💾 Archived View for gemini.susa.net › news.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 15:44:58. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/histrionic
I installed it on my ideapad (Arch) with pacman -Ss python-pillow, then pip3 install imgp.
I normally don't link Flickr, but Jeff Salisbury's photostream (0ver 6500 images) is good.
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” - Banksy
However I suspect these harvesting companies keep 'derived data' indefinitely. This way, they can effectively retain information about you even if they delete the data that you provided. I can easily think of ways to, for example, store your name, age, geo-location, etc. in such a way that it can be reconstituted from silos or buckets tied to your original user-id.
It has vim (vi) key bindings and can be found here:
https://git.dece.space/Dece/Bebop
An example of how someone extracated systemd from a Fedora box, to replace with busybox.
https://busybox.net/kill_it_with_fire.txt
https://2021.revision-party.net/start
Word on the street, no sources.
"MEN WANTED: FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOUR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS. SIR ERNEST SHACKLETON"
This is probably not a genuine Shackleton advertisement. Still, it makes a clear point.
The only new thing enabled by our bigger systems is big data, which is largely a process of finding patterns that will fool or exploit the user/subscriber/customer.
David Molloy claims to think that sending one less email per day will have a positive impact on the environment. How can a technology reporter put their name to such meaningless crap. I mean, really David Molloy? I don't even know where to begin. This is embarrassing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55002423 David Molloy, paid to be stupid.
My life is blessed.
Myriad poems lack this essential beauty.
There's a whole world of data trading that forms the basis of the harvesting economy outside of the obvious huge players. This would make an interesting area of investigation, just to build a picture of how things work. I have already seen one site that's kind of an eBay for data, where harvesters can peddle their ill-gotten gains to data-hungry buyers, there must be many more but since they are B2B, they don't advertise widely. However they do advertise. Must get digging!
There's a row in the UK over offering free school meals, via vouchers, where the tories are generally against it. Mark Jenkinson MP opposes it because, he claims, a miniscule (his word) number of people in his constituency abuse it and trade the food for drugs. And for this reason, he would prefer to deny the overwhelmingly non-miniscule number of children who would benefit. He's either dishonest about his reasons, or stupid about his reasoning. He could also simpy be a hideous individual, though I think more likely stupid or dishonest. I wonder, if he has children, how well fed they are.
Sorry to tell you folks with a large cranium that it infers nothing about your intelligence or other form of superiority, except perhaps heading the ball in a football match. Any apparent supremacy that has historically been attributed to phrenological characteristics is no longer considered valid. Yet, you were so fucking sure, weren't you? All it took was some pseudo-science to flatter your ego, and you were bound to buy into it. It was all bollocks. Not like melanin, now that's real science.
British athlete Bianca Williams was stopped by police for 'looking black in a fancy car'. Her baby was in the back, and it seems that the child was entered into a Met-run database that stores information on children who have 'become known to the police for any reason'. Shocking. There was no reason to stop her in the first place, and her child has absolutely fuck all to do with the police. I'd be livid.
Jack hates the poison that is the YouTube recommendation algorithm. I think I feel every bit of Jack's anguish.
gemini://berserk.red/~jack/youtube.txt
The Kids BBC show Waffle The Wonder Dog led me to Champion The Wonder Horse. Made around 1955, periodically shown on British TV until 1993, it was shit! I mean, really shit. The absurd crap we filled childrens heads with astonishes me.
The BBC News site just 'revisited the 90s' with Oasis dominating with their product-placing, stereotypically Manc Indie, yet really middle of the road crap. One reference, in name only, to the Stone Roses, about halfway down the page, without showing any real respect to their enormous contribution to the whole Manchester indie scene. Inspiral Carpets? Zilch!
I want to get a Pinephone. More accurately, I want to ditch Android, and Pinephone is the best replacement I can find. Blair Vidakovich wrote up an excellent overview of his experience with the Pinephone Community Edition, having tried a whole bunch of Linux-based distributions on it. It has both tempered my expectations and made me want one more!
gemini://tanelorn.city/~vidak/pinephone/pinephone-review.gemini
I was looking up the heaviest metal found on Earth, which led me to Osmium in the platinum group metals. I found the following paragraph, which shows the range of names and acronyms used for this group. It struck me that much of naming in science is inconsistent - you often don't realise this until you've learned the subject after fighting through the terminology. In other words, too late!
