⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ @falken@qoto.org

Happy Birthday to Douglas Hofstadter (born 15 February 1945), cognitive and computer scientist, author of "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" and "I Am a Strange Loop".

From GEB, Hofstadter's law - "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

From IAASL - “In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.”

How many of you were influenced by GEB?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter
1/n

This is a thread of beautiful or interesting computer-y things I scanned at the Museum of Printing this weekend.

(Eventually all of this will be processed and deposited at Internet Archive!)

1. You don’t see a lot of yellow in computing.

there’s going to be a Silent Hill game set in the UK and I’m like… kind of hyped, but also, it just feels sort of intrinsically hilarious? like, a foggy shithole full of ugly weirdos trying to attack you is just Belfast city centre late on a Friday night

James Sutherland’s seen some shit but it’s nothing compared to the 2am Royal Avenue McDonalds crowd

@adafruit well that's too bad. Guess I'm not buying adafruit anymore. #NoAI

Cold, grey and chucking it down again. Time to retreat to the #LEGO room to get some more building finished!
I had three copies of the big rocket launcher so I've used some of the parts to make two new vehicles - a refuelling rover and mobile satellite comms truck.
#AFOL #BlockHeadUK #BabySpaceBase

The cost of running OpenBenches.org

After my recent presentation at FOSDEM, someone asked a pretty reasonable question. What does it cost to run OpenBenches?

It is, thankfully, surprisingly cheap! In part, that's because it is a relatively simple tech stack - PHP, MySQL, a couple of API calls to external services. It was designed to be as low cost while also being useful. Here's the breakdown:

Hosting - £171 per year

Our biggest expense but, I think, our most reasonable. Krystal charges around £342 for a 2 year contract. That includes unlimited bandwidth and storage, as well as the domain name. We have nearly 400GB of photos and bot scraping means we can use over 900GB of bandwidth per month - so Krystal give us a rather good deal!

Use this affiliate link and code EDENT to get a small discount.

Stadia Maps - US$20 / month

Geocoding is surprisingly hard to do locally. We need to transform latitude and longitude into addresses, and then back again. Stadia Maps cost about the same as our hosting! What's rather annoying is that we only use about half the API calls in our plan. We need to find a cheaper solution.

Mapping - Free!

When we used Stadia for drawing maps, we regularly ran over our quota. So we switched to OpenFreeMap which produces gorgeous interactive maps.

The service has been rock solid and very responsive to bugs on GitHub.

Logo - US$5

I'm not a good designer, so we bought a logo from The Noun Project and then coloured it in. Bargain for a fiver!

Image CDN - Free!

Although we have unlimited bandwidth with Krystal, we're only located in one region - the UK. WeServ. It's also pointless serving full resolution images to small screens.

So WeServ offers free image resizing and global CDNs. Personally, I'm not a fan of CloudFlare (their CDN partner) so I'm looking to change provider.

OCR - Free!

People don't want to type in the inscription of the photo, so we use Google Cloud Vision.

We send less than 1,000 requests per month - so we're inside their free tier. If we get more popular, that'll get more expensive. But I don't know of a local-first OCR which is as good as Google's. Sadly, Tesseract is rubbish for extracting text from photos.

Authentication - Free!

We don't want to store anyone's passwords. The free tier of Auth0 allows us to do social login for up to 25,000 monthly users. Which is more than enough for us.

Sadly, Auth0 don't support the Fediverse, so I had to build my own "Log-in with Mastodon" service.

As much as we'd like to run social login locally, we simply don't want to be responsible for securing users' details & API keys.

Software - Free!

As per the OpenBenches colophon we use a lot of cool FOSS. Small JS libraries, big PHP frameworks, and everything in between.

Income

Thanks to GitHub Sponsors we make a whopping US$3 per month!

Similarly, our OpenCollective Sponsors brings in about £3 per month.

Merchandising! You can buy OpenBenches branded t-shirts, mugs, and hats. That nets us about £20 per year

Call it roughly £80 income. OK, it is better than nothing - but doesn't even cover a quarter of our costs. Sometimes people give us a higher donation privately, which is also very welcome. These people are listed on our README.

