● 07.06.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 06/07/2023: Fire Retardants and lp0 on fire

Posted in News Roundup at 4:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Wake up, Pate, the machine has you. No matter, the war is yet to be lost. Raise your towers and fly the banner. Skip along the rocks made of broken bits. Surrender or not: The machine has you.

Politics and World Events

• Often, some people make remarks like “Don’t expect the goverment to just hand you things!” in response to concerns about healthcare, food, housing, what have you. This, I think, fundamentally misses the point of what a government, or at least a democratic government, *should be*.

• (Note: I understand there is a massive difference between “should be” and “is”.)

• See, like, if you’re just in a small group of people, you probably get along just fine talking things out with each other and making compromises. This is how things work in my family of all adults, for example. Most friend groups are this way too.

• This kind of breaks down when you have a much larger group. Maybe, *maybe* you could gather everyone in a small town together and have them hash out budgets and laws, but a big city? An entire nation?

• The source in the original article lists only legislation for Delaware, and even then it only prohibits “harmful flame retardant chemicals”.

Technology and Free Software

• A user once showed up at the office door, and claimed that the “printer smelled funny”. That is never a good sign. What had happened was that they had loaded iron-on t-shirt paper into a laserwriter. The paper, or rather its coating, had in turn melted around the fusor, the most expensive replaceable part. No actual fire, but it did smell pretty bad.

• Fire is rare in server rooms, or rather “significant heat incidents” as one might see in the official reports. There may not actually have been a fire despite all sorts of burn damage from the, I don’t know, electrical arcs.

• Fun couple days, in no small part for having less to do with monitors and/or keyboards.

• Grant it, I had to deal with so called “4th of July” activities. I think I summed up my take on that well when I turned to a couple adult guests and said, “This is what the people not good at math consider entertainment.”

• I honestly have very little to say. I don’t even like talking. And forget about listening to others unless they’ve an intriguing voice *and* come up for air regularly so others can get a word or three in.

• I’m probably going to get a chance to help write a class that teaches physics majors how to code and how computation integrates with physics.

• This is actually a topic I love a lot and I’ve been low-key thinking for years that I wanted to write a textbook that teaches intro physics and intro programming at the same time, to avoid the panic-inducing nature of anything that requires calculus.

Internet/Gemini

• A few months ago, I happen to notice some crazy spikes in my gopher server stats.

• Following reddit’s decision to monetize their public API, I decided to simply get off the platform. I’m however a fervent lurker, and love to mindlessly scroll through links and memes posted by random people. Hopefully for me, a bunch of nerds were already working on a decentralized link aggregator: Lemmy[0] (see also kbin[1]).

• It’s a link aggregator one can self-host, but which can talk to other software involved in the « Fediverse ». Long story short, all servers can communicate together, and with an account created on website A, you can read, post and comment on website B. Many software use this principle of federation, starting with emails (but also Mastodon, Matrix, …).

• My purpose, in this address, is to bring about a juster understanding and appreciation of different classes of reformers among one another and to direct their attention to what seems the most practical as well as the easiest method of reform which is already within their grasp whenever they are willing to undertake it. I have no expectation of bringing about any formal union of those different classes; but only to favorably incline the most thoughtful individuals among them toward united action; and to soften, in some degree, the asperities which now prevail. Hoping that it will not entirely fail of its purpose, is the hope of…

• I wanted to be able to find a post and just hit a “like” button to upvote them directly from my desktop.

• Found out that lemmy is kind of picky with the Accept header.

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