Techrights

Gemini Links 22/08/2024: Talos Principle 2 and Agate Upgrade

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 22, 2024

GNOME bluefish

Contents

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

DCE's Tinylog

I keep seeing all of this injustice and corruption everywhere I look. I always thought that I'd feel better once I turned 18 and would be able to vote and drink and stuff; but I still feel as powerless as ever.

Comradery

Comradery is an attempt to reinvent Patreon as a cooperative that is focused more on the needs of the creators on its platform and serving them rather than investors. It's small and in alpha currently but there are some cool people already on there.

ch01 - exploration

had a chat with Pi.ai [1]. explained my situation: desire to broaden/improve my skills for work in a way that benefits my non-work life too, ideally

shared my resume, back-and-forthed in the morning, before work. after mowing. had coffee.

[...]

- researched ai training versus inference, especially as it relates to data centers. not related to data analysis, just work. still lots to read on this subject, but i'll get to it tomorrow.

Politics and World Events

Where insecurity ends and I begin

I recently read Polysecure, by Jessica Fern, a book about attachment theory in the context of polyamory. Attachment theory is fundamentally the idea that the way we were loved (or not) during our childhood creates insecurities in us, and what we need to feel secure in our relationships with others varies depending on our childhood circumstances. I already knew some of my issues with insecurity from prior therapy, but reading the book and it's emphasis on personal security has made me really inspect how it impacts me. There are many areas in my life where different factors cause pulls in separate directions.

Technology and Free Software

Thoughts on The Talos Principle 2 (Non-Spoiler)

Just finished The Talos Principle 2! Overall I liked it but there was a lot more I didn't like than in the first game. I'd still highly recommend it though, at the very least because there's always a major dearth in nice Portal like 3D puzzle games.

Overall, at the very least they went for something different and unique rather than “the same thing, but again” which is what I was really really worried about. They definitely went for a very different story, looked at very different themes, and the puzzle design (particularly the bonus/hidden puzzles) felt subtly different (although the latter point is not necessarily a positive).

Internet/Gemini

More unintended consequences of my Apache configuration

Now that mod_blog [1] supports conditional requests [2], I thought of the next feature I want to add—PUT support to upload posts.

The Worst People You Know Have to Go Somewhere: On the Zynternet

The first time I was exposed to Hawk Tuah, it was sideways, and I didn't get it. On r/torontobluejays, which I browse occasionally during the baseball season, someone posted a picture of someone by the CN Tower with a Blue Jays jersey personalized with HAWK-TUAH / 69. Variations of eyeroll emojis, "classy" remarks, and so on. I didn't get it, but 69, the favourite number of the sort of person for whom the ultimate life goal is a threesome, was obviously a big clue. I googled it. I got the context. I instantly got dumber.

Emacs Functions, Agate Upgrade

I've written around 100 elisp function in the last two years or so. Most of them are not functions that would be useful in a published code library or package, but just functions that save me time or otherwise provide some automation useful in my particular life circumstances. E.g., I've written code to automatically send out e-mail reminders to people each week; code to speed up my process for making gemlog posts; code that launches a gemipedia search; code that restarts system daemons; and various other little things perhaps not interesting enough to list out.

I suppose, as an ideal, it would be nice if all our coding produced mostly code that could easily be reused by others. But it is very easy and quick to write code in elisp if you are able to make a bunch of assumptions specific only to your life and needs, such as what file endings are involved, where you want files to go, and so forth. I'm interested in the idea of composing lots of small functions, with super-powerful combinators, but in practice the problem is usually easily reduced to 5 or 10 steps that can be represented as stateful function calls combined with LET assignments to variables.

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.