Status: Done
Date: 2020-07-30
I haven't been publishing much in Geminispace recently (actually, I haven't been publishing anything at all!), and it's been frustrating me. Geminispace is exploding, and it's been incredibly warming to watch! I'm barely keeping up by skimming the mailing list everyday [1], and I haven't really been reading everything on CAPCOM, though I am catching up here-and-there. My "real" life, the one in meatspace (does anyone even use this word anymore?), has been quite busy. Work has been extremely busy, my partner and I are in the process of buying our first property [2], and there's other various things going on. While it's frustrating that I can't keep afloat of my interests, I have had enough time to barely write code, though not even on a daily basis. I've written about a few of the things I've been noodling over/working on, manly to remind folks that I still exist [3] and to re-engage in the wider Geminispace. I'm also trying to remind myself that writing is like anything else and that the perfect (a well-thought-out, in-depth article) should not be the enemy of the good (something a lot ligter and fluffier, like this post.) So without further ado:
I admit, I enjoy reading HackerNews (or HN as its abbreviated as). HN is something I frequently derive entertainment from and rarely derive education from [4]. HN often occupies small, useless moments of my life when I would otherwise be staring into space; sitting on the toilet, standing in line, and small breaks after hand planing a board often involve reading HN. I've had a desire to replicate HN in Geminispace so I can consume more of my favorite web content on Gemini. I had started writing the mirror in C++, but ran into some issues choosing a good async library [5], so I decided to take the plunge and finally learn Rust. I've been hacking at this with Rust atop Tokio (which is its own source of frustration at times), but I'm making steady progress. Hopefully I'll be launching this soon.
I'm also a statistics buff [6] and so I've spent time collecting my Jetforce logs and analyzing my most popular posts and the periodicity of my readership. I have a draft of a post diving into the details, but really have not found the time to polish this up and publish it here.
Geminispace is growing! But there are some things I'd love to see us tackle; a list of things that I may tackle.
I spend a lot of time working with math. For me, math is both a source of great intellectual enjoyment and a practical language to reason about my world and the things I make for it. Reading through CAPCOM and searching GUS has not shown me any mathematical posts, and in general the Gemtext [7] format makes minimal affordances (as it should, really) for mathematics.
But there's a _lot_ of innovation going on out there in the world of scientific computing. Jupyter notebooks offer rich ways to share data and analyses. MathML and Math fonts help researches communicate proofs and exploration to others similarly mathematically inclined. Right now I'm not sure how I would post mathematical content to Gemini. My plan is to create a Gemtext summary and then to provide an HTML file with a rendered Jupyter notebook in it for the interested to download. Google Colab
https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/intro.ipynb
is also a great way to share both mathematical notebooks and the accompanying data. I've used Colab in the past to make comments on COVID-19 papers and distribute those to mathematically literate friends of mine (and in certain internet spaces), and this tool is simply fantastic. I would love to bring a fraction of the power of a Jupyter notebook to Gemini, even if that is just through an HTML download.
I'd love to see more Gemini specific spaces and software. Right now, a lot of what I see in Geminispace is personal content and thoughts on the Gemini protocol. I'm guilty as charged as most of my posts are also either personal or Gemini related, but I would love to see more first-class software and content distributed through Gemini. I'd love to be able to go to Gemini and just find new, cool Gemini-specific artifacts, much like I do when I get onto DuckDuckGo on the Web. I should probably follow my own desires here and make the content I wish to see...
All of my posts on my capsule are either about software, my own personal experiences, or my own thoughts. Many others' posts in Geminispace are about similar topics. I really enjoy reading solderpunk's gemlogs about bicycling
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/riding-through-forests.gmi
And I need to do this sort of posting myself. I've been hand-tool woodworking for a while now and am finally buying my first power tools. Working with hand-tools has been interesting [8], and I really should write some posts on it.
Geminispace is starting to have a lot of content, but other than GUS, a lot of the content seems (to me, at least) difficult to find and organize. I'd love to see more curation of content, and once things settle down for me I intend on trying to curate some types of content. Thanks for CAPCOM and Spacewalk, they really make Geminispace fun!
And that's that. See y'all soon... hopefully.
[1]: Can one feel FOMO on the small internet?
[2]: And they said Millenials couldn't own things
[3]: Though it feels egotistical to have to affirm this, I must admit.
[4]: There is a staggering diversity present among the types of software engineers on it. Sometimes it's fun to get the perspective of someone that writes software for a small credit union.
[5]: Boost/ASIO exists, but is quite low level. Boost::Beast is a small layer on top but doesn't implement many of the things I'd like. This deserves its own, longer post.
[6]: Not simply machine learning and the somewhat deranged cargo cult that it seems to have appropriated. Statistics is a rich field and I consider machine learning and data science to be aspects of statistical learning and inference, but this also desirves a longer post.
[7]: I know there have been developments on the Gemini text format on the mailing list, but I just haven't had the time to read through it all.
[8]: And I've fallen in love with my #4 smoothing plane.