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● 09.06.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 06/09/2023: Reddit’s New Tracking URLs and Iterating On Fractals

Posted in News Roundup at 12:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

=> ↺ Show notes 23-35

• This week i have been preparing to move back to university, and have been streamlining my workflow for learning chinese. Recently i have been neglecting certain aspects, and in general doing far too many flash cards.

• I know that a lot of people swear by anki, but i am less convinced. Often the cards used are low quality, so the information recall can be hardly that helpful either. Instead, i have been increasing the amount of reading i do, which should have the same general effect as word flashcards, but with added context of sentences and plot.

Science

=> ↺ Astronomy Season Begins (publ. 2023-09-05)

• For me here in Fairbanks, Alaska, astronomy season doesn’t start until September, since there isn’t enough darkness before that for practical stargazing. I’m on an early-morning life schedule, so it doesn’t work for me to stay up until midnight to see the stars. But now there is enough darkness for me to be able to do early morning sessions (around 4am) before work.

• Most nights these last few weeks have been overcast skies, but there was a forecast of partly cloudy early this morning, so I decided to head out early to the boatlaunch, away from the light pollution, and give it a try. Indeed, it was partly cloudy this morning, but I was thwarted by a thick, low-lying fog, which blocked out all the stars and obscured the third-quarter moon.

Technology and Free Software

=> ↺ let’s talk about AI art i guess

• unavoidable subject i suppose. as i mentioned in my microlog, i don’t know why everyone’s talking about their hatred for AI art these days; it’s not exactly the same as when dall-e 2 was unveiled and half of art twitter was running to the hills, panicking about their jobs [1]. it’s less fear and more… contempt? disgust? just sheer hatred?

• now, i don’t wanna come across as a techbro or something. i get rather defensive when i hear people talking shit about AI art; only natural given that’s my research and how a lot of my work has involved GAN generated images for the past year and a half (since october 2020 to be exact) [2]. but don’t think this a blind defense of the corporations and exploitative systems behind current state of art AI image generation. i would like to talk about the medium or the technology itself (not that it can be understood in a vacuum, but let’s cross that bridge when we get to it).

=> ↺ Gemini PDA vs Emacs Native Android

• However, there were deal breaking issues. The android sandbox the app lives in is the main one. I was unable to get files I wanted to edit into emacs to edit them. I could make a new file and save it to /storage/emulated/0/Downloads, for example, but if I created the file in another app, like vim in termux, it would not open it. Access denied. This device is rooted, so I even created a new directory – /tmp – and chown’d to u0_a96 (the android system generated user for my particular emacs installation), chmod’ing /tmp/ 0777. No dice.

=> ↺ Re: FLOSS Equivalent of Wordpad

• Ted is a very old program. It looks dated as all hell because it uses xlib instead of a “modern” toolkit like Gtk4 or QT6. I do not consider this a bad thing. It’s very small, very light, and has very few dependencies. It hasn’t really changed in years. It’s software that has achived that remarkable (for today) state of being “finished”.

• What Ted actually does give you is a pretty good word processor using the Rich Text Format (.rtf) that is the native Wordpad format. No more than that, and no less. It does that job and that job alone.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Beware Reddit’s New Tracking URLs

• Reddit recently implemented a new feature for tracking the activity of it’s users and site visitors, even if not logged in. This is a privacy concern for everyone, even if you’ve never used Reddit.

• If a user using the official app shares a link, they will be given a special tracking URL that links their account to the post being shared. These tracking links look like this: https://reddit.com/r/subredditname/s/tracking_token where the tracking_token is a bunch of gibberish.

• Opening this link resolved to a normal Reddit URL with tracking parameters: https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditname/comments/post_id/post_title/?share_id=more_gibberish

• Take note of the share_id parameter. This is a unique identifier that reports to Reddit who shared the link that is being opened.

=> ↺ RE: Why would students use gemini?

• This is an update to my original post asking for help in a course I’m teaching on web technologies, collaboration and the internet to undergrad Computer Science students.

=> ↺ RE: Accross the Spiderverse

• Circadian makes a number of great observations. I actually loved “Across the Spiderverse” myself, but would likely point out some of the same flaws if pressed. That said, I’ve felt for a long time that there is something wrong with our attention span in modern times, and it overflows into our expectations for entertainment. Thinking on this, and on one of his biggest complaints, got me thinking about pacing, and how different it used to be.

Programming

=> ↺ Re: Fast Thoughts on a Fast Language

• slondr has written up four thoughts on the Ada programming language. As the maintainer of one of the world’s most widely used Ada programs, I couldn’t resist weighing in. Sadly this program is used for cheating on Latin translation homework, rather than Ada’s more glamorous niches of aerospace or security kernels.

=> ↺ Iterating On Fractals

• In my recent post about print nozzle sizes I showed a print of a super-fine fractal pyramid.

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