Gemini Links 12/03/2024: Binary Blinkers and Disappointment in Urbit
Contents
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal/Opinions
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fourth
hi! i believe arctic has been making all of these entries so far? i forgot she started this... so! my name is ethan! i'm probably the most frequent fronter, so a lot of entries will probably be from me :)
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I went to the cafe, but the coffee was bad. True story.
So after 24 days of intense duolingo, it is not possible to say simple things like this, without outside help.
For some reason, all language courses I've seen focus on the completely unusable present tense for a long, long time. While it seems simple and perhaps not entirely unwise to learn to conjugate verbs in present tense, it makes it impossible to communicate even simple thoughts.
The present point in time is just that - a POINT, while the rest of everything is in the past and possibly the future. Simple present tense is useless unless you want to talk like Tarzan.
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Politics and World Events
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How to become OK with woke
I’m writing this to people who are a little bit turned off by woke culture (or as it was called ten years ago, "SJW", or in the eighties and nineties, "PC") but who are curious enough to read a guide about it.
[...]
I always got to keep this in mind when scrolling through the high-tempered social media postings of people who are just struggling to figure themselves out in an absurd world. There is a lot of un-thought-through, self-contradictory stuff out there being touted as absolutely shoe-hammering gospel. “How dare you say (or not say) such-and-such” admonishments that if followed to the letter would make some other just as vulnerable group just as messed up. It’s easy to get sick of the whole thing.
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🔤SpellBinding: ABEITNK Wordo: FIRED
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Binary Blinkers
A similar thought was expressed by some president, "either you're with us, or against us" regarding some military adventure somewhere. The playbook is to setup a binary between (according to the speaker) a good thing and a bad thing where the good thing is the only choice. Oh, death? Death is bad. We must be for whatever the other thing is… right?
Let's try another example. Suppose your country labors under crippling sanctions as a result of a recent peace treaty. Do you continue with the ruinous sanctions, or throw in with a new political party that promises to improve things? Here, both the sanctions and the rise of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei were bad for various folks. One might also look for binaries where both options are good, or both are neutral, good or bad, bad or good, bad and bad, etc. For example, a particular business may benefit from either sanctions or war, or the issue may be irrelevant to others.
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Technology and Free Software
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Disappointment in Urbit
I first heard about and became interested in Urbit in late 2020. Censorship from big tech, a tumultuous election year filled with agitation and misinformation, and isolation at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic all led me to search for different communities and technologies outside the sensationalist mainstream. It was this same yearning that brought me to Gopher in January 2021, and Gemini that March.
Urbit is a fascinating project, but it doesn't particularly satisfy my desire for digital independence. There are several caveats about its design and operation that I was not aware of when I purchased my planet, and had I known about them at the time, I may have made a different decision.
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So much for the Gentoo dream
I have been sold on the idea of "you don't pay for what you don't use" for longer than I can remember. Minimalism and "strictly necessary" was the guiding star that brought me to the Gentoo, Linux from Scratch, djb-style software, suckless project, sysvinit and other nice things. In general, it prompted me to understand deeper the operating system I am using to be able to tell which part of it is not strictly necessary.
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Micropower radio
Micropower radio is a general term for a whole class of activities of underground radio. As opposed to unlicensed "pirate" radio stations operating powerful transmitters, larger stations, and targeting a major metropolitan city for example, micropower radio is instead concerned with broadcasting to a niche community that could be as large as a neighborhood or as small as a campus or city block.
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[EN] Re: Micropower radio
Lettuce shares with us the appealing world of micropower radio transmisison. Ah! That's something calling my attention since I was a kid.
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Internet/Gemini
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sp-dl
South Park is one of my guilty pleasures. All of its episodes are available online for free[1], but they cannot be streamed easily (or at all) without a modern browser and javascript. Worse yet, it's impossible to get the full list of episodes without the same.
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Back to the grind
Hey hey gemini! How's it going?
Things are alright here. I'm working again at the same bookstore I worked at before I left to go study music. I like the work (mostly), and I'm happy to be doing something that earns some money, but I have a little note on my desk that reminds me
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Programming
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Disappointment in Game Dev
Stellar Settlers was one of the games I tried during Steam Next Fest. So really, it was my fault for not catching this when I tried it. I suppose I wanted to believe in the best in people, especially indie devs. Ultimately, they would be one of the first to take advantage of AI-generated content, wouldn't they?
Would I have bought the game if they had came right out and said they used AI-generated content? No, that's not enough. In this day and age, I would need more proof that the training material used were obtained ethically (properly licensed). But there was little to no information on that. The only way I found out about the dev's use of AI-generated content was from a Steam discussion thread.
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