@kl There is a lot of personal power in simply saying no to what capitalism has on offer. No to endless and pointless growth. No to spending more. No to change that isn't improvement. As a performance, it can also be useful to demonstrate that capitalist realism is a problematic and needlessly constraining worldview.
@akkartik @kl@mastodon.sdf.org
Computers are dual-sourced, much like the Internet itself.
The Internet's dual-sources are the government-backed ARPAnet and the home-grown BBSes.
Computers dual-sources are machine-room computers and the kit computers. The terminals to connect to the machine-room computers have changed, but it has always been big business that loves control.
We thought home computers fell on the side of kit computers, but these days they're just fancy terminals to the machine-room systems.
@anarchiv uk govt numbers suggest only a fraction of a fraction of a percent of benefit payments are fraudulent. you wouldn't know that from the way the govt and media here talk about benefit fraud as if its a huge problem costing us lots of public money. tax fraud and avoidance by the wealthiest, though, that actually is a big number. govt and media don't raise that issue ever though.
The tax lady, she was also fiercely anti-incarceration. All in all, that talk gave me back some of my lost belief in common sense.
The barrier for getting started with #SLIME and #CommonLisp in #Emacs is really high -- and I'm a very experienced developer, and have even written a moderate amount of Lisp (elisp, scheme, racket, but not CL).
All of the tutorials say "look at how to do these super simple things!" Which is great. But like ... how do I open up a large, existing project, and start exploring? Mostly I get package loading errors when I do that.
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Tibor Kaputa spends his days developing the Simple range of apps for Android-based OS and makes them available free of charge on F-Droid. I use a bunch of them and they're fantastic. Please consider trying out his apps and making a contribution to support his work:
@tetrislife @spacebuffer I wrote a thing for #MediaWiki that makes GraphViz dot format family trees. It's sort of tricky to make it handle things like putting multiple spouses near each other, but it's pretty great really.
@ddevault
Introducing the Himitsu keyring & password manager for Unix
June 20, 2022
https://drewdevault.com/2022/06/20/Himitsu.html
"I’m using Linux. A library that emacs uses to communicate with Intel hardware.” – Erwin, #emacs, Freenode.
(Mastering Emacs – Mickey Petersen)
I'm going to stick my neck out and say that the Obi-Wan Kenobi series is the best Star Wars spin-off since the original trilogy. I really enjoyed the final two episodes.
@bsmall2 Easy for me to carp from the sidelines I know. But the FSF/E seem to mostly work on convincing people it's a good idea to upcycle devices, and often end up preaching to the choir. It occurs to me they might achieve more if they helped coordinate (and get funding) for the work to get more devices supported, make installing replacement OS easier etc.
The FSFE is running a campaign encouraging people to upcycle old Android devices with free code software. Totally agree with this in principle, but beyond installing F-Droid and using apps installed from there as much as possible, I've found it remarkably hard to do in practice.
I see only vitriol for the Beckn protocol for digital commerce, even though it, in its https://ondc.org #ONDC form, *could* loosen monopolies like Amazon. Without some justification, the vitriol seems like noise.
e.g. being created by actors endorsed by the Gates Foundation in other contexts does give #Beckn a hint of a bad smell. Also doesn't acknowledge pre-existing work like https://valueflo.ws . Also, other open-source tech stacks of those actors, like https://sunbird.org, are mind-boggling contraptions.
Interesting UX observation:
I just saw an online store do a very minor change in the user flow for "Forgot My Password" — I clicked "Forgot..." and it sent me to enter a new password right away. After I finished entering the new password, *then* it told me check your email for a numeric code. Of course, by the time I finished typing the code was already in my inbox. A minor change, but it felt much more streamlined!
@schratze The Immortal Science of Reading the First Post in the Thread