● 06.18.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 18/06/2023: Division, remainder, mod…

Posted in News Roundup at 8:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I drink too much coffee. Any time I pass coffee machine I get a double cup. Maybe 5 or 6 doubles through the day until evening.

• I will try to take a break from coffee for 2 weeks starting today.

• I recently stumbled about a PDF file detailing the “Dynabook”, a sort of personal mobile computer envisioned by Alan Kay in the seventies… and oh boy, what he envisioned was lightyears away from todays locked town and “appliance-ified” smartphones.

• I don’t remember when I learned about face blindness—but I was glad I did, as I learned it’s not just me.

• Face blindness is a condition in which the ability to recognize familiar faces—to identify people by their face—is impaired.

• According to Wikipedia the prevalence in the general population is 2.5%, so it’s not particularly rare.

• I follow the youtuber The Spiffing Brit, because he is a fellow gamer and tea drinker with a good sense of humour and lots of fun game exploits.

• He also likes OpenTTD and recently held an event where community members could participate in a match like no other.

• The game had (it’s just been removed) a system for buying shares from other companies. This was rarely activated in multiplayer games because of how broken most players found it. In this case another community member had modded that system and much more of the code to allow for an experience never before possible in OpenTTD.

• Today marks my first Father’s Day as a day. Father’s Day has been a day I’ve struggled with in the past, but I’m thankful that it’s now a day I celebrate.

• A little warning, this isn’t my most uplifting post, my apologies for that. But it’s something that’s overdue for me to get onto “paper”.

• The relationship with my own father was one that got worse with each year since high school. My dad choose to leave the family and move to North Dakota for work. This led to my parents growing further and further apart. I started to dread the weeks he would come home and visit. Inevitably the distance led to my parents getting divorced when I had just started college.

Politics and World Events

• In so doing, though, he greatly exaggerates the difference between these flavors. Pearlstein’s first major variant of modern capitalism — robber-baron capitalism — was characterized by the large-scale economic power of big business. It was succeeded by the managerial capitalism of the New Deal and post-WWII era: “Competition tended to be gentlemanly and the power of big business was held in check by the federal government (big government) and unions (big labor).”

• The “State capitalism” of the European social democracies and Japan is just a more extreme variant of American managerial capitalism.

• This zine is a collection of texts written by people associated with the Syrena collective, which was evicted from an occupied building at 30 Wilcza Street in Warsaw by people associated with the Przychodnia “squat”*. The conflict inside the Syrena squat with Przychodnia involved in it had been going on for months, if not years. We are writing about the day of our eviction – 5.12.2021, and what this house and social center was to us.

• I’ve been posting less and less… Not that I’ve been writing less – I just look over my posts and delete them because it feels that the world would not become a better place because of my post.

• I used to not care at all. Then I cared a little but it felt like I was shouting into the vacuum anyway. Now it feels just pointless most of the time.

• For a while I kept the unpublished posts — first as .txt files that my indexer ignores, then in an ‘attic’ directory, still thinking I might rework them later. Now I just delete them, and feel a little better.

Science

• I’m not qualified to say if that’s true (and I don’t really care) but I have some relevant observations because I came across this while implementing a Whitespace interpreter.

• Whitespace was originally implemented in Haskell, and I wrote an interpreter in Java. These two languages disagree on what the operator % means for negative inputs, so I read…

Technology and Free Software

Internet/Gemini

• I just added a page to my archives [0] area of this gopherhole for Riot Medicine [1], an open source medical guide for street medics.

• Riot Medicine is a full-length textbook that covers everything you need to become a medic. The 466 pages include organizing, medcine, equipment, and tactics. It is written for those with no medical training and no experience at protests, but medical practitioners and seasoned protesters will still find it useful.

• I’m still getting used to getting my info from a wider variety of channels. I used to get a lot of stuff via Twitter, some things from email (from my family), some things from bookmarks and from search. Now I’ve added geminispace, Cohost, Mastodon. I’m reading more. Where am I finding the time? I’m scrolling less.

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