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Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 19, 2022,
updated Sep 19, 2022
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> I’ve noticed quite a few shell scripts recently that claim to be POSIX-compliant despite using mktemp, so I wanted to go over a compliant alternative and a few things you should know about writing POSIX shell (#!/bin/sh) scripts.
> I've been writing about some experiences with the small-net [fog of war]. I'm facing a permanent state of forgetting and excitement of finding the same things. The search engines aren't providing the solution to this problem. Their results are almost always disappointing. There are also several catalogs, which try to organize things in an old-school way. The indexes are like it was used to be in the '90s. But they are also like a walk in a disorderly maintained garden. Some information is in good order, and the rest is obscured by bushes and black weeds.
> And we have [Collaborative Directory of Geminispace] announced. What are the most modern achievements in the internet directories business? It seems that there aren't many of them, and we are still in the '90s. So we had failed with the [medusae.space Gemini directory], and we have only a promise that it will be better with the CDG. And it's all.
> The more I browse the small net, the more I'm suffering from a lack of reliable search engines. We have several projects, which are aiming to build a search engine that could be the same as their big-net relatives. The truth is that they are not working too well. During the writing of this paragraph, I tried to search Gopher Lawn and Medusae Gemini Directory with them, and I failed. So the common result of current search engines is many entries in, what seems to be, random order. We are at the beginning of the path. It's worth saying that during gathering answers about how Gophersphere was in the 90s' one of the common answers was the problem with slow search engines!
> [...]
> We are like in the fog of war. I'm repeatably discovering the same addresses, which I am forgetting later. The most information on what is trendy now on the small net I obtain on recent Gemlogs' entries, and Blogrolls on various Capsules. On the one of the Gopherhole, I learned by accident that /taz.de/ (it's one of the biggest newspapers) offers its sites on the small net (Gopher and Gemini). How can such information be found less randomly?
> If you're a Doom Emacs user and you try using Elpher for the first time, you might get timeouts whenever you try to visit Gemini URLs, even if visiting Gopher/Finger URLs still works as expected. At least, that's what happened when I first tried.
> That's an excellent point. I suppose the counterpoint would be made with nuclear weapons, which as of now have no use other than causing massive loss of life. Nuclear power is a different story, and it may be what helps mitigate climate change and eliminate fossil fuels. I don't believe that technology and tools are always value-neutral, though this is frequently the case. Mustard gas and atomic bombs are my counter-propositions.
> I flirted with IPFS off and on since about 2015, and as of this summer, I've been using it heavily[1]. When I got back into IPFS this year, one of the first things that jumped out at me was just how much cryptogrift was associated with it. I don't want to be involved with that. I've ranted against cryptocurrency multiple times in several public fora such as HN. So it was a real struggle for me. Do I stop using this really promising tool just because a bunch of people are doing things with it that I find harmful or threatening?
> [...]
> I've been here before. About 15 years ago, I dabbled with Freenet. I stopped pretty quickly, because with the way that Freenet works, you have no control over what is hosted or exchanged using your resources. The hard drive space and network connectivity dedicated to Freenet may well be used for storing or transmission of kiddy porn without one's knowledge. That was too much for my conscience to bear, so I noped right out of Freenet. That said, I do not condemn the good people using Freenet for good purposes.
> I go some feedback via email oppositing my view fairly strongly because keeping things aligned adds noise to diffs. A fair point. My reply would be that I spend a lot of time looking at code and very little looking at diffs, and I can tell the diff tool to ignore white space differences if necessary. But each to their own.
> I also suggested as a thought experiment a language with no punctuation, and my correspondent pointed out Forth as a language that's like that. I didn't know anything about it, but on reading it is indeed just a stream of words. Well, "words" here means something like "tokens" and some of them look like punctuation, but you they're just words.
Gemini links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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