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● 08.30.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 30/08/2023: 90′s Kids Trackball and Sleuthing an Old Phone

Posted in News Roundup at 9:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

=> ↺ Invega withdrawal and other things

• It has been 24 days that I’ve been on 4.5 mg of Invega. No noticeable withdrawal effects today.

• Other than the “benign” paranoia that is constantly present in my mind and which I don’t think will ever go away, I haven’t had any episodes of the panicky paranoia aside from that one day last week. My cognition feels basically the same as it did on the higher dose. I had panicky paranoia episodes on that too.

• My mood seems stable today.

• I have been feeling sad and lonely/socially alienated intermittently. This seems to be an outcome of social anxiety and rejection sensitivity. The other day I made a minor mistake on a public GitHub repository and felt stupid/terrible about it, and my brain probably made a bigger deal out of it than it actually was (catastrophizing).

=> ↺ Biggest Fear (breadcrumbs)

• And my biggest fear is that we’re going to just continue with business as usual until we have a collapse of biodiversity and life on this planet. And actually, my biggest, biggest fear is that we’re going to do that and we’re going to continue living and we’re going to live in this dead world. We’re going to find some way to engineer ourselves to the point that we can live — survive, but we’re going to survive without all of the beauty and all of the life around us.

=> ↺ The hypocrisy of Australia’s Net Zero policy (breadcrumbs)

• An unbroken canopy of ancient eucalypts rides over the ridges of the Atherton Tablelands and disappears into the horizon. Queensland’s wet, tropical ecosystem is like nowhere else on Earth, the sacred remnants of the ancient Gondwanan forest that covered Australia before it separated from Antarctica 100 million years ago. Chalumbin Forest survived the axes of Queensland’s early settlers with its ancient ecosystem virtually intact. Yet a brutal reckoning with modernity could be just months away. “They’re going to put the windmills in there, aren’t they?” said Tommy, my Aboriginal guide, as we looked down at the forest from a secluded bluff. “They want to really rip this whole country up.”

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: EJNOYUR Wordo: MEDIC

=> ↺ Hot Dogs and Découpé

• Had a great time out last night with my partner and a couple of friends. We went to a little brew pub, its interior done up sort of kitschy island/beach style. Games stacked up in the corner. Had a couple of drinks, a couple of fancy hot dogs. Chatted and played a couple of games of 31. I was out first the first time, almost won the second.

• Received a really nice handmade mug from our friends as my birthday present, which I’ll cherish: she made it in her pottery class, and it’s a smaller one, maybe roughly teacup sized? A little larger? Meant for smaller drinks. Seems like it’ll be perfect for my little Moka pot.

• This morning I woke up and it’s downright cool. The kitchen window covered completely in dew; I was just wearing a t-shirt and was shivering when I let the dogs out to pee. It feels like a fall morning. We were supposed to have a hot week, and that’s just sort of vanished.

Politics and World Events

=> ↺ 90′s Kids Trackball (Microsoft EasyBall)

• This was a trackball aimed at kids, it’s very easy to use and only has one button. The ball itself is a bit squeaky but I’ll open it up and have a look if we can grease it up a bit.

• Seller just wanted to get rid of it, only cost me €2. Which is a steal in my book!

• In my last post I wrote about getting my Win95 desktop back up and running to test this trackball on, while I did get it up and running, I ran into a problem with the PCI VGA card (S3 Trio64v+) where lines would appear on-screen when attempting to use resolutions above 640×480 (all I wanted was 800×600). So that one has been moved to the ‘fix-it’ pile.

Technology and Free Software

=> ↺ Sleuthing an Old Phone

• I’ve owned and used nine different mobile phones in my life so far. I remember every one of them too; I even maintain a list of them here on my capsule. That list contains some supplementary information as well, specifically when I began using each phone, when I stopped using them, and what carrier I used them with. I was able to find date information well after the fact by using various clues, such as when a photo was taken with the device.

• That supplementary list, however, is incomplete. There is one phone I owned for which I don’t have a started-using date–indeed, I have very little evidence that I ever owned it at all. That phone is the second phone I owned: the LG CU515.

• The CU515 was a major upgrade from the Nokia 6030 I started out with. It was my first flip phone; it had a camera; it had expandable storage; it could set custom ringtones and SMS tones. everyone in my family had owned a camera flip phone by then except me, and I was thrilled to join the camera phone club.

Programming

=> ↺ LLMs for research

• Pretty much everyone has dabbled with LLMs by now, and most have found it nigh-unusable. My own experience of it is like working with a very, very dumb and lazy research assistant who’s only saving grace is that they can justify any of their half-assed answers. It’s a profoundly frustrating contact.

• But if you need an idiot, it might be the right thing.

• In research, we tend to outsource tasks to strangers. Typically, this is either annotation—we get people to read some text and extract some information—or participation in studies—the tasks are part of an experimental protocol to illuminate something. Strangers are pretty much anyone. We don’t expect any special skill or knowledge, except basic linguistic habilities. Want to know if people are talking about covid-19? If the text in your corpus are about a conspiracy or another? Some LLMs can do just fine.

=> ↺ CGI scripts: simple vs easy

• This post is a follow-up on the previous announcement of gmid 2.0 dropping CGI script support. I felt that I had to explain more accurately why I decided to drop that feature and what are the options available and what I can try to do before finalizing the release.

=> ↺ Go-C interop memory leak

• Wrote a program at $JOB that, for each frame obtained from a camera, tries to scan barcodes. The purpose was to replace a handful of libraries not compatible with Node.js v18[^0]. The Node.js controller program spawns this other program (camera-streamer), passing some static parameters as program arguments, and otherwise communicating through stdin/stdout. It’s a simple solution and I’m pretty happy with it[^1].

• We wanted something compiled and relatively fast (though almost anything would be better than JS), and with good C interop because of the libs we used underneath. We chose Go. It’s an annoying language, but I can’t say it was a bad choice in the end. Message passing in Go is (almost) a gift from Joe Armstrong himself (if it wasn’t so dumbbed down), and makes concurrency super easy (though not reliable)!

=> ↺ gmid and CGI

• So the next version of gmid will drop CGI support. This caused a complaint on the #gemini IRC channel. The problem is that CGI support is pretty trivial to add, something like…

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