• 18 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • A fun weekend project was to set up a local model to tool call from openweather and wolfram alpha through their API for factual dataset retrieval and local weather info.

    Someone In our community showed off toolcalling articles on local instance of Wikipedia through a kiwix server and zim file and that seems really cool project too.

    I would like to scrape preprints from ArXiv and do basic rag with them. Also Try to find a way to have a local version of OEIS or see if theres an API to scrape.

    So I guess my solution is to use automation tools to automate data retrieval from wiki’s and databases directly. Use RSS, direct APIs, scrapers and tool calling.




  • What is ‘the internet’ to you? I think this term means different things to different people. I imagine to people born in the latest generations the internet is social media and productivity corpo sites. To them the internet is youtube, tiktok, twitter, reddit, their bank, and whatever slop services they subscribe to magically beamed into pocket computer through technomagical nerd shit like “5g” and processed through “microprocessors” and other stuff they’ dont care to really understand because its all abstracted away.

    I was born early enough for the internet to be nothing more than two computers barely powerful enough to run a GUI calling eachother up through telephone wires to share goofy web 1.0 blogspam. I remember when low res images were the norm and when pre-google youtube was just coming into being. When AOL and Myspace and Newgrounds/flash games. I remember being a kid and loving computers because I never knew what new cool website was on the horizon to discover and play with. I remember that people used things like newsgroups and pre-craigslist to meet up for transactions.

    This is the internet, to me. At least what it once was and what it can be again. People using the digital landscape to freely express themselves with their own hardware. To come together to share in hobbies and interest and passions.

    We could have that again if we all bought into a standardized radio based mesh network that could host personal sites while acting as a routing node.

    But I don’t know if the general public will ever be pushed to partake in this network. They would have to be squeezed very hard to try alternatives to the common way of things.







  • I enjoy the concepts and structures of mathematics. Fractal geometry, holomorphic dynamics, computational theory, uncertainty principles and all that are fascinating as hell. Discrete systems dancing with continuous integrals at process limits.

    I DO NOT ENJOY working with math. Specifically I cant read complex equations. I don’t have an attention disorder but I swear the moment I try reading anything that looks like this I get overloaded and nope out. If it aint highschool algebra with PEMDAS I cant do it. If you put a bullet to my head and pinned my survival on properly solving a quadratic equation I’d just tell you to shoot me.

    The concepts are cool once you can get past the notation to understand the ontology of whats trying to be conveyed. The actual expanded out notations and trying to do work with them is a fuckin nightmare.

    Also since im ranting can I just say, across STEM the biggest problem is the naming convention. Math and science would be at least 60% more accessable if we went back and renamed all theorems, hypothesis, proofs, to be what they are about instead of just shouting out the guy who discovered it. “eulers identity” doesnt mean a fucking thing. Neither does scrodingers equations or the riemann hypothesis or turing machines. THESE ARE NOT ACCESSABLE NAMES THEY CONVEY NOTHING INTRINSICALLY BESIDES SOME DEAD GUYS LAST NAME. GET SOME PROGRAMMERS WHO KNOW HOW TO ACTUALLY DECLARE HUMAN READABLE STRINGS FOR YOUR FUCKING ABSTRACTION OBJECTS.




  • Less danger than OPsec nerds hype up but enough of a concern you want at least a reverse proxy. The new FOSS replacement for cloudflare on the block is Anubis https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis, while Im not the biggest fan of seeing chibi anime funkopop girl thing wag its finger at me for a second or two as it test connection, I cannot deny the results seem effective enough that all the cool kids on the FOSS circle all are switching to it over cloudflare.

    I just learned how to get my first website and domain and stuff setup locally this summer so theres some network admin stuff im still figuring out. I don’t have any complex scripting or php or whatever so all the bots that try scanning for admin pages are never going to hit anything it just pollutes the logs. People are all nuts about scraping bots in current year but when I was a kid allowing your sites to be indexed and crawled was what let people discover it through engines, I don’t care if botnets scan through my permissively licensed public writing.



  • Thanks for sharing! It was a good read. They have good points for security and clarity revisions.

    A lot of Gemini spec choices were made to dissuade feature creep. Youre probably never going to do banking through Gemini but its also pretty much gaurenteed you’ll never need adblock either.

    Gemini is appealing from the perspective of novice self hosters. Its simple enough that most people can set up a simple server and publish on their site within a few hours. Its minimality enforces maximizing the most reading content for least bits used. 95% of modern webpages isnt even for reading or reference its all back end trackers and scripts and fancy CSS. Newswaffle shows just how bad it is.

    When I read through a gemtext capsule I get the impression I’m looking at something that was distilled into its most essential. No popups no adds no inline images or tracking scripts or complex page layouts. My computer connects to the server, I get back a page of text or an image of a zip file. Once and done.





  • Theres been at least 5 rapture days since ive been alive. Cult members REALLY like the idea that they’re super special moral beings with Gods favor. For some reason people get off on the idea everyone they don’t like or isn’t part of their tribe gets locked out of ‘paradise’ or better yet actively burns in hell forever. This vengenance fantasy extends to the idea of rapture where God personally singles them out as a favored one for heavenly ascension or whatever. I guess theres something appealing about this concept that really resonates with the kind of people who drink the coolaid, they just can’t let go and take the L. So we see the same story every 10 years or so a cult leader predicts the end of the world all their followers give up life savings destroy their life then when the day passes they quietly sweep it under the rug pretend it never happened to save themselves embarrassment.




  • I wrote my own set of tools in python that convert a simple gemtext formatted .gmi file into a static HTML file thats served by apache.

    I’m a big fan of the Gemini Protocol project and found that handwriting pages in gemtext was ideal for focusing on text content and not worrying about formatting. Converting it to HTML+CSS with some scripts is pretty easy.

    If anyone’s interested I can give a link, currently just hosting source locally on my website, really should get a public github running.