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That's make it just a toy

marginalia_nu 4y ago
Of course, that's why it's so great.
selfhoster11 4y ago
You say that, but plenty of old computers were based on the 6502. Those were used both for play and for real work. Before the time of resource-heavy network protocols, they could even host and access BBS systems (for those unfamiliar, basically a precursor of the Internet). Gemini cannot do a lot (which is by design), but it also has huge capabilities. For instance, while client-side logic is impossible, there's nothing preventing you from writing a "web app" that does its logic on the server side. Yes, you would require page refreshes to update what the client sees, but with Gemini each page load is much, much cheaper than HTML because the response payload is smaller to transfer and easier to parse. Assuming that your Gemini client allows enabling inline images, there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't build a stateful web-app that is a clone of Twitter, Facebook or another social media site. There's no reason why you couldn't design a simple webmail client a la Gmail, or a system monitoring dashboard, or a bug tracker, or basically anything else that doesn't have to rely on complex layouts or inline video to do its job.
BizarreByte 4y ago
It’s disheartening to see so many posts like this on ‘Hacker’News. It doesn’t have to be some big, serious thing for people to either enjoy or find useful. Some people had an idea, went out, and made it a reality, built a small community around it and now we have Gemini. We should encourage such things. Projects don’t need to change the world and they don’t need to be useful to all people or exploitable by corporations. Building something because it’s fun, or because you want it to exist is good enough.
anthk 4y ago
Unix was born to play Space War. NCurses exists because of Rogue. Text adventures where used a lot on text parsing, and video games boosted the PC industry on multimedia.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
what's wrong with toys? Toys are way better than startups and growth and monetization and disruption and onlyfans to pay the bills.

Of course, that's why it's so great.

You say that, but plenty of old computers were based on the 6502. Those were used both for play and for real work. Before the time of resource-heavy network protocols, they could even host and access BBS systems (for those unfamiliar, basically a precursor of the Internet). Gemini cannot do a lot (which is by design), but it also has huge capabilities. For instance, while client-side logic is impossible, there's nothing preventing you from writing a "web app" that does its logic on the server side. Yes, you would require page refreshes to update what the client sees, but with Gemini each page load is much, much cheaper than HTML because the response payload is smaller to transfer and easier to parse. Assuming that your Gemini client allows enabling inline images, there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't build a stateful web-app that is a clone of Twitter, Facebook or another social media site. There's no reason why you couldn't design a simple webmail client a la Gmail, or a system monitoring dashboard, or a bug tracker, or basically anything else that doesn't have to rely on complex layouts or inline video to do its job.

BizarreByte 4y ago

It’s disheartening to see so many posts like this on ‘Hacker’News. It doesn’t have to be some big, serious thing for people to either enjoy or find useful. Some people had an idea, went out, and made it a reality, built a small community around it and now we have Gemini. We should encourage such things. Projects don’t need to change the world and they don’t need to be useful to all people or exploitable by corporations. Building something because it’s fun, or because you want it to exist is good enough.

anthk 4y ago

Unix was born to play Space War. NCurses exists because of Rogue. Text adventures where used a lot on text parsing, and video games boosted the PC industry on multimedia.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

what's wrong with toys? Toys are way better than startups and growth and monetization and disruption and onlyfans to pay the bills.