Gemini Links 29/02/2024: Web Enshittification and Firefox user-agents
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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A curious question on a geology final
Last semester I took a course on geology. Would have been a big mistake had it not been a requirement for my environmental science program. I get why, but geology is a short road to extractivism.
In this spirit, I want to talk about a really, really interesting question on my geology final. I don't know if I got it right. I'll never know. I sat there for a good ten minutes during the final thinking about it, and it's been on my mind ever since.
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The Fantasy Trip Bestiary
I downloaded the PDF of The Fantasy Trip Bestiary today. After a quick scan up to page 79 I like what what I've seen. Lots of natural animals and unnatural creatures. TFT stat blocks are tiny (4 stats, armor, attacks, and special abilities), so seeing that each generally has up to a page or more of information, including a description of the creature and sections labeled "Habitat", "Behavior", "Natural Enemies", and "Economic and Cultural Significance" is wonderful, with lots of things to spark ideas
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🔤SpellBinding — CDUNOPM Wordo: ABBEY
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Politics and World Events
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Lenten uncertainty
Starvation, real starvation, takes a long time.
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Technology and Free Software
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enshittification
tumblr announced it's officially selling users' data to ai companies, which sucks massively. tumblr is the only social media i use that i actually participate in versus lurking, and i've been on that site since 2011. it sucks seeing it go downhill so fast, but i'm afraid a lot of sites like those are going to give in to greed. i hate that we're just. things to be marketed to. collections of data to be sold to increase marketing to increase profits. i'm getting so tired of my favorite websites getting worse and worse. i know the old adage is 'if it's free, you're the product' but i soooo wish that wasn't true.
i recently learned about gemini from a post by ~the8thworld (ty!) and i've done some rudimentary digging into it. i would like to escape from the broader internet but a lot of it is a little out of my grasp yet.
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cfgmagit
I can clone the dotfiles from elsewhere with git clone ~/.cfg, but in the directory I instead call config, like config add, config commit etc.
I’ve also seen other names proposed for this repo dir, like .myconf or .dotfiles.git.
But since apps don’t believe that my entire home directory is a git repository, that includes magit and I sometimes wanna use magit to restore files or partially stage hunks or whatever. Things that are too time-consuming to do by hand.
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Internet/Gemini
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FIREFOX USER AGENTS
This gopher hole and its plain web sibling now host a file, which contains a daily updated list of most recent Firefox user-agents.
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Programming
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Converting IEEE-754 floating point to Color BASIC floating point
I'm still playing around with floating point on the 6809 [1]—specifically, support for floating point for the Color Computer. The format for floating point for Color BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) (written by Microsoft) predates the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)-754 Floating Point Standard [2] by a few years and thus, isn't quite compatible. It's close, though. It's defined as an 8-bit exponent, biased by 129, a single sign bit (after the exponent) and 31 bits for the mantissa (the leading one assumed). It also does not support ±∞ nor NaN (Not a Number). This differs from the IEEE-754 single precision that uses a single sign bit, an 8-bit exponent biased by 127 and 23 bits for the mantissa (which also assumes a leafing one) and support for infinities and NaN. The IEEE-754 double precision uses a single sign bit, an 11-bit exponent biased by 1023 and 52 bit for the mantissa (leading one assumed) plus support for infinities and NaN.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.