💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2023 › 03 › 18 › fundamental-limitations.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 16:24:43. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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< jcowan> also, where does this 1024-byte limit come from? Even
fairly restrictive browsers like IE tolerate ~2000 bytes,
and in Chrome it's something like 2MB.
So in gemini there is a 1024 byte limitation on the URL; this is by design. Softwares can have a fixed buffer, and you'll know whether some micro device (presumably with hairball SSL handled, elsewhere) will be able to deal with the protocol, or not. If there were no limitation (there still is one) that would rule out many smaller devices that either cannot allocate sufficient memory, or where the processing would become too slow. Some will argue that the modern web had already become too slow.
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi
This limitation may make it more difficult to render important media such as the library described in "La biblioteca de Babel" (Borges, 1941) in gemini,
which would serve mainly as a bot-trap. Humans will doubtless soon wander off; the texts quickly become predictable and exhaust interest, much as the pianist who has hit that middle C too many times in a row. There may be something of a Goldilocks zone between "too random" and "too predictable".
One can find novels that omit the letter "e"--lipograms, for a platinum word to forget--or messages in lojban of precisely 640 chars. More popular are various poetic forms, often quite limiting. This may be a boon to creativity: given rules X, what can be produced? Next steps may be easy, such as to construct word lists that omit the letter "e", or those that rhyme with orange.
$ grep -vi e /usr/share/dict/words | randline
stodgily
"Dreamsnake" (Vonda N. Mcintyre, 1978) began this way; two lists of words were drawn up (pastoral, technological) and the would-be authors drew a random word from each list. "Dreamsnake" is claimed to derive from "snake" and "cow". A dictionary may again be of service.
Oral cultures have no dictionary to consult.
Likewise for music one may compose under limitations; "Composing with Constraints" (Jorge Variego, 2021) is noteworthy. The gist here is to pick some instrument--the vuvuzela, for example--and then some pitch set, say that of B3, possibly allowing for varied registers, or not, and then to compose some (hopefully, mercifully) short work using particular rhythmic figures. Other variations are possible, e.g. to tease out harmonic forms, particular sequences, instrumentation, etc while holding other features constant (isorhythm, etc).
In olden times this was the realm of the arrangement--there was no bleeping box to play a symphony on, so one might transpose the orchestra to the piano, or set Meshuggah to percussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyckFsxeylE
¹ The reader may note the similarity of this country to that of Uqbar.
tags #gemini #music #poetry