Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Project Gemini

geminiprotocol.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 194 posts

Re: Project Gemini

#21

Post by karmakaze »

If this is being developed, it should have a more modern description. Comparing it to Gopher is fine as a historical point, but comparing it to http/html is more useful today. I read the faq for geeks and didn't learn much:

> 1.1.1 The dense, jargony answer for geeks in a hurry

> Gemini is an application-level client-server internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between hosted files. Both the protocol and the format are deliberately limited in capabilities and scope, and the protocol is technically conservative, being built on mature, standardised, familiar, "off-the-shelf" technologies like URIs, MIME media types and TLS. Simplicity and finite scope are very intentional design decisions motivated by placing a high priority on user autonomy, user privacy, ease of implementation in diverse computing environments, and defensive non-extensibility. In short, it is something like a radically stripped down web stack. See section 4 of this FAQ document for questions relating to the design of Gemini.

Annoyed that for a system about plain text links, there's no link to "section 4".

The transport sounds like http without saying so. It doesn't go into why it doesn't use http. I'd probably be fine with HTTP and Markdown + image/video links. Maybe the Gemini document capabilities/scope is better but they're not described.

Edit: they are in "4.1.2"[0] Be warned, there's still a lot of beating-around-the-bush.

> 4.1.2 I'm familiar with HTTP and HTML. How is Gemini different?

[0] https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/faq.gmi#412-im-familiar-with...

Edit 2: Seems opinionated in many stupid-by-todays-needs ways. It feels like text-web made by some group of deniers.

Re: Project Gemini

#22

Post by roomey »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #17
netdevphoenix wrote: post #10

Why do programmers have so little imagination when it comes to names? It should almost never be the case that project names conflict

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton

You forgot the "and off by one errors"

Re: Project Gemini

#23

Post by corysama »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #10

Why do programmers have so little imagination when it comes to names? It should almost never be the case that project names conflict

For one, the project started in 2019 https://geminiprotocol.net/history/ So, I guess Google should rename their LLM?

For another, to do that we'd have to follow something like the prescription drug naming process https://globalhealthnow.org/2024-07/why-do-prescription-drug...

That way, instead of "Gemini", they could have named it something like "Cymbalta", "Xeljanz" or "Cialis" :P

Re: Project Gemini

#25

Post by djaboss »

billfor wrote: post #9
blcknight wrote: post #5

So Gopher?

gopher over http: Seems like firefox et al removed support for it years ago.

... which looks even more stupid when you can force quite a number of browsers to get you something through gopher if you just pretend it's http on port 70. of course you have to self interpret the result, but gophermaps are quite readable. :)

Re: Project Gemini

#26

Post by jerf »

blcknight wrote: post #15
billfor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gopher over http: Seems like firefox et al removed support for it years ago.

Gemini's native protocol isn't HTTP, they invented their own. I don't really see what this does you couldn't do with simple HTML pages (or Gopher 35 years ago).

Nothing.

But that's not the point.

Re: Project Gemini

#27

Post by tracker1 »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #17
netdevphoenix wrote: post #10

Why do programmers have so little imagination when it comes to names? It should almost never be the case that project names conflict

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton

You forgot "Off by one errors."

Re: Project Gemini

#28

Post by ChipopLeMoral »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #12
netdevphoenix wrote: post #10

Why do programmers have so little imagination when it comes to names? It should almost never be the case that project names conflict

Ask Google, this project predates the LLM.

Back when I was a Googler, I used to play a little game where I would think of a random word and then check if there was a Google internal project code named for it. It was a bit hard finding stuff that wasn't some system or project, and often there would be multiple ones. I actually found one that I thought would be a nice name and reserved the go link for it, but naming anything after it never panned out, when I finally got to design a system from scratch my manager wanted a boring descriptive name like "consolidated data system" (it was a bit more specific but that was the vibe).

Side note: I noticed that more "boring" and less sexy projects had cooler names a lot of the time, and my theory was that people were compensating for doing unsexy work.

Re: Project Gemini

#29

Post by pianoben »

Gemini was so much fun during lockdown - I loved the distraction of a new simple protocol, and the challenge of writing a gui client for it.

Can't say I'm surprised that it hasn't taken the world by storm, but it's still a cozy part of the Internet.

Post reply on HN