"The platinumgroup metals abbreviated as the PGMs alternatively, the platinoids, platinides, platidises, platinum group, platinum metals, platinum family or platinumgroup elements PGEs are six noble, precious metallic elements"
The IRC logs that I make available here are now taken locally from my own bouncer, rather than hitting makeworld's server for them. The main benefit is that I can filter out meta-lines ('***') and still be left with full conversations, since sometimes the abbreviated list on makeworld's server would contain almost all meta lines (e.g. if there was a netsplit).
I have an atom.xml file that seems to be valid, but nothing is showing up in CAPCOM. Not yet sure why.
It was mentioned that the JVM was entirely unrepresented in Gemini space, and so I couldn't resist redressing the balance. Since the runtime consumes ~90MB of RAM, it's going to have to offer some astounding feature before even I, the author, use this myself.
There's nothing even moderately substatial. The website has a lot of text, but it's largely vacuous other than a few paragraphs on setting up a web site. If I were more cynical, I'd think its aim is to hijack the concept of a simpler, more diverse web, and then fuck it up before it gains any traction.
By contrast, Gemini's official homepage offers a concise specification, a meaningful FAQ, a list of clients and servers, proxies for accessing the sites, a link to a search engine to find stuff, links to aggregators to find stuff. The list goes on.
My Gemini repository on GitLab (see last news item) has twitter2gmi, a JavaScript (nodejs) script that accepts a list of twitter users and generates a gemtext file with the last 40 tweets for each tweeter. It also creates a summary index file with all tweeters' last few tweets.
I have found it a distraction-free way to keep up with the handful of twitter accounts that I read periodically.
In other news, a headline suggested by an anonymous source was inadvertently sent to press by a careless worker. Asked for comment, the publisher said "I'm shocked". Angry activists took to Twitter to express their outrage, though none seemed to know what they were angry about. Asked for comment, none were able to form a coherent sentence, instead spouting random hashtags and trigger words.
Now my proxy now passes all tortures. I have put it on Gitlab, linked below, though there's no user-interface and no docs yet. You just specify the gemini URL as a url= parameter to the proxy CGI script.
https://gitlab.com/ksangeelee/gemini
I have written a web to gemini proxy in Bash and Awk to run from CGI. The edge-cases just seem to keep coming, and I have to choose between tedium and mediocrity. I'm leaning towards mediocrity. It works, but does not fare well on some of the torture tests.
Film assembled from old footage that tells a story of Scottish cultural change over time. Virginia Heath, Grant Keir, music by King Creosote. This is a beautiful touching film, the music and imagery go perfectly together, and it gives some wonderful insights into years gone by.
How many people feign loyalty and patriotism by using a flag in their portrait photos? You might be forgiven for thinking only highly patriotic people are intelligent enough to hold high positions. Or it might be that people only get into high positions if they're willing to at least feign devition to their country and flag. I find it all a bit creepy - cult-like.
The UK has used algorithms to assign exam grades to studens, since they couldn't actually sit their exams this year. There has been a lot of discontent, because I suppose nobody agrees with the criteria on which the algorithms are based. This is an opportunity to drive home to youn people the dangers of using algorithms to make life-changing decisions for people (big or small). It's not that algorithms are a bad thing, it's that there's not enough transparency regarding their implementation.
gemini://gemini.susa.net/gemini_over_lora.gmi
My make_site_words.sh script auto-generates pools of words on the site. This helps me remember the growing list of stuff I am putting on Gemini. If anyone wants the scripts, they're largely the sitemap stuff, but the wordpool script isn't up yet, so ask on IRC(kevinsan).
gemini://gemini.susa.net/sitemap_script.gmi
I'm losing sight of .gmi files that are shielded by index.gmi, a sitemap was needed.
If we read concerns that China 'has our data', then we should be at least as concerned about any other entity having our data. It begs the question - what can China do with our data that is so bad? Because the answer will apply to anyone else with this data.
An absurd question, but is typical of news opinion piece headlines, the BBC comes to mind in particlar. The answer is of course "No, but there are *some* profoundly racist people here". Not least, within the BBC - all discussions around race seem to polarise to 'us' and 'them'. There must be enough people in that organisation to point out the obvious stupidity, yet it seems not.
I'm reminded that not all climbs to the summit are rewarded with the glorious views across Perthshire; sometimes all you get is a cloud blowing in your face with gale force.
Then again, I might not. It depends on how much stuff i think might be worth bringing to port 1965.
What this shows is that structured plain text can be processed very effectively. Plain text is powerful.