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Long read. Fantastic perspectives on programming, software, architecture, teams, computing ... in a Q&A from Forth land
forth2020.org/about-forth

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Erlang achieves Dan Ingalls' Smalltalk goals 

Choice in software systems design seems hampered by the scaffolding needed to use shared memory and message passing between threads and processes. Dan Ingalls: "An OS has the things not there in the language. There shouldn't be one.". It was about but the VM seems to solve that, with shared binaries between processes and transparent message-passing across nodes. Maybe your language and database should run on the ?

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Greetings, people! I am a software developer. Outside of work, I use free/libre software almost exclusively. I am pained that we continue to allow nature and community to get degraded by crony individualism. We can do much better, e.g. the voluntary refugee concept.

I have been chuffed with the almost all of the time I have been on it. There is plenty of food for thought in many a toot out there. I am having to move off @wyatwerp now, and really happy to find a Fediverse instance that ... uh ... federates.

Proposed new Laws of Robotics:

1. A machine must never show an advertisement to a human, or through inaction allow an advertisement to be shown to a human

If I think of a second Law of Robotics I'll let you know

master: welcome to my Smart Home

student: wow. how is the light controlled?

master: with this on-off switch

student: i don't see a motor to close the blinds

master: there is none

student: where is the server located?

master: it is not needed

student: excuse me but what is "Smart" about all of this?

master: everything.

in this moment, the student was enlightened

Christianity has killed more humans than any other religion. Yet people fool themselves saying its a religion of kindness.

#Religion #Christianity #Violence

A potential client of mine asked my Aadhar and PAN to give me a job. I asked his, and he is silent. 😂😂😂

#Software #Programming #India #Fraud

@chfkch I coded with #Rust, and it sucked. I might blog if I have the time.

Wonder why people invest in real estate? Unless lucky, you get less than half the returns of passive financial investments.

Plus there is this land mafia, and hyper corrupt government, police and bureaucrats in Tamilnadu.

#Tamilnadu #realestate #investment #finance #government #corruption #police

Surprised to find ppl dancing in a Hindu marriage. Marriage in my region is said to be holy and ppl exhibit their high degree of control.

Nothing like losing control of your senses like drinking, smoking, drugs, dancing, even indulgence by killing life is allowed.

Maybe be religion is what one thinks it is. And people should be honest and declare themselves atheists.

#Hinduism #Marriage

I love this Disney+ Terms of Service update.

"We are clarifying that, as we continue to increase the breadth and depth of the content we make available to you, circumstances may require that certain titles and types of content include ads, even in our 'no ads' or 'ad free' subscription tiers."

That should... be straight up illegal, shouldn't it? It's false advertising, or, you know... plain fraud.

#disneyplus #fraud

effective immediately, we are defederating loops.video.

this is because of the following segment of their TOS:

"By posting any Contributions, you grant us an unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide right, and license to: use, copy, reproduce, distribute, sell, resell, publish, broadcast, retitle, store, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part), and exploit your Contributions (including, without limitation, your image, name, and voice) for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, your Contributions, and to sublicense the licenses granted in this section. Our use and distribution may occur in any media formats and through any media channels."

obviously, we do not endorse claiming this kind of extreme power over users' uploads. this gives them explicit legal permission to, for example, use all of your posts to train an ai, or to sell images of your artwork if it was posted there.

additionally, some of you may have seen my posts on this matter, the admin dansup has recently posted some very anti-union views, criticizing the Canada Post strike and asking for legislation to send them back to work. this call for violence against the left is not something we can simply ignore. i will link my thread with further details in a reply to this post.

at this time we have not reached a decision on pixelfed. if we decide to take action, we will let you know.

What I do take comfort in: It only takes approximately 3.5% of a population to resist and defeat fascism.

This is an absurdly low number.

Be ungovernable.

@daniel I feel that #matrix "success" is almost #xmpp anti-objectives: development almost uniquely done in a single #company, heavily promoting official apps, the weight of matrix.org in the "federation"...

