● 09.02.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 02/09/2023: Fediverse Issues and Back to Agate

Posted in News Roundup at 8:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I got my print copy of the Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised Rulebook from the recent Kickstarter a little while ago, and I was reading it and noticed that they made some of the most unbalancing monk abilities available only if the monk has has 15+ DEX or 15+ WIS, depending on which ability is in question. I was amused, because the Original D&D monk had to have a 15 in DEX and WIS just to be a monk. And the AD&D 1E monk had to have a 15 in STR, DEX, and WIS!

• The result is that in S&WCR you don’t have attribute requirements to be a monk, but you DO have attribute requirements for Weapon Damage Bonus, Multiple Attacks, Alertness, Deflect Missles, and Slow Falling; in other words, the fun stuff. So if your DEX and WIS are less than 15 you can still play a monk, but you’re nowhere near as powerful as the classic monk.

• Earlier today, my brother sent me a video of my niece. She was running along with a stroller thing in the garden as his dogs were chasing her. She is laughing the whole time until she stops and sort of sounds like she is crying. Turns out she is so happy she cannot make a reasonable sound other than a cry. Then the one dog goes in for a lick attack and she is giggling away while trying to avoid the licking. The video ends at this point.

• This is the sort of video which makes me a teary laughing mess. I am always glad of my brother sending this sort of silly video through. Precious moments which are all that much easier to record with phones while not recording every moment.

Politics and World Events

• I’m tired of pure rationalism. Recently, I’ve had the urge to learn aphorisms, riddles, and powerful stories to use in life. Any good collections or books?

Technology and Free Software

• In which I discuss the progress so far in my quest to repair a Macintosh Classic II I’ve been given.

• Written on a MacBook Pro while listening to Blondie’s Autoamerican.

• While it still worked, it did not feel smooth to roll the ball around. After some investigating I came across a faq, by trackball manufacturer Kensington, describing the process of maintaining your trackball. I was really surprised to read that they recommend slathering your ball with a bit of vaseline.

• Not long after my last benchmarking attempt. Rockchip releases a SDK update that fixes the crashing matrix multiplication API. Now I’m no longer restricted to using ONNX. Now I can directly do matrix multiplication from C! And now I can do an apple to apple comparison with OpenBLAS. That’s benchmarking. Actually, I knew the SDK update days before writing this post. But I held on because I’m working on something more exiting – porting Large Language Models to run on RK3588 NPU. The result is.. well, you’ll see. I also got an oppertunity to speak at Skymizer’s interal tech forum because of my work. I’ll share the side deck after I gave the talk.

• I’ve used AWS for quite some time before moving my capsule into EC2: my primary use case for it is off-site archival by backing up my files to S3. Using a shell script and the AWS CLI, I encrypt the files in my NAS, tag them with a checksum to detect file changes, and upload them in bulk, storing them in the Glacier Flexible Retrieval tier to save on storage costs.

• I recently rewrote my backup script to be able to exclude directories from archival. The mechanism by which I do this is including a “.noupload” dotfile in any directory I want to exclude. When the script sees this file, it archives a list of the directory’s contents rather than the directory itself, and it ignores all of its subdirectories. This allows me to save even more by excluding files that are easy to replace or don’t mean much if I lose them.

• While I like the idea of gemlog format and could submit my index page to Antenna, I thought the cgi route would be fun. I’ve posted about it in the past but seeing as others are looking at generating the same type of file I thought I might as well toss it back out there for inspiration.

• The script is fairly simple, written in python3. Reads through a directory, scrapes a few attributes to put in publish times and tags, title from the first heading, etc. Nothing too crazy but very helpful in automating the process.

• I dug out the following old text of mine from the Story Games archive and edited it for grammar and punctuation:

• Not sure what writeup is the best but I had been playing & running RPGs for 20 years and then somewhere in 2012, 2013 I found an OSR group (so I was kinda late to the party, Grognardia had been up for years at that point) and I played with them once, thought “ok that was kinda fun, but kinda scripted”, went home, looked at the module and thought “huh…. that could’ve gone all kinda different ways”, and then played with them again and we find this room.

• There’s an object behind a curtain. I walk up to it and put my hand under. Feels like glass. “It’s a cursed mirror?” we all think. We take it down from the wall without looking at it or removing the curtain. Attach it to our cart.

Internet/Gemini

• 1. The technology sucks. Activity Pub is half baked, and was rolled out prematurely to create Mastadon. 2. Mastadon is a Twitter clone and Lemmy is a Reddit clone. I hate the originals. Why would the clones be better?

• The Fediverse, a.k.a. fedi, is a name for mostly-compatible implementations of a protocol that started as ActivityPub. Mastodon is probably the most well known.

• [...]

• * Keep trying to fight the rando weird harasso instances that plague our mentions. Maybe use tech from email? The nightmare scenario for fedi would be an app that can churn out new, uniquely named, one-off harassing instances. Maybe we need to think of something preemptive for that scenario.

• My answer is: as a toy protocol to understand the basics of networking and as a model for very simple and fast software. I think of my syntax classes, which introduced us to the structure of a complex sentence by adding more complexity as the class went on. Initially, all of our syntax trees (sentence diagrams) were simple and pretty imprecise. They didn’t need to be complex because we hadn’t learned about the possible consequences of such rigid simplicity. As the class progressed and as we learned more, we were able to understand abbreviated trees and recognize why certain things are complex, as well as different positions on complexity (e.g. I think there are some Scandinavian maximalists who give every morpheme a discrete marker; some minimalists argue that a top level S phrase marker is ok iirc).

• Satellite always irritated me with how it treated foo.com/bar/ as its own entity separate from foo.com/bar/index.gmi. It would serve content incorrectly if you used the “parent up” command that’s present in so many Gemini browsers. So now my capsules are back on Agate.

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