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Re: "[preformatted] Building a Better Text World: Notes on..."
Quite a post, thank you :)
I think of Gemini as more of sitting by a lake enjoying the sunset than any kind of war. There's a lot to enjoy, people are enjoying it ... if others are passionate and want to build new things, great! But it doesn't detract from the enjoyment. In the lake metaphor I guess that's some people windsurfing? :)
Lots of people here seem to like consoles, TUIs, ASCII art ... the shell is one of my personal top tools. But the <other> two windows I always have open when working are VSCode and Chrome, which for me are also top tools. I don't see Gemini as a callback to an earlier age, it's a great tool right now that lives side by side with others :)
I've written about big tech vs Gemini on my Gemlog, the tl;dr is that there is not really any "vs" ... big tech does not know or care that Gemini exists; check again if it ever reaches ten million users. (But really, 100 million is the lowest they can usually count). Which is fine. Governments? Probably the same, unless Gemini turns into some kind of crime ring, in which case, okay, security will get more important ;)
Jun 14 · 4 weeks ago
I've never really used ANSI colouring in terminal. Didn't realise how inefficient large colour space representation was! Wow! That definately needs a better alternative. Maybe some state machine to switch between following data in stream is utf8 text vs colour command vs font change? Could enforce ltf <-> rtl transition rules too. Maybe push a stack ptr at transition and move cursor to end of buffer/next row on switch to rtl and have checks that a write will not cause current ptr to cross that pushed ptr boundary?
☕️ tenno-seremel · Jun 14 at 11:11:
Interpretation of ASCII art is hard for me, TBH. At least at the letter size I’m using. UTF‐8 is a must, of course. As for setting text colors… I’d rather not have this feature as that usually doesn’t work great with colors I’ve set for myself. Or at least it should be easily strippable from text.
👻 mediocregopher [...] · Jun 14 at 13:56:
"Securing ASCII Culture" has a very jingoist ring to it, that framing is a pretty big turn-off from me.
What exactly is being secured, and from whom? You talk about very hypothetical security concerns, but what is the actual threat model? "Secure" is extremely relative, there's no such thing as perfectly secure, only "secure enough", and to understand "enough" you need to discuss what is being secured and from whom.
Is the concern that UTF-8 parsers in use by clients are vulnerable to some kind of exploit based on input? Or that users can be tricked into clicking/reading/inputting something they didn't mean to by way of weird unicode nonsense?
Incredible effort very appreciated. 👏👏👏
I love ASCII but I don't believe that Gemini is made for ASCII or terminal only... As a matter of fact I love using Lagrange, whether is on desktop or my mobile. I use exclusively TUI tools to write and upload my gemlogs but it is more for convenience that for any other particular reason...
@mediocregopher So I'm not the only one who noticed how much this sounded like something I'd read on /pol/.
I found this on the Fediverse, I think it is related…
— https://hpjansson.org/chafa/
There is a point to be made that smallnets may be local. If ASCII works for your audience, why not. In spite of what they teach the kids these days, inclusiveness is a form of premature optimization and niche solutions are often best when infinite money is not available.
[preformatted] Building a Better Text World: Notes on Reviving ASCII Culture Gemini is famously a text-first protocol, one that improved upon Gopher by shifting to UTF-8 encoded gemtext. That being said, there remains a lot we can do to improve text culture. The purpose of this document is to briefly outline the general features of what ASCII is, should be, and could be. It is not complete. Follow up these leads with your own investigations. What is ASCII? ASCII, like fascism, is a term...
💬 blah_blah_blah · 11 comments · 3 likes · Jun 13 · 4 weeks ago