Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 12, 2023
=> QtWayland 6.6 Brings Robustness Through Compositor Handoffs | Purism Launches New Secure Librem 11 Tablet PC Powered by Linux
A Gemini client* is needed for the following links.
=> ↺ Bombadillo
I came of age in the dot com boom: Pentium chips, Herman Miller chairs, the first wave of media darling startups (who remembers pets.com?). It was a era before massive computational power was easily available, and long before "compute" entered the lexicon as a noun. AI was still not in a particularly good place - after the promises of the 1970s failed to deliver the general AI its practitioners were sure was on the horizon, funding dried up. For a long, long time.
The state of the art in the 1970s was neural networks; after that, there were researchers involved in investigating other ideas, such as Bayesian networks, which work off probability and priors.
These investigations yielded success in some very early-internet ways, with Naive Bayesian classifiers showing incredible promise in spam filtering. Before Google clogged up the web with SEO spam (whether written by underpaid writers, or now wholesale by AI), spam was a real plague
=> Jumbled thoughts on using pinyin instead of characters
For the most part i believe that switching to pinyin would not have any detrimental consequences. My reasoning for this is:
(A) for a long time many people in china were illiterate and did not have trouble communicating without resorting to characters. (B) today in general speech people can have conversations without needing to resort to writing. (C) i have converted many wikipedia articles to pinyin and asked native speakers to read them. The consensus is that doing so is slow, but the content is understandable.
I love Locust ciders, and I've tried enough of the flavors to make a semi-substantial post commenting on them.
=> This week — I Welcome My New Pixel Overlords
TL;DR: I jumped down the rabbit hole of click-based pixel art virtual pets. I also grinded hard in GBF's Exo Cocytus Crucible event, answered some surveys, and discovered some interesting websites.
This is a late, brief update because I had to do some heavy chores last weekend.
(For anyone curious on what I've done at work this week: I've made several preparations for my upcoming training program, while finishing other tasks here and there. Nothing exciting, really.)
I swapped my Windows 10 desktop machine for a Raspberry Pi 4 around a year ago. Time for a resume and asking “would I do it again”?
Let's start with the big question: Would I do it again, knowing what I know today?
Well, yes and no. I'm much more happy with the streamlined, terminal UI based workflow that I have now. I feel more focussed and way less distracted. I spend less time procrastinating and I'm not really missing much. So that way it was totally worth it.
I have just announced the relaunch of AuraGem! The address has changed to auragem.letz.dev. Most of the capsule should be as it was in 2022, aside from various updates and some things which I have taken down until they can be fixed (the music service and the starwars database). I was planning on waiting until I can pay for the original auragem domain, but I went with FreeDNS instead, which should mean that there should be no more DNS mishaps in the future.
I have also made some updates to the search engine (AuraGem Search) which I am excited about, and will continue to make updates to it. One can read more about this on the search engine's new About and Features page.
Over the past two days I have made some more updates to AuraGem, particularly the Search Engine. These are mostly stability and QoL updates.
=> Celebrating the small web, too
Recently Kagi’s announcement that they’d gone and done something to highlight small-web sites crossed my desk.
I’m in favor of this. While the small not-web is nice — if you’re reading this, it’s probably on the small not-web — it doesn’t fit everything. If you’ve got a blog with a lot of pictures on every single post, things will probably be nicer for your audience if they don’t have to click on every single picture.
Then there’s gwern.net, which does all sorts of fancy things with what I am told is completely optional JavaScript. Turning footnotes into sidenotes, that sort of thing. It has an entire Design page describing all the fancy stuff that goes into it, as well as an entire separate page that went into things that ended up not working out.
This is a posix shell script for converting linkhut bookmarks to Solderpunk’s Smol Earth Compendium.
You’ll get a text file; it’s up to you to then place that textfile on Gemini or Gopher.
I’m not telling you to go use linkhut—the Smol Earth Compendium’s own format is much simpler, just use it straight up; this script is only good for people already using linkhut.
It’ll only grab ones with the ‘outdoors’ tag (and remove that tag), and only bookmarks to pages on Gemini or Gopher, and not if they contain a tag that starts with the string “expires-2”. I want to submit more permanent entries.
I finally got a chance to look at Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. This is a “capsule review” as opposed to a “playtest review” since I haven’t played it, only quickly thumbed through it! That’s right, I didn’t even read every room, just some of the intros.
The original starter set, The Lost Mine of Phandelver, I’ve whole-heartedly recommended to new groups or people who wanna get started with D&D.
* Gemini links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
=> gemini.tuxmachines.org This content has been proxied by September (ba2dc).Proxy Information
text/gemini;lang=en-GB