Life is Tetris @tetrislife@qoto.org

Is anyone working on a version of ActivityPub that’d allow fediverse servers to communicate with something more efficient than JSON? Just curious.

My wife said “when we first got married [15+ years ago] I got the vibe from you and your friend circle that was ‘we want to use tech to change the world’ and now I get the feeling that you’re constantly yelling ‘STOP TRYING TO CHANGE THE WORLD USING TECH’”

I have never felt more seen.

Once libraries are nonexistent any modern fascist movement wouldn't even have to burn books, but flick one switch and they'd be remotely deleted from your Amazon Kindle or similar digital “library”.

Capitalists are already building the infrastructure to do this through DRM, so stop believing tech is apolitical - the defunding of libraries and paywalling of information are all part of this.

Did you hear about the person who got cooled to absolute zero?

They’re 0K now.

Remember that while a picture tells a thousand words, it uses the same amount of storage as several million.

BBC: "Everyone got duped by Sam Bankman-Fried's big gamble"

No, lots of us called crypto out from the very start. I was reading accurate critiques of bitcoin in 2012.

Journalists and financiers and politicians got duped or didn't care about the truth when there was money to be made.

Now you're trying to pretend nobody warned you? Get fucked.

They say count sheep to help you get to sleep, but they keep bleating, jumping on the bed and the smell is awful.

Arrived by email this morning. #humour #cartoon #computing #AgentXCartoon

@aral @blepharon

Every time I've brought this up in any thread, the genocide apologists just ignore it.

They don't reply or rebut or try to say it's not true or anything-- it's like the posts are invisible.

- it works on my machine

- well, we ain’t shipping your machine to the customer are we

- you know what you smug son of a- *invents docker*

The reasons we're changing our domain and the impact were a bit too big to fit in last week's post, but as promised, here's what's up:

https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-11-03-from-io-to-org

Started fiddling around my 42nd birthday.

No previous musical experience, very little music listening even.

Spontaneously decided to learn to play Irish Trad, picked the fiddle as the instrument.

It’s been a tough three years, it’s a hard instrument. Was close to tone deaf.

Yesterday I learned a full tune by ear in one day.

Tomorrrow I turn 45.

I’m proud of my progress, even if I still have a lifetime to go.

#IrishTrad #fiddle

@qqmrichter @tetrislife

Depends on your definition of "user"… and evidently your definition of "never".

Microsoft did make great strides in the earlier part of this century, before they decided to take a wrecking ball with the combined efforts of the "Metro^WModern" UI, their "cloud first" push and most recently, their fascination with AI.

Apple's platform is good, but it requires buying their hardware (and its limited range of form-factors): go have a look at how Amazon do MacOS X instances to see where that's a problem. (spoiler: they've hacked off-the-shelf Mac Minis into 2U racks.)

You needed some functional knowledge of BASIC to do anything with an Apple computer years ago. Today, Microsoft and the KDE project are riffing off each-other UI-wise.

As for Linux audio… when I started out, OSS was the standard. Most applications dealt with audio directly, there was this new fangled daemon called the e-Sound-Daemon (esd) which came from the Enlightenment desktop (and often ran along side Gnome v1).

KDE had their own called aRTS. Basically only KDE applications supported it.

ALSA got merged into the kernel with Linux 2.6. It solved a lot of problems with OSS, but still it was one application at a time. (Unless you set up dmix/dsnoop plug-ins.)

Proprietary OSS-only applications like Skype needed all sorts of unholy hacks to make it work back in the day. Everyone celebrated when they implemented ALSA support.

JACK popped up, and did allow multi-application sound-card use and flow-graph processing… but it was finicky, and better suited to advanced users.

PulseAudio is the present day, and aimed at replacing esd (and aRTS). BlueZ started working their audio infrastructure to link into that instead of ALSA.

That said, architectural issues were hit with PA, and there were ideas in JACK that were useful for solving problems, so PipeWire does a bit of both. It has support for the newer BT CODECs, and as I say, I think will ultimately replace PulseAudio.

This is almost entirely volunteers. If it took 30 years for Microsoft to get where they are today with full-time employees, it does not surprise me that the Linux community is taking a little longer. You're comparing one group who are paid a typical 40-hour week to work on their thing, to another where volunteers might only spare 10 hours a week.

I've seen printer handbooks which described the format of the commands sent down the parallel port to make a printer change fonts, colours or print graphics… but that was many moons ago! We have to reverse-engineer this in many cases today.

The only thing in favour of OSS is shear numbers: there's no recruitment process to write patches or submit bug reports -- anyone can pitch in and help. (And yes, I have written a patch or two for ALSA! Probably nothing that matters in your bug.)

Sitting here moaning though isn't going to get the problem fixed. In the discussion so far, there's been no mention of distribution, kernel versions, BlueZ versions, what audio subsystem is being used (PulseAudio, PipeWire, pure ALSA, sndio…), what hardware is being used.

That doesn't give us a lot to go on. I'm not saying your problems are unimportant or non-existent… I also don't think they're unsolvable. But, we'll need detail to get to the bottom of it. 🙂

The essence of programming Erlang?

#actorModel #erlang #functionalProgramming

Palestinians are being slaughtered. Where are the sanctions on Israel? Where are the embargoes? Why are they giving them and selling them more weapons and bombs?

How is this invader so different from Russia, why is Israel authorized by the US and EU to slaughter at will?

Fucking hypocrites.

#FreePalestine #Gaza