● 07.18.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 18/07/2023: Free Speech and Tech Illiteracy

Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• My old dad knew some things. Not so much about any one thing, but he could take the measure of whatever came. If you brought something broken, or someone’s name, or what you heard, you’d know he’d have a place for it. Not the details, but a slot. He’d move through this world grounded in what he knew. And enough bones to hang and carry whatever he found. Most of the old folks I knew was like that.

• And I wonder now, what he’d make of what I got to steer through now.

• I have this early memory, of when I was small. Back then there was barely any of the Olds come in yet, although they was something he could reckon with. But this one day, I go to fetch dad to come around. I’d found one of his dogs dead on the lower field, just laying there in the dust with the flies, its head about all gone. We go along the fence and find this jelly lump creature about two foot long, heaving along and trailing blood behind. So my dad puts a boot on it, and it bursts out this blue-colored bile as it dies. It’s running down that wind-parched dirt, some unnameable juice, but it don’t run like blood or anything, it pulses with a rhythm. Like it’s its own thing. Never saw nothing like it.

• Informed consent is the core pluralist value.

• The populist core value is tradition. Sometimes flimsy-ass traditions that are only a few decades old, sometimes ancient granite boots stomping a human face forever.

• So in the mind of a populist, the pluralist ethic might seem like a mess of contradictions. We protest when Iran forces hijabs and when France forbids them. We protest islamophobia but support LGBT which many imams speak out against.

• In the minds of our foes we seem like flickering candles unable to make up our minds, unable to wrangle our minds to fit their beloved hobgoblin of consistenc

• The Tomatos are just now turning ripe. They’re very small — a bit bigger than cherry tomatos — which wasn’t expected but they’re tasty. Need to do better research what kind of tomato seed to buy. Oops.

• I’ve already harvested two batches of gherkins and pickled them. All in all around half a kilo of them. This is surprisingly little considering it is seven plants. It’s too early to tell how the pickling turned out, they’re still in the basement fermenting or whatever you call this :).

• The potatos will soon be ripe I think, so will the chillis and the onions.

Politics and World Events

• There is an aforism, “a rising tide lifts all boats”, made popular by a speechwriter in the JFK administration who snarfed it from the regional New England Council in the early sixties.

• It’s been used to promote pretty messed up economic policies that benefit the richest of the richest, and completely ignoring the ever-widening wealth gap, under the guise of “what are you complaining about? Even though the wealth gaps are the biggest they’ve ever been and the billionares can buy and sell forty thousand Versailles palaces per minute, you’re still better of than a Whitechapel streetrat in the 19th century, aren’t you?”

• There’s also a really good music album by Mire Kay that’s named after that phrase. One of my favorite records, coincidentally. It doesn’t seem like a political record as far as I can tell. It is a poetic and dangerously convincing phrase even though the underlying political sentiment is all kinds of messed up.

• It’s weird how the shift from workers vs owners to pluralists vs populists has been presented as this new phenomenon by commentators like Norris and Inglehart, the latter arguing that it’s because of how the new generation has new values.

• For me, there are two kind of sharp dividing lines when it comes to doomerism (and people do one or the other or both, they’re independent).

• One is when people use it to shut down others. The difference between “I need a break from thinking about this” vs “you need to give up! You need to stop trying!”. The latter is what’s not OK.

• I hesitated to even write this, but it needs said. I did tone it down just a bit, in the interest of legitimate dialogue.

Technology and Free Software

• I only learn about the challenge on the first day. Hopefully I have the perfect challenger for this task: my trusty Acer Aspire One from 2009. Equipped with an Intel Atom clocking at 1.6GHz, 1Gib of RAM and a 250Gb hard drive, it barely needed any limitation to fit in the challenge.

• I grab it from the shelf, blow the dust out of it and powers it. Without much surprise, it boots into the 5 years old Void Linux I had setup and forgot about.

• I plug it in to reflow it with some juice, and ends the day.

• “Composing with Constraints” exercise 9 has one chop a given melody into segments of equal length and presumably to reorder those segments as you see fit, possibly randomly. Musikalisches Würfelspiel was popular a few years ago. With a computer one might imagine software that splits music into suitable segments, and now you have two problems: the original exercise, and new software to write.

• Worse, not all MIDI is suitable to segmentation; there may be zero “dtime” events associated with either a previous or the next note, and the next note event could appear before the previous note event. Perhaps there is a control change for the next note, and then a “note_off” event for some prior “note_on” event. Most MIDI is not like this, though tracks that have long sustains (“note_on” without a corresponding or very late “note_off”) will also be a problem for a simple segmentation process that only considers “note_on” events. Still, you can try arbitrary MIDI files or normalize them first so that shuffled stray events do not cause problems.

• In this guide, I’d like to share with you how to install Alpine Linux, so it runs entirely from RAM, but using its built-in tool to handle persistency. Perfect setup for a NAS or router, so you don’t waste a disk for the system, and this can even be used for a workstation.

