● 09.03.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 03/09/2023: Synthember and Strengthening the Small Net

Posted in News Roundup at 6:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I love fireworks. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been looking at those big, beautiful, beacons of happiness in the sky whenever they happened nearby. I watched them with my family, with my friends, with my girlfriend, with my wife. It’s one of my few pleasures during summer.

• I love firewoks. They’re a simple, yet complex, pleasure. They’re bold, yet subtle. They’re dangerous, yet so distant. As long as you’ve got eyes in good enough working condition, you can enjoy them. Even better if you’ve also got ears that can hear to some extent. Or so I thought.

• Finally, I decided to make cinema reviews here, only if the film is good. This one won the «Palme d’or» at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023….and it’s bilingual (french and english).

• «Sandra, a German writer, is arrested for murder in France following her husband’s death in the snow under mysterious circumstances. Having the couple’s blind son Daniel as the only witness of her husband’s death, Sandra tries to prove her innocence during the trial.» (wikipedia)

• It’s a drama, a courtroom drama, a specific genre in cinema with masterpieces like 12 Angry men (Lumet 1957). Generally, I like that genre but it can be boring when the screenplay is not good. Justine Triet made it with her partner Arthur Harari. The family is at the center of the plot, not just because of the husband’s death. It’s a fall, as the title suggests but not only the fall of Sandra, the mother, not only the fall that causes death, but the fall of a couple. The spectator is not a part of a jury but neither is he omniscient.

• yes i’m still alive…sorta. the good news is that I just came back from a redteam/blueteam cybersecurity exercise. My first one in fact.

• It was a complete blast! way too much fun. I was blueteam of course and it was pure chaos from the start. totally worth it.

• the bad news is that i apparently picked up Covid from either the exercise or the long airport/airplane trips.

• I will say the more I work on this project, the more I think about it, the more lore and characters and semblance of a plot I draw up, and the less spontaneous the project becomes. At the pace I’m going they won’t show up in the story for a long time… but I will keep thinking of them.

• “I get a beer, from the tap, pleas” While the barman pours the beer, i put the business card on the counter:”Is that ok?”. It has some ASCII art and m15o written on it. He hands me the beer with one hand and takes the card with the other. It lands in the back pocket of his trousers, without looking at it. “Its ok. Welcome!” and gives me a welcome smile, that i cant decipher. I turn around, look for an empty table and check once more the people inside. I make a sip of the cold beer and leave the foam on my mustache. Sure i must look even more silly now, but i dont care. This is all i have and with the beer in my hand i feel i dont need anything more. With a slow phase i moove towards the empty table in the back. I decide, that if i get some signal from anyone before reaching the empty table, ill join them, else i just take a good rest, have the beer and a little retrospective of the past period with it.

• apparently #synthember is a thing, except to those of us who do our best to live under a rock, or who are otherwise occupied

Technology and Free Software

• To me, there are two different ways to think and talk about Cohost.

• One is that it’s like any other li’l community, like any old phpBB site or mailing list. A dunbar-ish amount of people, 150 or so maybe, have meaningful conversations on such a forum site. Nothing unsustainable or wrong with that. People will naturally drift on and off since too large of a forum site stops being fun. I have some random accounts on trpg discussion sites like Giant in the Playground or The Piazza, or even corporate ones like Paizo’s own forum. Fun, great, no problem. Yeah, yeah, forum sites can get dangerous when it’s coupled with a database and becomes the singular monolith source-of-truth site like BGG or IMDb, those are problematic. If this is how you approach Cohost, maybe it’s fine. As just another site online, not out to rule the world. Good luck, have fun.

• Just as I was beginning to enjoy low-level assembly coding after a long break, and looking forward to whumpin’ on some home-made forth, the bastards got me!

• My mom tried to tell me to be normal, and do things the way other people do them, but no! I had to be this weirdo who just gets more and more restless doing things the way others to them.

• And so, 32-bit code is apparently over, just when I was really embracing the i386, with its limited registers. But I love being able to have a 3-byte, two-instruction NEXT which uses 32-bit execution tokens. And I really miss pusha and popa instructions in 64-bit code. Compactness.

Internet/Gemini

• I was inactive here for a short time. During this time I’ve read about several hottest Gemini ideas, and the whole Geminispace went further. Now I’m like on a Gandalf meme with the “no memory of this place” caption. Many of my /Comitium/ feeds are inactive. Most entries on /Antenna/ or /GTL Tinylog Timeline/ were written by authors unknown to me. The more time I’m inactive more Gandalf meme is inside me. I haven’t got the idea of /BBS Geminispace/. I wasn’t moved by “The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person”. I was in, and now I’m out.

• This is good that there are many new ideas around Geminispace. That we are seeking the area for improvements. That we are stress-testing base technical concepts. But probably we start to lose the key assumption that we don’t want to become the Big net. This is the Small net, the place for a small group of people. We are empowering each other, only when we know each other.

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