● 08.26.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 26/08/2023: Game Showcase of Black Mesa and Two Years on Gemini

Posted in News Roundup at 5:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I feel like my parents are being a bit overbearing at the minute.

• A while ago, I said I was interested in anthropology, and that I might like to study it in university; but they immediately put it down and told me it would not be useful to me.

• Yeaterday, I ate my roast dinner one component at a time (i.e. veg first, then the potatoes, and then the meat and stuffing); then my dad started talking about how I would become obsessive, like someone he used to know.

• Recently, it seems like the web revival/indie web/retro web/personalized web sphere has had a huge influx of members. Probably a mix of dissatisfaction with the bigger social media sites like Twitter/X, Instagram, Reddit, and maybe even Tumblr, as well as troubles to find spaces you’re content with in the fediverse. I know some people have trouble with Lemmy and Mastodon, from choosing an instance to their instance closing down or the instance owner being involved in drama, being defederated, or having trouble finding content all in one place. I’ve also seen people who fled from Reddit fleeing from Squabbles (I think it is Squabblr now?) because of severe disagreements with the admin, and delete Cohost over allowing or not allowing the sharing of sexualized drawings of underage fictional characters.

• Although I am not sure BBS is the right place for this discussion, I am still sharing it here. Some people like me do not have capsules and may want to comment or ask questions. I thought it would be good to open a thread about it here. Perhaps as a way of collecting blog post replies about this.

• I have a bone to pick with WOKENESS, one of my least favorite newspeak words. WOKE is one of those: when I hear it, I know that any chance of a productive or even remotely interesting or satisfying conversation -out the window. There will be no deviations from the party line from here on – left or right one.

• Note that it is simply mentioning this word as an adjective¹ (except in the context of linguistic misuse or perhaps quoting some fool), is enough to indicate to me that the person using it is likely a rabid, brainwashed simpleton, or possibly feeble-minded idiot. You just know what follows. There is simply no point continuing the conversation — just not politely nod and back away!

• Remember when “talking about the weather” was a clique for jokes, a device to indicate that desperation to avoid awkward silence had reached the point where even the most fundamentally uninteresting subjects were suddenly a viable topic of conversation? Those days sure are gone. I wonder if old media will cause confusion for future generations, in this regard. Anyway, I’m writing this, or at least have started writing it, during a very sudden, very intense, rainy squall. These are not uncommon in the summer time where I live these days. I actually really enjoy them. This one slammed shut many of the windows in this room which we’ve kept slightly ajar to help ventilate the place (Europe has crazily advanced windows which are hinged on multiple axes simultaneously, somehow. Australia has never seen the likes of it, even double-glazing remains an exotic novelty. At least we’ve figured flyscreen out – looking squarely at you, NZ), and has blown some (thankfully non-fragile) decorations off the wall adjacent to the last one still open.

Politics and World Events

• … I think that we are now in a mood, determined by the present conditions produced by social development, to look more objectively, without taking sides, at that contest between two great revolutionaries that dominated the rev. movement in the 19th century; to appreciate that we have both of them, and to understand their difference and opposition. Both they took part in the revolution of 1848, as militants; but then their ways parted; they were indeed products of entirely diverse social milieus. B. [Bakunin] came from Russia w[h]ere Czarist absolutism kept down all social and spiritual progress; Marx was formed by the rising Western industrial capitalism. For Bakunin therefore liberty was the great idea; he saw in … State power the basis of the slavery and poverty of the masses. Marx saw in capitalist exploitation the cause of misery and slavery; political freedom he saw present in England, where, however the competing small business, unorganized, he considered organization as the chief demand, which could only be ascertained by a central dominating power, democratic state power, dominated by the working class. So their basic ideas stood against one another; M.[Marx] saw that Bakunin’s political freedom was not sufficient (vide England); B. saw that Marx’s organized state power would bring worst slavery. Bakunin had studied and assimilated, as many Russians, Western science and knowledge, and, different from other Russians, applied them to take part in the struggle of the exploited masses in Western Europe, thinking that their grievances were the same as his. Marx revolutionized Western science and put in this way, by his Historical Materialism and his Economic theory of Capitalism, a new basis to all further class struggle.

• We know that throughout history, various prisons around the world have experienced riots and uprisings. But this is an almost rare occurrence. Prisoners had to live for years in the same gloomy room and were thus considered passive subjects. How do we define a resistance where we can almost only rely on ourselves, in a space that is almost isolated and full of pressure, which offers almost no opportunity to organize, such as a prison?

Technology and Free Software

• What if you could relive a favourite childhood memory—but with everything upgraded so it’s as awesome as you remember?

• I’ve just finished playing Black Mesa, and … well, that’s what it is for me.

• It’s a remake of the original Half Life.

• Dedicated fans—particularly, I think, movie fans—wince at the word “remake”, because remakes are often awful: missing the point of the original, adding nothing.

• Black Mesa on the other hand truly captures the spirit of the original while not being shy about making changes. Weirdly, it ends up closer to how I remember Half Life than the actual game.

Internet/Gemini

• In the summer of 2021 there was a discussion on an email list where someone mentioned the tendency to invent technically advanced solutions to engineering problems instead of simpler, more robust ones. Of course, engineers need to make themselves needed! Someone linked to Cheapskate’s guide to computers and the internet, and there I found a mention of this new gemini protocoll. I took a look through a web proxy and became fascinated. There were already many gemini browsers available, but only one that I managed to install. It was amfora, and I’ve stuck with it since then. Although amfora may lack some features, the experience is so dissimilar to browsing the web that you can’t forget for a second that this is not just a stripped down html homepage but something quite different.

Programming

• From this point of view, anything that you can’t easily program yourself is effectively not a computer. Effectively, it’s an appliance (at best).

• But why the pedantry? Why would you program anything for yourself? After all, there’s a veritable army of professional programmers out there, clambering over themselves to get you to run software that they’ve written! And their programs are *polished*; way better than you or I could accomplish on our own.

• Automatic differentiation is a method by Seppo Linnainmaa for quickly computing the partial derivatives of a function defined by a straight line program. This method is very important in machine learning because it makes it easy to implement gradient-based optimization methods (which are, among other things, used to fit neural networks to data; did you know that neural networks are just straight line programs?).

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