• My parents were born around the 60s. They were fortunate enough to witness some of the most revolutionary technological miracles, and remember living without them. For example, did you know before mircowave popcorn was invented people just took the kernels and put them in brown paper lunch bags and put that in microwaves. Anyways, a story my mom likes to tell me about regarding computers is this:

• “When I was a kid they brought in a computer to my school and gathered everyone around to see it. An old terminal style with a keyboard. It probably weighed a hundred pounds. The presenter said “In the future everything will be done with one of these!” And the entire classroom laughed at them, “Yeah right!” we all said in disbelief”.

• One of the arguments for using tabs over spaces as a coding style is that tabs use less disc space than, well… spaces.

• It’s obvious that it does use less space. One tab character can represent what multiple space characters do, and the size of a tab and space character are identical. People argue about the degree of difference it makes. Most people just guess. Either saying “it’s too small of a degree to matter” or “I guess it would be this much smaller”.

• I could not find any actual tests outside of a few toy examples. So today I decided to do my own test and get a real estimate.

• I didn’t manage to write up my experiences every day, so I’m going to do a recap today. Overall, there’s not much to say; going to the smol computer made me postpone some things that weren’t urgent, but had to be done on the web of *B▲b𝑦ƚøn*, but didn’t otherwise affect my computing very much. I used my phone more than I expected or intended to.

• It’s been a while since I’ve done something like this. Here’s a list of Android apps I use often on my Pixel 4 running GrapheneOS. It’s not a complete list at all, instead I’ve tried to focus on unique apps that you’re less likely to have heard of before. Hopefully you find something useful!

• Maybe my faculties are failing, but Bubble seems too “link busy” to me. I stare at a page there, and it feels as though I have too much screen scanning to do to accomplish what I want. But I suppose practice would perfect that.

• Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is how I can be a more conscientious and ethical consumer of visual content, specifically movies and television.

• This isn’t my first foray into trying to be a more ethical consumer. I recently quit using Spotify for music consumption, and so far it’s been a rather rewarding and transformative experience. My consumption habits were completely changed by dropping Spotify and all for the better.

• Television and movies will be more difficult though. I watch a lot of TV and it’s almost all through streamers. I figure I would lay out some of my thoughts as I try and put together a plan to wean myself off the big streamers almost entirely.

Internet/Gemini

• I have been sitting on this post, unwritten, stewing around in my head for a while now. Given the recent woke gemidrama, I thought now as good a time as any to finally write this up.

• In my mind, browsing Geminispace or Gopherspace is the internet equivalent of de Certeau’s idea of walking in the city. The veteran geminaut knows the best way from capsule A to capsule B, gems like a games and shortcuts like aggregators. The veteran geminaut navigates deliberately and mindfully, and this is an empowering experience that allows people to pursue their interests, find adjucent topics of interest and exchange ideas with like-minded people, without fear of tracking or ads that gently bend and push one’s stream of consciousness. Gemini allows people to talk to the void without FOMO and without expecting “coins” such as “likes” in return, and that is very liberating once you get used to it.

• Gemini is a good lesson for people who believe that work is never “done” and deny the “perma” in “permacomputing”. My most influential and inspiring teachers taught me that there’s always something I can do when I’m done with my current task: if you don’t see anything to do or improve, you’re probably not looking: you’re a lazy bum, incompetent, or both. When I was younger, confidence in my ability to fix and improve things made me a calm and productive person. Gemini helped me realize that this hunt for problems and solution made me stressed: my attempt to restore what I preceived as lost harmony in the world, helped me find peace and win this silly zero sum game. Writing my own Gemini client taught me that the work can be “done” if you decide so, and I feel more peaceful knowing that my primary content retrieval tool won’t change.

• Fortunately I’ve been sufficiently busy of late for Antenna’s downtime to make me too impoli.. I mean despondent.

• I also went cold turkey on alcohol and pot, not to mention not having any cigarettes after a weekend smoking a lot with my brother (basically the only time I ever do anymore).

• I am grateful today that I have access to some smaller, more niche parts of the web. I am glad that I have a computer and feel comfortable using it. I think if I was raised on smartphones and tablets alone and just used to a few specific apps (and at worst, a functioning and optimized mobile browser view), I would feel very, very lonely and locked out right now without an account on the big socials. They’d be all I know and used to have access to. Now, they don’t have to be, but it still sucks to be anyone online right now.

• A few days ago, and again today, I wanted to check up on a music artist I enjoy. I don’t have any accounts at Twitter, Instagram, or Tiktok. I try to check their Twitter on my phone – login screen. I close it. It presents me with viral tweets, but not the profile I wanted to see. I try it on my laptop. Sometimes, they make a difference between desktop and smartphone. Not this time.

Software Releases/Announcements

• Renovating takes more time than it should…

Programming

• From time to time I need to work with web APIs. These normally allow computers to communicate online. But, it might be necessary for people to work with APIs to connect a business to a new service or to automate tasks.

• Below are some articles that I found helpful while learning about APIs.

• Added [Gila2023], which presents “zip-zip trees”, which claim to offer the balanced depth of a treap or binary search tree that has been constructed with uniform random insertions, while being strongly history independent.

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