In order to try out Multi-User chat in #Gajim, I looked for lists of popular Public "Group Chats". I came across "The top 25 public chat rooms on the Jabber network": search.jabber.network/channels

The fullest groups seem to be the support groups for XMPP clients/servers like Gajim, #Conversations, and #Prosody. You might scoff I even tried these out, but _it was a start_, especially to try the "Joining" and "Leaving" process. *These activities - especially the very simple and quick "Leaving" process - are a non-trivial ability these days, in a world where closing accounts is about as easy as escaping an alligator.* They worked fine. No problems.

There's a huge number of people panicking about how sketchy ("enshittified"; fraught with "proprietary lock-in") all the popular online services have become. How about make your own Public Group chats, for any and all of the #Facebook groups, #WhatsApp Groups, and #Discord "servers" you are part of, and thereby try to gradually provide/advocate an "out"? Maybe even mirror the announcements from the more popular groups into your own Public Chat groups.

How about take on some leadership, if only as a form of action and protest, offering an alternative, and thereby *making a statement that a federated alternative indeed exists*? You might not be taken seriously at first, but if people are indeed *upset enough*, maybe your protest might actually catch on?

#XMPP #SocialMedia #enshittification #fediverse

Let's play a game.

Don't say PowerPoint presentation, say slidedeck
Don't say Word, say text document
Don't say Photoshop, say image editing
Don't say Excel, say spreadsheet
Don't say...

Language is important. When corporate companies own the names of the tasks or the digital items you create, you have become a cog in their branding machine.

#bigtech #DataSociety #academicchatter

@karlauerbach You may find Linux is less fuss than Windows, but I *absolutely refuse* to use Windows, so that's not much use to me.

Yes, thank you for mansplaining Linux to me. I am quite well aware of it, use it personally, and maintain it professionally for decades.

You're doing a classic xkcd.com/2501/

@karlauerbach @cstross @dlakelan

@dlakelan See, you're talking like a sysadmin there, not a lowly user. When I say it's a 9-5 job I'm talking from the PoV of Getting Stuff Done. And if you want to accomplish a task and ask about it on the net, these days 95% of the time all you'll get is a fucking youtube link at best and "get in the sea, n00b" at worst.

This is not a viable ecosystem for users. (And I don't have the cognitive bandwidth to pick up from where I used to be all over again, 20 years later.)

So we wanted to transfer 50 GiB between two modern linux laptops that are on the same table.

We had a USB 4.0 cable. We connected two laptops with it. Didn't work. There is Ethernet over USB, but some kernel modules are needed so whatever.

We had two USB sticks but they are small and slow.

We tried to make a direct ad-hoc WiFi connection. Ended up shooting a leg.

Made a hotspot on a phone. Connected laptops to it. Great. What do we do now.

Magic wormhole failed, some encryption error.

Ended up piping tar to netcat.

The video of mine and @hpk talk at @fosdem is now published. We tell the story of @delta from 2017 and up to now. If you're eager to learn how to replace billionaires with a zip-file, the answer is in the video! Hope you enjoy

ftp.fau.de/fosdem/2025/k4601/f

@superflippy @ajsadauskas @can @davidho it just occurred to me that maybe this is a reading comprehension problem. Dumbing it down could solve all kinds of problems.

we value many kinds of people, for all to be treated fairly, and for all to be invited

@wonka @aras @mekkaokereke

Once upon a time the same was said for countries which banned slavery, or which gave women equal rights.

However, since you asked: pre-state societies have been the norm across vast amounts of the world for very long times. Historians have discussed whether medieval Europe can be considered to have states, or at what point the state reemerged as a concept; but almost nobody is claiming that Celtic and Germanic tribes had what could usefully be described as a state. They did have large, economically complex societies though. It wasn't just small villages of mud farmers.

And then of course when you look outside of Europe there have been a plethora of non-state societies, some involving surprising levels of urbanism.

What states are very good at isn't stability but violence, aimed both inwards and outwards. I'm sure we'd all agree that being good at violence isn't something to admire or aspire to. Ted Bundy was not more admirable than his victims.

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