● 09.07.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 07/09/2023: The Hope Pushers and Rust Sucking

Posted in News Roundup at 1:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• When we are full, we’re dull and yawning. The best of days is one of longing.

• There is a goal, and we see through it, and yet the journey’s why we do it.

• I am on my last bottle of this concoction. What will I do when it’s gone?

• This is not an advertorial, or in any way sponsored. It’s a lamentation for a product that is no longer available. Was it snake oil? Maybe.

• Some years ago my partner found this weird odorless concoction that you spritz on your armpits and go around all day smelling like a baby, even when sweaty. And it seemed to work.

Politics and World Events

• I see people who don’t fight climate change because they’re hopeless and despairing and I see people who don’t fight climate change because they underestimate the danger and urgency.

• (Talking to Czege about this yesterday and he misunderstood me as saying it was only those two kinds of people. No, no, I see plenty of people actively doing their best, keep it up, that’s great.)

• I see plenty of both of these two problems, but I see—anecdata alert—far, far more of the second category.

• It might just be me, but claiming you’re not antisemitic, while at the same time claiming there’s a shadowy organization, that just happens to be Jewish, and that’s “responsible for most of our revenue loss”, seems to be a bit of a contradiction. It’s pretty clear what Musk is doing here. And what he’s doing is, to be clear, tying the ADL to traditional antisemitic narratives about Jews, the media, money, power, and control. Even if you give him the greatest benefit of the doubt (and why would you extend that to billionaires?), unintentional antisemitism is still, well, you guessed it.

• Musk has become, in some people’s estimation, the most powerful antisemite in the world. And the ADL in the past few days has become the number one trending topic on the platform. Think about it: all kinds of people – boomers, octogenarians, young teens, all of ‘em – are going to get antisemitic tweets boosted into their timelines. The polite ones talk about banning the ADL; the impolite ones have cartoons that would have been applauded in Hitler’s Germany.

Technology and Free Software

• This is a no time for phlog posts phlog post.

• Usually I wouldn’t make such a post – I’m more a fan of the SFNPFSLPP (the “sorry for not posting for so long” phlog post).

• But this week is just… bleh. I know there are high energy people who can survive in a state of constant time depletion and stress, but I am emphatically not one. I value my soul.

• Two years ago a couple of friends (who don’t know each other) both convinced me to get an iPad, since I needed to join huge Jitsi meetings while sick in bed, but there’s been a lot of drawbacks being on a proprietary OS…

• I’ve gotten some shell scripts with a not too terrible interface for sending messages to a group of users that can be discovered from them putting route blobs into the DHT. The scripts are pretty rough atm. I named them netchat-[stuff] and they use some hardcoded paths. All the veilid-hacks stuff has expected itself to run in ~/projects/veilid-hacks because I can’t be fucked to do something like.. ~/.veilid-hacks or ~/.cache/veilid-hacks or… whatever.

• Olivier mentioned “Copyleft and degrowth” which is something I’ve been talking about with some a friend on email but seeing the post, it’s just “Use copyleft to spread knowledge about degrowth” which is a good idea so check out his post for more on that…

Internet/Gemini

• Trihosting usually refer to hosting the same texts on https, gemini, and gopher, and bihosting means being on two of the three, in my case the two former ones.

• I spend some effort making texts that look like they belong natively both here on Gemini and over on the web.

• For example, links on the web are inline while links on Gemini are their own lines.

Programming

• The final straw that broke the camel’s back was the binary blob in serde_derive procedural macro crate. But this fact alone would not suffice for me to change my opinion. But nonetheless my love for rust died by thousand paper cuts.

• So after spending some time on learning the Rust programming language I’ve some complains about it.

• I don’t like the over-reliance on GitHub: the whole toolchain with RFCs are hosted there and a GitHub account is required to publish on crates.io. But Ok, they don’t have time for self hosting and GitHub is still the most popular software forge and maybe they want to be more visible. So I can understand this decision.

• I’m not sure if I’m a fan of the whole language complexity. I highly value simplicity. But I’ve read some standard library code and I was able to understand how one randomly chosen non-trivial function works, so its not so bad.

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