Gemini Links 24/02/2024: In Defense of Boilerplate and TinyWM Broke
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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The black box
A black box is a frame of mind. One that's perhaps disturbingly common in technical fields.
If you're not familiar with it, a black box is a system whose internals you don't need to understand. To you, it's just a machine that has inputs and outputs. We can hypothesize about a correlation between certain inputs and outputs, but we can never truly know what causes what. A black box is not meant to be understood; it's meant to be worked with.
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Science Alert ☛ In 1987, We Saw a Star Explode. JWST Finally Found Evidence of Its Remains.
A 37-year-old mystery solved.
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In Defense of Boilerplate
Let's say someone is building you a house, and one day you come out to check on how they're doing. You expect to see them with a bucket, a trowel, and a pile of bricks, laying them one by one. Instead you see them wielding a crazy contraption which seems to output a brick wall out of nowhere at a very high speed. When you ask them about it, they respond "oh yeah, the other way is boring so I use this instead".
How much confidence does this give you in your new wall? Keep in mind, the answer wasn't "this thing outputs a better wall for this this and this reason". The quality of the wall was apparently besides the point in the builder's mind. For all you know (and perhaps for all the builder knows) the quality of the wall is actually worse.
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or I can just be spending too much time behind the scenes I guess
Oh hey look at that, datestamps are perfectly~ visible already -- when looking at the actual gemlog and not just the list of posts from my admin panel.
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Where are the cows?
I like puzzles a lot, here is an old one which I haven't solved yet! Let me know if you did, good luck!
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Midpoint Catchup!
Progress on the "Don't Go Outside" game jam is going smoothly, the game has all the features for a playable version (skipping out on a minimap and any quests until we're post-jam both of which being updates I might just not do) meaning I just have to piece together the actual level and not the tiny test room and surrounding field I have currently.
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the library
haven't used the public library in a longggg time, not since i was in middle school at the very least. i used to be a voracious reader as a child, but reading gave way to screen time and i'm trying to read more/replace screen time with reading time. i went in to renew my card today and it was so old it wasn't even in their system unfortunately, and i almost didn't get a new one because my ID was expired but they accepted my student ID as well since it had a photo. thank god for that.
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The Case of Mistaken Identity Part 3
Watson stood from his erstwhile wicker seat and reflexively flattened his coat against his stomach with his hands. It was an old habit he developed while in the military when the crispness of the uniform was inculcated as a necessary, mandated decorum. This was, of course, of absolutely no practical value when he had served in Afghanistan. When men had been shot up by muskets and viscera and gore were spattered about the makeshift operating tables, military men were less concerned with how crisp the uniform was. Even less was this a factor when one’s self had been wounded. As Holmes had all ready perceived, Watson had been shot in the shoulder during his service. At the time, his uniform was not his concern.
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Technology and Free Software
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Paper IO
My son was playing on paper-io.com and I thought I'd join him this morning just for kicks. I used the name 'tfurrows', and was tickled when some other random person signed in with my real name, 'joelyman' as their username (due to ham radio, my name isn't all that secret, as you probably know). My son was blown away by it, like there was some glitch in the matrix, but it didn't shock me, really. I told him that I had a lot of friends who were computer geeks, and that I was a part of several unix servers filled with people who might play games like that.
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TinyWM Broke
I have my own little version of TinyVM, which I don't use all that often. When I fired it up yesterday, it wasn't working. For some reason, it's not able to capture the Mod1 state (I think), and so the very few available actions don't work at all. Focus-follows-mouse works, and that's about it.
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8088 day
With the recent posts about gopher best practices or whatever it was, I got to thinking about my 8088. I wasn't using it much, so I disconnected it and set it aside a few months ago (I think, but maybe it hasn't been that long?); and of course, I've missed it ever since. Today, I setup a new spot for it, moved some other things around, and got it back in service.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.