Total

On the assumption that our time is worthless (ha!) and that we only rarely go over our providers' API limits, and we get in some revenue, the cost of running OpenBenches is less than £300 per year.

That's not bad for a fun little hobby. People certainly spend more than that on Funkopops, vaping, and mechanical keyboards!

Nevertheless, I'm always slightly worried that we'll go viral and have an unexpectedly high bill from our API providers.

I would love to be able to hire a proper designer to make the site look a bit nicer. I also want to be able to buy a modern iPhone so that I can test it in the latest Safari.

If you have any suggestions for cutting costs, or non-scummy ways to help us raise funds, please drop a comment below.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@a2_4am/116072144942640899

Meta-note: this is the GOOD STUFF. This took me HOURS to debug, and in those hours I developed a mental model of a complex operation AND learned something new about ProDOS internals AND tested and discarded several theories before finally discovering the root cause and it was ALL WORTH IT. I don't want to outsource that to Dr. Flattery the Always-Wrong Chat Box. Why would I want to skip this? This is the WHOLE THING.

If you don't want to write software then don't.

Because it's owned by a dickhead and full of the fash?

Here's a thought experiment.

Imagine a stamp mark with the words "Made with #AI" on it.

If you see this mark on a picture, illustration, mobile app, song, movie, or story - do you get the notion that this product is of higher, lower or unchanged quality?

If you see two identical products for the same price, where one has an AI mark and the other doesn't - which one would you buy?

(Please retoot this #LLM #poll for wider reach)

🆕 blog! “Book Review: 20 Goto 10 - 10101001 facts about retro computers by Steven Goodwin”
★★★★☆

This is an excellent "dipping" book. There are nearly 200 articles ranging from short anecdotes, multi-page synopses of complex topics, and quirky little asides. Rather than a linear history of computing, each short chapter ends with a…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/02/book-review-20-goto-10-10101001-facts-about-retro-computers-by-steven-goodwin/
⸻
#BookReview

ICYMI: Roguecraft DX for Mega65 is out now!

Get it here: thalamus.link/roguedx-mega65

#roguecraft #roguelike ⁠#gamedev #indiedev #indiegamedev #retrogames #mega65

@pollita like parents have to let go of children, so can people let go of github

What’s the difference between a £20 meal and a £55 meal?
February 14th

One of the most common objections I hear to climate action is: “But what about China?”

The person making this argument usually goes on to claim that China is doing nothing, while everyone else is making sacrifices. But that’s not what the data show.

Here’s the reality:

* As the U.S. doubles down on fossil fuels and blocks new wind and solar projects, its emissions are ticking up.

* In contrast, China’s emissions appear to have peaked — and may now be starting to decline.

* Last year, China installed a full half of all the world's new wind and solar energy.

* Over the past two years, China installed more new solar power each year than the U.S. has installed in total across its entire history.

* China's clean exports alone are cutting CO2 outside its borders by 1% year on year.

Of course no country can fix climate change on its own. But just as it's a global problem, progress in one place helps everyone.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-have-now-been-flat-or-falling-for-21-months/

As a fan of Babylon 5 but frustrated it's not more readily available, I'm very happy to hear Warner Bros has released it for free on YouTube (https://cordcuttersnews.com/babylon-5-is-now-free-to-watch-on-youtube/).

For those of you who don't do Insta, here is a photo. #LEGO #AFOL #BlockHeadUK

Listen, I fail to see what's romantic about thrusting a bundle of severed hermaphrodite genitalia at your love interest. They may be collected from sessile photoautotrophs as a traditional human invitation to copulation but it's somewhere on the same continuum as a gift of disemboweled rodents from your pet cat.

Thank you, #OnlineSafetyAct for failing to regulate #AgeVerification in any way at all. Now Discord users must hand their data to a Peter-Thiel-of-Palantir-linked system.

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/oh-good-discords-age-verification-rollout-has-ties-to-palantir-co-founder-and-panopticon-architect-peter-thiel/