● 07.09.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 09/07/2023: Mutt and Updated Thoughts on Gemini

Posted in News Roundup at 8:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• hello, it’s my birthday!!! so, how do you like to celebrate when it’s your birthday? today i’m going out to eat and having a homemade strawberry lemonade cake. i’m excited!!!

• We have exciting times afoot. During the last basho, Kiribayama gained the rank of Ozeki and became Kirishima. There were a few retirements which have caused a bit of a shake up. Takakeisho cleared kadoban status and so keeps at ozeki. In the end, we have 3 key contenders for ozeki in Daieisho, Wakamotoharu and Hoshoryu. Oh and of course Terunofuji returned and showed he is still capable of some amazing sumo after yet more knee surgery.

• So, recently I have been engaging a bit with the Korean language again. I have a complicated relationship with Korean and language learning in general. I’ve spent a significant amount of hours striving towards fluency in languages, but have not reached it. Partially I haven’t reached fluency because I have failed to focus on one. The language I grew closest to conversational fluency in was Korean.

• Then I developed hypothyroidsim, chronic leg pain, and moved to a new city in Korea and so did not have the friend base I had in the old city. I had a very bad third year in South Korea. At one low point, when my computer was having trouble loading a presentation right before my first class of the morning, I raked my nails across my face and drew a bit of blood. I can’t quite remember but I belive I started to self-harm just a touch in other similar ways.

• In (to me) similar news, I’ve never lived with a woman that didn’t want to fill our living space with gobs of useless junk in the name of decor.

• I’d like to add vehicle doors that lock themselves to your list. We’ve a Kia Soul whose doors and hatch (other than the driver seat door) lock themselves under circumstances we’ve yet to discern, and of course the manual is long gone.

• What that means is Murphy’s Law guarantees the door you need to get into to quickly get something from or put something in the vehicle is locked if you don’t have the key fob on you – which I rarely do because the button on it that causes the horn to sound repeatedly (in case… one is being attacked…? I’ve still no idea what it’s for…) is located on the fob such that going down on one’s haunches or bending over to pick something up results in one’s pants pocket pressing that idiotic horn/alarm button, requiring quickly abandoning what you’re doing in a panic to fetch the fob from the pocket and disable the ridiculous beeping.

• After writing my 3rd perfect album gempost I realized that I think I need to rethink the formula a bit. I genuinely love writing them but they’re probably not that fun to read! But until I think up a better way to approach these I’ll be maintaining a summary page that contains all of the entries and a paragraph about them to at least give folks who are interested in the list a quick and more consumable way to get the information! It’ll be updated as new entries are added. Every entry will still get a dedicated gempost and added to my gemlog.

• Duster had a stroke a few weeks ago and for the first couple of days it was the worst thing I had ever experienced. I was a complete wreck, absolutely beside myself the entire time. My baby boy was suffering and though we took him to the ER and they released him back to us after 20 hours with care instructions and medication, it felt like there was nothing I could do to help him.

• Emergencies happen when you’re busy with other things. There’s that manner in which the working world suddenly fades away as you realise the importance of the moment, and get the hell out of the office.

• I got interested in note-taking in 2020, and started seriously doing it a few months later. Looking back, I can now tell it was when I was seeing my grandma suffering with the early stages of dementia, and that really scared me. That loss of identity is something that I find existentially terrifying, and has been a motivating factor to take notes seriously. Now I enjoy taking notes for the sake of it, and continuously improving at it and seeing the growth of my vault of knowledge is both satisfying and helpful when I’m learning new skills.

Politics and World Events

• When most workers think about improving their working conditions collectively, a contract is the limit of their political imagination. It’s not their fault, that’s just the common understanding of what a union does. Anyone familiar with this process knows that the process of bargaining a contract, and even getting to the bargaining table to begin with, is long and arduous. It’s part of an organizing model that relies on the work of professional union staffers and lawyers who are in effect providing a service. We call it Service Unionism.

• When I was little I would stare into the lights around my room. It would create little spots in my vision; flickering and dancing that would eventually fade away. As they would face every time the every shrinking flickering dot would become this image of a woman’s face. She was beautiful. She captivated me. I would do this constantly growing up. I would stare into my ceiling lights, in the lights coming through my window, anywhere – if it meant I could see her. I would try staring at larger lights hoping that final flickering dot was larger and I would be able to see her more clearly. She stayed with me for most of my childhood. It wasn’t until I was around high-school that I lose memory of seeing her. Which makes sense since this was when the lights, in general, faded from my eyes. But who was she?

• DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) is a common tactic deployed by abusers to co-opt one of the few (potential) sources of power available to the survivor — disclosure — and turn it towards their own project of coercive control. The abuser denies allegations of abuse (if any have yet been made, sometimes abusers preempt their victim), attacks the credibility of the survivor, and creates a narrative in which the abuser is cast as the true victim of the survivor. When some people first hear of DARVO they express concern that the reality of the tactic makes it functionally impossible to distinguish between abuser and victim, implies the presence of “mutual abuse,” or demotes the situation from abusive to simply “toxic.” With these conclusions in hand many feel as though they can safely recuse themselves from engaging with the situation entirely, thus fulfilling the abuser’s central aim in deploying DARVO as a tactic in the first place.

