Life is Tetris @tetrislife@qoto.org

At a family reunion with ~25 adults. None traditional techies. It's day one. So far, 1/2 of them have asked me questions about AI.

I walk them through a quick path from thinking about it like advanced auto-complete to the dangers of the AI generated videos for propaganda.

None of them had heard anything about the energy/water use required to run the systems.

I want to make the point that Zohran Mamdani talked about affordability while also supporting trans kids and immigrants and refusing to endorse genocide and he won against the heavily favored Democrat despite an avalanche of racist, Islamophobic hatred and zillions in dark money. Candidates can do all these things and win. It's just the Democratic Party is full of sellouts, cowards, and bigots.

@raiderrobert it's a bit like I keep commenting about the "huge savings" blog posts: Everyone wants to read about saving $$$ by changing the architecture, few want to read about doing ongoing planning and not wasting $$$ in the first place.

I honestly thought that "grab a screenshot" would be a straightforward and non-controversial thing. I mean how could it not be?

But you kick over any Wayland rock, and this is the kind of absolutely bugfuck insanity you find underneath.

Why I love Delta Chat and the possibility to use small "In-Messenger-Apps" :)

"How can we evolve and deploy web apps without allowing developers or operators to become a “billionaire in the middle”? There are many ways to try to address this challenge and some involve the technical Internet protocol foundations. The “Web”, and the HTTP protocol in particular, arguably played a big part in producing tech billionaires with their possibly unprecedented power and money concentrations today.three spidermen pointing to each other, respectively labeled with 'messenger devs', 'webxdc app devs' and 'web app users'.

Joined by XMPP-messengers Cheogram and Monocles, and supported by many contributing experts in the background, we are playfully addressing the no-billionaire-platforms challenge with webxdc, a container format and API for “chat-shared web apps”. Technically, webxdc apps are network-sandboxed HTML5 apps and instead of the HTTP protocol they use Peer-to-Peer send/receive APIs implemented by webxdc-capable messengers, rebasing relations between developers and users by saying
- Bye Bye to surveillance capitalism: Users have both the code and the data of their web apps in their hands and benefit from end-to-end encrypted messaging not only during regular chat messaging but also during their private web app usage.
- Bye Bye to user policing (logins, passwords, OAUTH, TOS and privacy policies etc.): Web app developers never obtain or touch any user data or user identities, and can have peace of mind of not being responsible for any data, and not having to program identity management and social discovery UIs. Messengers already provide it through arranging chat groups or rooms.
- Bye Bye to depending on a corp or org that enshittifies: Messengers, as decentralized runners of webxdc apps in chat groups, can not hold web app developers, their users or data hostage. Consult Cory Doctorow’s “Ulysses Pact” for why this is a good idea.

This all sounds too good to be true, right? But what if another reality is possible by just stretching out our hands and grabbing it?

Let’s look at some recent webxdc community advances, new webxdc app capabilities along with updates to the webxdc specification, and finally at some community-produced webxdc apps already in everyday use, as working first approximations on how to replace whole Venture-Capital platforms with a ZIP file :)"

Read more on:
delta.chat/en/2025-01-23-webxdc-no-billionaires

#Messenger #XMPP #DeltaChat #Cheogram #Monocles #Collaboration #NoSurveillance

Also, for dropping FTP support in firefox, I'd like to wish mozilla a very fuck you

@nadiyar
> why would you use ftp? It's been obsolete for years afaik

"Obsolete" is a word someone usually uses to dismiss something that still works without having to think of technical reasons why they should not use it. It is usually a marketing tactic to convince people they need to constantly re-invent stuff that already exists and works to make people spend more money. Obsolescence is a state of mind.

And in a much more real sense, also because IBM's website still hosts some downloads over FTP only (gives you FTP links).

The move to 64-bit only computing is steadily underway: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-43-Change-No-i686

Retro computing needs to look away from #Linux as "always being there" and maybe focus more on more manageable OSes like #HaikuOS, #AROS and whatever that #Rust based OS is called (I think there's several?)

#retrocomputing

The net is full of articles and pictures about Linus Torvalds meeting Bill Gates. They all gloss over the fact that Dave Cutler was also there — to the point of cropping him out of the picture. Somehow, it seems, the guy who did RSX-11, VMS, and Windows NT is relevant too...?

So much focus on development speed and being "productive". The fastest, cleanest, and most reliable and error-free code is the code you never write. There's no metric or KPI for unnecessary code not written, productivity gained by not perturbing a dependable system, maintenance avoided by refactoring. You don't get promoted for building systems that don't need constant care and feeding, that don't change week to week, day to day. There's no concept of software being effectively "done" - doing just what it's intended to do and no more. Projects and features get abandoned as teams move from one Shiny to the next. Move fast, keep one step ahead. There's always another green field ready to be turned brown and left behind.

Updated by one of our Haiku users and one of it's developers Alexander V. Wolf, Stellarium 25.2 for 64bit Haiku.

https://stellarium.org

#HaikuOS #haikuports #Stellarium #software

#privacy #backup

@catsalad Lemmy is in rust and I'm not a fan of that language.
Also pixelfed is a divine product, like litteraly made by a self proclaimed god

God, this bubble burst is going to be so brutal