Gemini Articles of Interest

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 30, 2023

A Gemini client^* is needed for the following links.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Sleuthing an Old Phone

    I've owned and used nine different mobile phones in my life so far. I remember every one of them too; I even maintain a list of them here on my capsule. That list contains some supplementary information as well, specifically when I began using each phone, when I stopped using them, and what carrier I used them with. I was able to find date information well after the fact by using various clues, such as when a photo was taken with the device.

    That supplementary list, however, is incomplete. There is one phone I owned for which I don't have a started-using date--indeed, I have very little evidence that I ever owned it at all. That phone is the second phone I owned: the LG CU515.

    The CU515 was a major upgrade from the Nokia 6030 I started out with. It was my first flip phone; it had a camera; it had expandable storage; it could set custom ringtones and SMS tones. everyone in my family had owned a camera flip phone by then except me, and I was thrilled to join the camera phone club.

  • Programming

    • LLMs for research

      Pretty much everyone has dabbled with LLMs by now, and most have found it nigh-unusable. My own experience of it is like working with a very, very dumb and lazy research assistant who's only saving grace is that they can justify any of their half-assed answers. It's a profoundly frustrating contact.

      But if you need an idiot, it might be the right thing.

      In research, we tend to outsource tasks to strangers. Typically, this is either annotation—we get people to read some text and extract some information—or participation in studies—the tasks are part of an experimental protocol to illuminate something. Strangers are pretty much anyone. We don't expect any special skill or knowledge, except basic linguistic habilities. Want to know if people are talking about covid-19? If the text in your corpus are about a conspiracy or another? Some LLMs can do just fine.

    • CGI scripts: simple vs easy

      This post is a follow-up on the previous announcement of gmid 2.0 dropping CGI script support. I felt that I had to explain more accurately why I decided to drop that feature and what are the options available and what I can try to do before finalizing the release.

    • Go-C interop memory leak

      Wrote a program at $JOB that, for each frame obtained from a camera, tries to scan barcodes. The purpose was to replace a handful of libraries not compatible with Node.js v18[^0]. The Node.js controller program spawns this other program (camera-streamer), passing some static parameters as program arguments, and otherwise communicating through stdin/stdout. It's a simple solution and I'm pretty happy with it[^1].

      We wanted something compiled and relatively fast (though almost anything would be better than JS), and with good C interop because of the libs we used underneath. We chose Go. It's an annoying language, but I can't say it was a bad choice in the end. Message passing in Go is (almost) a gift from Joe Armstrong himself (if it wasn't so dumbbed down), and makes concurrency super easy (though not reliable)!

    • gmid and CGI

      So the next version of gmid will drop CGI support. This caused a complaint on the #gemini IRC channel. The problem is that CGI support is pretty trivial to add, something like...

^* Gemini links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.