• The Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun, and every day we read the names of cities unknown to most Americans until the invasion: Kherson, Kharkiv, Mariupol and Mykolaiv. After more than 15 months of fighting, large swaths of southern and eastern Ukraine remain under illegal Russian occupation.

• Early on June 24, Vladimir Putin addressed Russia about the unfolding rebellion of the Wagner private military company, saying that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion is “pushing the country toward anarchy and fratricide.”

• This is a misuse of words. Fratricide has long been the rule under Putin. Torturing and assassinating dissidents was fratricide. Invading Ukraine was fratricide. Both the Wagner company and the Russian military have made fratricide their profession. Anarchy is the opposite of fratricide: it is the condition that prevails when people do not compete to rule each other. Totalitarianism always leads to bloody conflicts over power.

• I received an annoying e-mail about white people and their struggle to do anti-racist work. I keep reading and hearing white people talk about their struggle to do anti-racist organizing, and frankly it gets on my nerves. So I am writing this open letter to white people who engage in any activist work that involves or affects non-whites. Given that the US social structure is founded on white supremacy, and that there is a global order in which white supremacy and European domination are at large, I would challenge any white person to figure out what movement or action they can get involved in that will not involve or affect non-white people.

• The following is my own attempt to define primitivism.

• Primitivism is the pursuit of ways of life running counter to the development of technology, its alienating antecedents, and the ensemble of changes wrought by both.

• Technology is here defined as tool use based upon division of labor…that is, tool manufacture and utilization that has become sufficiently complex to require specialization, implying both a separation and eventual stratification among individuals in the community, along with the rise of toil in the form of specialized, repetitive tasks.

Technology and Free Software

• I enjoyed Katolaz’s ed tutorial [0], I found it a great way to learn a useful subset of ed commands. I haven’t used a line editor since the 80s, but the simplicity is compelling for minor edits, or even glog posts like this one :).

• It’s almost time for the third annual Old Computer Challenge (starts Monday, July 10). I did a modified version of the first year’s, by limiting the RAM and CPU of a computer that was old, but not old enough to meet the challenge’s requirements. The second year was limited online time, and I missed it somehow. This year is the same as the first, but leaning into the SLOW computer requirements. Using a not-so-old computer and limiting it is explicitly okay. I’m going to use the same computer as the first year, an Asus EeePC 1015PX. From 2013, it has a 2-core, 4-thread Intel Atom processor at 1GHz to 1.6GHz, 2GB of RAM, and a very slow spinning-rust hard drive.

• As a result of this, I decided I wanted to make my passwords in an analog way that were much more human friendly. A way of doing that was with some dice I had laying around.

• All my notes regarding this year’s challenge will be contained within this file. I will be updating it throughout the week.

• [...]

• It’s a few minutes past midnight. The challenge began. The T42 is asleep and I’m pecking at a keyboard connected to the low-spec OpenBSD server. No xenodm, mind you.

• OK, so I have mutt receiving emails fine, but I’m having issues sending them. When I first went to test mutt’s sending of emails today, I couldn’t get any emails to send as the error message returned was “invalid SMTP URL”. It took me about an hour before I discovered I had written “smpts://” in the config file (*facepalm*).

Internet/Gemini

• ChatGPT is a language model. It outputs text token by token based on its prior input. It does not consciously consider what it’s writing, it merely melds parts of its input into novel combinations.

• I don’t think this pattern ever stops as we age. We will continue to master skills until our brains can basically do them on their own and we get bored. The trouble starts, when we run out of new goals. For some, this starts in puberty, when they start questioning the value of the goals their parents present to them. For some it may just start to really impact their lives after they have reached their PhD or worked a job for many years, that they once found interesting.

• Not knowing where or when you are is extremely disorienting. Combined with a hearing loss (which disconnects large parts of one’s brain) and a vision loss (likewise), in addition to a declining ability to process information, reality is a scary place. Over time she became quite paranoid, convinced that others were plotting to take away her stuff (not worth anyone’s efforts, really), destroying her artwork, and otherwise conspiring against her. She would regularly go to the bank and demand funds which she had withdrawn years ago, and accuse them of thievery — until, eventually, the local branch closed, convincing her that they had absconded with her money and are living it up somewhere… (again, we are talking about life savings of a few thousand, which in her mind had grown into millions).

• Previously I had written about my experiments with getting Gemini to be used for different cases. Having now used it for a while, I’d like to reflect on what has and hasn’t worked.

• In the first weeks of March, June, September, and December, life gets complicated for my day job. Usually that means the pressure gathers in intensity in the preceding weeks and then winds down after the quarterly release.

• It is time when my other obligations start to press into my attention and I’m too busy to focus on them. Naturally that means as the release winds down, I try to get focus on the others.

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