but have never really studied.

• But lack of background knowledge won’t stop me from trying to spin up my own thoughts on how a person might structure a worker-owned cooperative, so that’s what this article contains.

• My starting point was that I wanted a structure where people build equity in the cooperative as they work, and when they leave the cooperative (by retiring, for example, but also for any other reason), that equity is paid back to them.

• As predicted, Important Men got together and saved the world at the last moment, by signing a piece of paper that authorizes further borrowing. Woo-hoo!

• And now, as more debt is to be monetized while the Fed is shitting in their collective pants, we can look forward to higher prices.

• Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, regardless of what these jerks tell you. Rising prices are a _consequence_ of cheap money. It is not because of ‘evil CEOs’ or profiteering landlords. It is entirely due to the vast amounts of counterfeit currency our senile president had forced into the system by handing money out to his croneys. Not that other presidents are much better, but this one kind of jumped the shart with the handouts. And of course it’s not really Biden, as I doubt he can put on his underwear without help, so it’s whoever is behind it this time.

• Huh. I’ve somehow not encountered the “dead Internet” theory ’til reading the above.

• Makes me wonder, just what is it that drives people toward the “TeeHeeVille” of deceiving others with respect to individuality, e.g. writing a “bot” to hopefully give some the impression they’re interacting with an “actual person”?

• Having finally returned this weekend to a permanent track (albeit with upgrades!) I have finally figured out exactly what my ideal weekend is! One Practice, One Qualifying, One Race. That’s it.

• How original I know. But I actually like televised practice. I like it because I don’t really like off coverage talks. Having an hour where teams test and push and work to trial their upgrades gives us fans time to understand whats changed between each session and gives the commentators some time to give their recaps and other notes from the weekend and time between.

Technical

• Whaddaya do when when you think someone’s pasting AI responses your way?

• I went to a favorite online place and was happy to see I had a reply to peruse… except by the time I got to the end of it I was under the distinct, disappointing impression it was the kind of hollow, prosaic verbiage I’ve come to expect from so-called AI.

• Grant it, I’ve no proof, so that impression could have been the result of too-much-yardwork mental weariness.

• My latest foray into software installation mystification involves something called “vimwiki”, whose installation instructions I followed to a tee, and yet for the life of me I can’t open what I imagine to be a “vimwiki” session within a vim session.

• I very rarely use customer support or feedback channels on the mainline Internet these days. I have always preferred to call or even visit in person. Especially when I see chat assistants on a Web site, I always assume they’re powered by AI and not staffed by a real human.

• Today textmonger wondered^ if replies and even full conversations over other channels are actually AI-driven–and if so, how often that happens. textmonger noted that if this is a common occurrence, it erodes further the individuality of all Internet users, not just the bots themselves. It also adds a kind of paranoia as to whether one is investing emotional energy into a soulless computer.

Internet/Gemini

• Based on my own experience writing various Gemini clients and servers, I think Stenberg makes some good points regarding the implementation Gemini programs.

• What does UTF-8 and URLs actually mean? Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI), punycode (but for hostnames only), and so on. It’s tricky to get right and easy to just treat the URLs as ASCII with punycode and percent encoding. If you’re in an ISO Latin-1 locale and pasting an IRI on the command line, the tool needs to decode the bytes from the locale and encode as UTF-8, for example. You don’t find that in the spec. I think it’s implied. Back when the mailing list still existed, such questions would cause long discussions that I found tiring. So here we are.

• [...]

• Stenberg also says that Gemini is “quite similar to going back to GOPHER.” I disagree with that. Gopher maps are a pain. No TLS for Gopher is not cool. I think from a visual perspective it depends on the client. There’s Lagrange which looks beautiful.

• A couple of years ago, I wrote SGGS, a system for playing turn-based games over gemini, primarily as an experiment in using streaming to support synchronous play. But it didn’t see much use, and I accepted it as an essentially failed experiment.

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