long time no see.

i have made a post for the first time in a year and almost a month.

This is not unusual. I also just replied to an email that was a year old.

If a person ever reads this, I would like to engage in a conversation. But I don't know how to order the world so that I can engage in a conversation. Is this platform conversant?

This article will briefly mention three things I would like to build if I could:

An independent content search engine. The independent content search engine would feature:

Only natural content - no automatically generated content

Mostly third party content - no websites about buying the product you're search for, no paid reviews, not the manufacturers homepage.

Some way to balance content produced by people who need to use it to produce an income (perhaps because producing the content requires significant effort) and content produced by people who do not need an audience: people who benefit from whatever it is they're talking about. The first might be investigative journalists and academics; the latter might be users of a tool helping people learn it or fans of a movie.

A decentralised antispam system

Perhaps a user of a gemlog has to agree that if they trackback pam it will be republished as spam. The spam would be conveyed in a machine readable form. An administrator would then be able to seek spam information from that source, so that they can more proactively block spam from coming to their attention, the attention of the publishers, or the attention of the readers (in other words, to preemptively block it).

As described here, I obviously encounter a problem. Perhaps Facebook's new Gemlog product comes setup by default to forward spam to their server. And it becomes super popular. And they downrank any content that doesn't forward spam to their server. Now they have effective control over anything published in Gemini space, because they can cause any server to regard certain messages as spam or to be hard to find. Perhaps we would need to develop some way to prevent a platform from repeating spam, so that the cost of excluding one platform is free.

A lazy functional language designed for expressing FRP machines

Using a well-written FRP, you can very nicely express the logic of a system that you care for and push the glue to the outside. It would be nice to have a straitjacket that compells you to

express your FRP solely in terms of behaviors, events and pure functions by using a special-purpose language that then compiles down to code in a certain language and framework, or which could be expressed graphically as a state machine. Then you could construct the GUI using the visual tools provided by your platform, and with a glue library write the code that glues the compiled FRP machine to the gui. I think this would help make average Android code, at least, look like business logic and glue, rather than a mess which you have to carefully search through with a fine tooth come to find the relevant business logic. (I'm picking on Android here only because it's shit, not because it's somehow a better target for this FRP language than anything else.)

This system would differ from, say, existing "write it in javascript" systems because you'd write the platform specific code in the native language. It wouldn't be fundamentally different from the way you write an Android GUI today: you have XML files (that you write with a gui) which compile down to jvm. And here you could do the same: you could have .frp files (parts of which could be edited in a gui, even) which compile down to jvm or at least kotlin.

Such a system would be imperfect, but it would be better than anything we have now. Of that I am quite sure.

This latter is the one I'd most like to work on. If I could, I would think about quitting work and doing it as a research project. I don't know how to get such work in real life. Maybe I should just try.

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if you prefer english, you can get more content in my gopher hole.

mi havas esparanto-lingvan ĝelogon