● 06.28.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 28/06/2023: Many Net and Technology Musings

Posted in News Roundup at 10:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• The accepted meanings of tarot cards can’t be deduced just by looking at them. Let alone their “true” meanings.

• Nor can you uncover their secret significance through philology. Claims by people like Court de Gebelin, Eliphas Lévi and Dr. Papus that the cards originated in Egypt or some other ancient repository of lost wisdom hold no water whatsoever under historical investigation. What educated guesses we can make as to the original designers’ intentions are disappointingly mundane; “The Tower” representing the defeat of the De La Torre family in medieval Italy; the “Strength” card commemorating the victory of a friend over a clan whose crest was the lion, etc. I hope I’m not ruffling any feathers by stating outright that the land disputes of long-dead bourgeois Italians hold no cosmic significance to me.

Technology and Free Software

• I know I said that I was going to work on writing after working on the previous post[1], but I tried to speed up the pipelines because an hour was overwhelming and bothered me.

• because they insist that I register first sending me links to these is pretty much telling me to fuck off

• * facebook * instragram * spotify * discord

• Wow, this has been an appealing read.

• A bit of context: I’m 36, and I studied Engineering first, followed by Management of IT Systems. I enjoy management but also appreciate working on the technical stuff. And I’ve been a professor in college fo the last 5 years.

• [...]

• However, when working with people, it’s rare to achieve those same percentages. Anyone can fall ill, conflicts can arise between team members, and people can become tired. In sales, the percentages can be even lower. Closing 33% of deals is often seen as an ideal number, but sometimes it can be lower than 5%.

• Well, as usual, it depends on what we ‘define’ as useless. I’m thinking of something like “unfinished stuff that doesn’t even do a single thing well yet”.

• I somehow managed to introduce a bug into this site’s configuration. It manifests as one of processes serving the site eating all the CPU resources. Every day there seems to be about zero to three of these.

• As I can’t debug such rare events, I need to rely on logging but my efforts so far haven’t been successful. So now what I’m doing is that I’m disabling part of this site’s functionality, piece by piece. Let’s see whether I can pare it down to a set that no longer runs into the problem.

Internet/Gemini

• I haven’t had a reddit account in a while, but I do read a number of subreddits. Well, I guess I should say that I *did* read those subreddits, since I used gopherddit and Libreddit to do it and they depend on the soon- to-be-very-expensive API.[1]

• Like a lot of people, when the reddit moderators’ strike started, I checked out Lemmy. Yesterday I took the plunge and actually signed up for an account (it’s @visiblink@lemmy.sdf.org).

• I haven’t made my mind up and I’ll keep editing this page until I have.

• I’m leaning towards “no” on the block, but it’s not an easy call and I haven’t made up my mind yet. The block side has two big arguments in their favor:

• 1. Google federated to XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) and we were like “OK cool” and I and many others federated with them. Then they shut off federation and moved all their users to their own closed network. 2. Meta had a big part to play in the Cambridge Analytica debacle. Not only is Meta the enemy (although I generally prefer to follow the Kumbaya Doctrine — if I truly believed they were reformed), they’re scary to deal with in case they’ll start data mining Fedi stuff.

• A couple of posts recently have talked about how to make progress on the Gemini spec.

Programming

• I’ve always been vaguely aware of Forth. It’s the language that works with only a stack. Which also means it uses reverse polish notation, that is, instead of `2 + 2`, you write `2 2 +`.

• My (inaccurate) knowledge of Forth ended there. But then recently I was reading up on Forth and I realized something.

• Same here. For me it’s mostly text-processing scripts/utilities, and almost always in Lua.

• And call me insane, but I stopped including blank lines and comments years go: the blank lines so I can see more of the actual code lines together, the comments because somewhere along the line I realized that over time they too often became misleading unless so verbose as to make it impossible to see sufficient code together. Plus, I’d rather study what actually executes when trying to re-understand how something works.

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