R. A. Dehi @radehi@qoto.org

My yak shave of the weekend is trying to get back into my irc bouncer.

I don’t remember what my raspberry pi is named on the local network (and sometimes it randomly changes and adds a number)

My network sniffer to find the name, Fing, no longer works on Mac (any desktop download is immediately marked as damaged and dumps to my trashcan).

Nmap, an alternative to Fing, is giving me no end of shit about openssl even when I point to my home brew install of it.

💡 This weekend would be a perfect time to #GiveUpGitHub.

☣️ #GitHub is the #Twitter of software development, creators of the most enticing proprietary walled garden ever made for #FOSS developers.

https://GiveUpGitHub.org

#FreeSoftware #OpenSource

Microblogging was designed to be ephemeral purely out of capitalist interests. We need a more permanent solution to share it thoughts, and link people to them.

I see the same points shared in here over and over. Whether they're about racism, or open source, or walled gardens, or capitalism, people keep repeating them because this place has no capability for history.

We're trying to decide the future of the internet but it's as if we had lost the ability to write. Without a permanent medium, there is no history. We're days away from becoming the online version of Göbekli Tepe.

I recall reading an old cyberpunk comic about a city where they replaced dates with "N years ago", and this was by design. Without history, people can easily lose their collective identity, which can easily be replaced by the current day's fads. This is what happened to Twitter. A ban and boom, all your post history is gone. And here we inherit the design faults of that platform. We are writing on the sand, on the dunes of short-lived server caches.

We need to claim our voices back and have permanent, calendared, searchable places to share our written thoughts. Even with activityPub, even with democratized moderation protocols, microblogging won't cut it.

We need to resurrect the blog.

#BringBackTheBlogs

Okay, so holy crap: earlier today @permagriculture recommended this browser extension for Mastodon, and IT IS A GAME CHANGER: https://github.com/lartsch/FediAct#installation

One of the more annoying things on Mastodon is if you end up on a page on a different server.

This solves that!

It's fantastic.

I know that some people hate browser extensions, but if you're cool with them, check it out.

This "Why?" is sublime. Just zero self-awareness. Chef's kiss

"You think twitter should be destroyed for depreciating rss? Who is rss? Are they still ... deprecated now?"

This was a conversation I had maybe 5 years ago, when twitter stopped serving tweets as rss breaking all of my cool electronic devices that pulled text from the internet.

No one understood what the heck I was so mad about. And leaving twitter over it was even more absurd to them.

I'm trying to learn from that uh... failure of communication.

(I'm still mad about the rss)

beyond "link tax" is "banned for linking" https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1604531261791522817?s=19

What authoritarian governments sometimes dream of-- the BigPublishers are doing.

I think I am in violation-- we will see when it comes.

lets go "protocol not platform"

Ok this rules. E-ink retro Mac running on Pi. #pi #rpi #raspberrypi #retro #mac #macse #eink #retropc #retromac #diy https://www.yankodesign.com/2022/08/12/paper-thin-retro-macintosh-comes-with-an-e-ink-display-and-runs-on-a-raspberry-pi/ #3dp

Using #vim is easy once you learn a few basic keybindings.

h and l - move left and right
j and k - move down and up
η and λ - move backwards and forwards through time
ξ and κ - translation through additional temporal dimension (if applicable)
ᚻ, ᛄ, ᚳ and ᛚ - moving left, down, up, and right through celestial spheres
𐤄 and 𐤋 - switch deity to pantheon member to left or right
ᛄ - supplicate to chosen deity
ᚳ - challenge chosen deity (dangerous)
:q - exit

Talk on Zero-cost deserialization in #Rust, by @manishearth

> ICU4X has [gone] all-in on zero-copy deserialization, a technique that ensures that data loading involves fast validation as opposed to slow allocation. To help with this, we have built a suite of crates (yoke, zerovec, zerofrom, and databake) that make zero-copy deserialization easier to work with and more broadly applicable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM2DI3ZI_BQ

Gotta love open source. I started using an open source code forge called gogs several years ago for personal projects.

Not too long ago it feels.. gitea forked off of it. I believe due to gitea maintainers being unwilling to work with people.

Gitea then went through some big backlash due to deceptive practices of transferring things built by a community to a for profit.

So community forked... and seems @forgejo is now the latest incantation.

Lisp: these are the fine artifacts of old. sometimes when you are not looking it creeps in to your life. but, sometimes, it's just clojure.
Lua: i'm not actually supposed to be here but someone decided to build a small universe entirely out of paperclips and it works somehow
Erlang: have they found out i run the internet yet
Rust: :blobcrab: rewrite it in rust! then die waiting for it to compile
C/C++: :blobcatdevil: why yes, we did find out how to transceive satan directly in computer form [crashes]

I've just transliterated another function (without pulling in a dependency on any particular graphics library, dependency injection) from FcFt (https://codeberg.org/dnkl/fcft) into my FontConfig language bindings.

So now it knows to retrieve & render glyphs from a font for a given index. Compiles successfully, none of this is tested yet. I need more infrastructure for that.

So if there's any other functions I want to transliterate Saturday...

https://git.adrian.geek.nz/fontconfig-pure.git/tree/FreeType/FontConfig.hs

Can you spot the circles?

It took me a long time. Once you see them, they'll seem obvious.

This is the Coffer Illusion, by Anthony Norcia

Apple has finally killed its ill-conceived plan to scan photos for CSAM. This is a direct result of work by experts and activists. Speaking up is important and sometimes we win.

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-communication-safety-messages/

Here's my new essay for Crooked Timber, "Your platform is not an ecosystem."

It's a big essay and work in progress from me, and part of a broader project with Robin Berjon who greatly improved this draft and provided the best line in the piece.

What if we didn't just glaze over when people call their closed technical architecture an "ecosystem"?

And how would the internet look if we saw it as a real but damaged ecosystem that we can yet repair?

https://crookedtimber.org/2022/12/08/your-platform-is-not-an-ecosystem/

Shared by my Daughter
"I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are"

In response to "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear"

So often, I'm reminded about the broken state of IT today. Barriers to entry everywhere are ridiculously high.

Self-hosting anything is incredibly stressful, often requiring you to be skilled as a system administrator to the point where you could make a living off of it.

I know why, of course.

Capitalism rewards enclosure. Money flows to companies who want customers on their terms, so solutions are designed to service thousands of people and for professionals to operate.

We need #SmallTech.