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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.

factorcode.org/ is really sweet

the whole listener / inspector is reminiscent of smalltalk

👏

AI is "inevitable" like "racial hierarchies and inequalities are natural and inevitable"

wired.com/story/google-microso

Except racial hierarchies and inequalities are neither natural nor inevitable. They are lies spewed by white supremacists, with no base in science or fact.

AI is not inevitable. AI is happening because too many of us are cowardly, lazy and greedy.

Doug McIlroy — Unix pipes, diff, spellchecking, macro pioneer whose work fed into Hart's impementation of Lisp macros, &c, &c — on driving to MIT from NJ to hear McCarthy give a talk on Lisp in 1959.

Should environmentally-irresponsible AI be called ... ?

(a riff off )

@breadandcircuses @gerrymcgovern Sometimes it feels like nature "is working on it" by setting our species into overdrive suicide mode.
There is just no other, reasonable explanation why globally everybody is going crazy, politically.

“The importance of Indigenous Peoples in the protection of the Amazon is not reflected in the design of international climate policy. Given their historical and ongoing struggles against extraction, guidance from Indigenous Peoples must be central to any climate justice approach.”

news.mongabay.com/2024/10/stud

The Global North is implementing a silent policy of extermination of Indigenous people and biodiversity in its pursuit of precious metals, in its righteous cause for the Green Transition.

@joe Those who would give up expressive liberty, to purchase a little type safety, deserve neither expressions nor types.

how to control the algorithm 

One thing I hear every now and then is that people on fedi (and elsewhere, I guess) would like to be in control of the algorithm. Thinking about this some more, I think I'd like to see a number of things: A way to include somebody else's algorithm; a way to adapt it interactively (more or less from this person, more or less from this hashtag, more or less from this phrase); a way to display these rules as text and a way to edit these rules as text.
The first time I saw something like this was article scoring in Gnus, a news reader inside Emacs.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Scoring.html
It also featured adaptive scoring (based on your behaviour, configurable, of course) and score decays (the algorithm slowly reverts to the default).
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Adaptive-Scoring.html
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Score-Decays.html

I think a set of rules in plain English would be easier for people than the special expressions with all the parenthesis that some people like so much. I'm thinking of how Microsoft Outlook E-Mail rules are written and shown. That's pretty cool.

In a way I'd love to see similar implementations for fedi, news, feeds, and so on. But I suspect that an external scoring implementation would simply lead to nobody using it. Too complicated.

I'm old enough to remember the outrage and hand-wringing from western politicians and media when the Taliban destroyed ancient cultural and religious sites in Afghanistan.

Now? You could hear a pin drop.
newarab.com/news/israel-dynami

Yes.

But...

...universal basic income would also result in an even larger stream of totally crappy software from people who don't know what they are doing, but do it anyway.

@trevorflowers

I tried to type a post about a mistake I made in a program, and my phone changed to "in a problem".

And yeah, I get it. Many programs would be better referred to as problems

@_elena @mcc @mhoye This chimes with my anecdotal experience of seeing some former Twitter mutuals turn up on Mastodon. They receive multiple Welcome! greetings and the usual simple tips about following liberally, following hashtags etc. Then they follow nobody; complain it's 'too quiet' here; sometimes moan out loud that 'you can't build an audience in here'; and leave. It's as if they wandered into a café where people are mingling and chatting, but they mistake it for a stage with an audience.

@mathiasx I’ve always been a big fan of signs - on trails or historic buildings. I think a community wiki might include important places or plants in the community and the history of their significance. I like to think of it like putting residents and visitors on the map both physically and historically. Perhaps that’s getting out of the scope of what you had originally envisioned, but it excites me. Otherwise, community “businesses” - where to eat, get a window fixed, walk a dog.

has anyone already made a captcha meme that asks the user to prove they're human by selecting all tolerable candidates, showing the pictures of harris and trump side by side?

Running #chatmail servers is <2h effort per month, according to an ad-hoc poll with 10 operators responding. Some have 10Ks of #deltachat users. Typically 300MB ram is used and max 60gb disc space per server. And all interoperate safely based on high security standards (DKIM and TLS enforced, and only no-metadata #openpgp encrypted messages allowed) .... with typically 0.5 secs end-to-end delivery. Who said again that email is insecure, cumbersome and slow? :)

stallmansupport.org

This website refutes many of the invalid accusations against Richard Stallman that were used to cancel him. It's the result of careful research from a rational and objective standpoint. It shows the truth, backed by the testimony of conscientious and thoughtful people. We invite you to explore it and join our efforts to give Stallman's visionary voice in the free software movement the space it deserves.

@GabeMoralesVR @cygnathreadbare @report_press

Disgusting? Now it's 16, and with France, Italy, Germany, Portugal... it used to be
the same as Spain, yet no one said any bullshit like you except EagleTM Prudelandia.
Maybe the US should learn a thing or two. Oh, btw, you are the ones allowing 16yos to
drive a huge chunk of metal not giving a shit to the rest of drivers/pedestrians.
Which is scarier. And don't let me start on guns...

@report_press@mastodon.social Can I also just say that personally attacking people through an anonymous report is also a very lame thing to do?

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