knowledge-clay

> But for large libraries, taking a source copy is absolutely crazy.

The solution is, when possible, to use (and write) smaller libraries. Many libraries are far larger and more complex than they need to be.

Servers are cheap and computers are fast. This site appears to be hosted on Neocities: a platform with a generous free tier that doesn't profit off user data.

I use it as my primary OS. You have to do more setup work, there’s much less documentation/help online than more popular distros, and running proprietary software (which usually links to glibc) is probably not worth the effort. This is mostly fine for me, as I don’t do much on my computer aside from code and use a web browser — the only difficulty is most streaming video unfortunately requires Widevine. Given those limitations, I’m very happy with it: it’s very simple and I have a much better understanding of what is installed/running and why.

oh hey, I made this

Who made this? Is the source available somewhere? It's very cool

Mailing lists!

Same, think it’s Hug

> We wouldn't have vaccines without some form of protection for scientists and their backers.

Pay them with public funds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prizes_as_an_alternative_to_pa...

> I'm not so confident this is really different from how a pro Go player would react 10 years ago to the analogous question.

Yes, and there were people in the 1960s who thought computers of the time were only a decade away from being smarter than humans. The question is one of category -- Go is something that a computer could conceivably be better than a human being at. There were certainly Go programs better than some human beings at that time. "Reading a human language document, communicating with stakeholders to understand the requirements in human language, understanding the business requirements of a large codebase, and writing human-readable code" is so categorically different than what Copilot does that, and something that no computer is currently capable of. If such a thing is even possible, we haven't even begun to tackle it.

> in 5 years will there be an AI that's better than 90% of unassisted working programmers at solving new leetcode-type coding interview questions posed in natural language?

I think that's highly unlikely, but it is within the bounds of possibility given what we know about AI currently (and probably, like GPT, it will only work under specific constraints). But the gap between that and what an engineer does on a daily basis is enormous.

There is a world of difference between what Copilot does and what an engineer does. Imagine reading a design document for a feature and implementing that on a large, years-old codebase, ie, what many engineers do on a daily basis. Copilot isn't even 1 millionth of the way to even beginning to solve that problem, it would require human-level AGI with the capability of understanding human cultural and institutional context: something categorically different than anything happening in deep learning.

> what they're doing is a waste of time.

I fundamentally disagree here. There are ways that people waste their time on the web that are far more pernicious than "learning how to write gemtext markup"

The web is in a seriously messed up state, and in many ways, things are getting worse. I think it's far more dangerous to shrug our shoulders and just let things continue as they are than to work on projects that attempt to present an alternative.

Probably someone would submit a PR complaining. A lot of folks in the gemini community are strict about the spec. In my view, they would be justified in doing so — I think adherence to specs is important in any domain, not just gemini.

With Gemini, the philosophy of intentional austerity means that everyone is going to be a bit unhappy, and want some feature added to it. Its "incompleteness" is a necessary consequence of its design philosophy -- it calls on us to accept it "as-is" rather than try and extend the spec. A mailing list for comments, as you describe, would be more "gemini philosophy". This is what the author does:

=> https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public-inbox

Mailing lists are a bit out of vogue, but there's no reason not to bring them back into vogue, at least for people sympathetic to Gemini's ideals.

It's not OK in the sense that it is a spec violation, at least. Some clients have images that load in-line on mouseover or click, which isn't a spec violation. You could do that with HTML.

> If you want people to use it, you have to provide some utility

People do use it, though.

> you may as well print up stickers that say 'get off the internet and talk to people in person'.

Gemini is basically a movement in this direction

Kineto might be what you're looking for: https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/kineto/

Inline images is a violation of the Gemini spec:

> clients MUST NOT automatically make any network connections as part of displaying links whose scheme corresponds to a network protocol (e.g. links beginning with gemini://, gopher://, https://, ftp:// , etc.).

> reducing the possibilities Gemini can have

Gemini is all about reducing possibilities. If you want more possibilities, use the web IMO

Property taxes are a form of wealth tax

A great book about this topic is "Daily Rituals: How Artists Work" -- which covers the routines of actual artists and thinkers, with their wild, idiosyncratic inconsistency: from waking up hungover most days and only writing when they feel "inspired" to working 3 hours a day and spending most of the day walking and "lounging" to the strict, regimented routines in the style of productivity gurus

Typefaces should not be copyrightable. Print ones are not, it makes no sense that digital ones are.

I agree, but I think this is largely because the tooling and ecosystem around it isn’t great.

Don’t have ads.

> IMO the actual problem is you want to interact with the people reading what you write.

What about email? I.e. put together a mailing list for your blog and host the archives online?

> that’s an art form or a statement, not a tool.

(Author here) I would definitely view Gemini more along those lines. Gemini is an interesting space to inhabit and explore -- a space dramatically different than the modern web due to its design. That's the value in it for me!

> Why am I going to use anything if I'm not trying to extract value?

(Author here)

What "value" is there to extract from a public park? Some things are just places meant to be appreciated and enjoyed, and lack a "practical" purpose.

People have said this for years, and yet, no such formal community has been created, while Gemini only grows in popularity. I think such a community would be great, but it's hard to maintain a strict separation with the "rest of the web" in the way that Gemini has.

> As far is I can tell this has (mostly) nothing to do with constrained resources and just with the extremely technical perspectives of the maintainers.

Discord, for example, has 450 full-time employees and is valued at $7 billion. I simply don't see how small non-profit teams, many of which are run primarily by volunteer labor, can compete with that in terms of UX. How many full-time designers or UX folks are working on GIMP or VLC?

At least he still has his Mastodon account https://mastodon.social/@Nicolas_Maduro

> Honestly, I think it is our job as the creators/hackers to come up with a better solution. The problem is very real, and needs to be fixed. But no good solution has ever been created by lawyers. Ever.

We could stop using tracking cookies.

I really enjoy working with the go-gemini library:

https://sr.ht/~adnano/go-gemini/