Gemini* and Gopher
Personal/Opinions
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Ralph the nonagenarianLast week Mrs kdan and I were on holiday in Somerset. One morning we climbed Glastonbury Tor, which is a steep hill just outside the town, with a ruined church tower at the top. It is steep and by no means an easy walk. On the way back down we met Ralph, who told us that he is 93 and has been climbing the Tor three times per week since he turned 90. He looked like it was doing him a lot of good, and he said he believes he's a good example of the way exercise helps to keep you young. #
Technology and Free Software
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Generative AI is making us louder, not smarterI want to talk a bit about the prevalence of generative AI tools in software development. Whenever I talk to other engineers about this (and yes, I am finally considered an "engineer"), they either hate generative AI to its very core or they consider it a "force multiplier" that allows them to work more efficiently. One thing I'm not hearing much, though, is that it is making anyone work smarter or better. I have the misfortune of working with Atlassian tools daily. These are - in my opinion - a collection of the most heinously designed, disastrously underperformant misery traps ever created by humans. Each page load is an exercise in frustration, each day starts with me wondering where they have moved basic functions to, each design decision is baffling. But they're all-in on generative AI, which I'm assured is smarter than all of us by a country mile. So what gives? Why are these tools still... awful? -
[F-ck you, bash. I love you!](gemini://enemy.org/mrfusion/rants/2026-09-12.gmi)
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Switching from QWERTYReasoning. The pains, the good parts, my experience. Some advice at the end. Although the most popular computer keyboard layout by far, QWERTY sucks. The key placement is terrible, the hand motions tiring, and, overall, the typing experience strenous. There is a rumor that QWERTY was designed with the specific goal of slowing down the telegraph operator so that the keys, which were prone to jamming, would not jam. The rumor is most likely false, but still, that hasn't stopped people from complaining about QWERTY and trying to replace it with a better-designed keyboard layout. There's been numerous attempts. None has managed to uproot QWERTY from its position. And yet, everything is fine? QWERTY typists are decently fast, the layout works, and it's so widespread even your grandma uses it. It's won the battle without causing the end of the world or anything like that. - mx key cap stop 3d printthe key for cycling the backlight colours is next to the backspace key and too easy for me to hit with my sloppy touch-typing. i often hit it by mistake, then have to mash the backlight key too many times to restore the boring backlighting that i like. - Why are modern televisions so cheap?OK, this should have been obvious. Modern, "smart" TVs -- and they're all "smart" these days -- are just like smartphones with much larger screens. If smartphones are surveillance devices, there's no reason TVs should be any different. All modern TVs are based on a software platform provided by one of the tech giants: my daughter's is an Amazon Fire device, but there are similar offerings from Google and others. All these platforms spy on their users in a variety of ways. They all record what channels you watch, when, and for how long. They record what external services you use, to do what. Since they all have voice control capabilities, they can record your voice. Some even have built-in cameras. #
Programming
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Multiple grepsThis may be considered inefficient, or not: the file may end up in a memory cache, and some (but not all!) operating systems are pretty efficient about forking the same program over and over again, so the efficiency gains of any alternatives would ideally need to be tested. One fix is to combine the individual expressions into one big expression, which may not be an improvement as far as maintainability goes, especially if the individual expressions are already complicated. #
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