timorl @timorl@qoto.org

University of Minnesota banned from Linux kernel development and a purge begins:

"Because of this, I will now have to ban all future contributions from your University and rip out your previous contributions"

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YH%2FfM%2FTsbmcZzwnX@kroah.com/

Nice article about Swiss queer hacker Tillie Kottman (Verkada Hack), that is pointing out the central problems - german only
https://www.republik.ch/2021/04/21/die-vereinigten-staaten-gegen-tillie-kottmann

I'm currently working on a #Pixelfed client called Resin, designed to prevent social media addiction. To hear more about it, check out:

https://github.com/natjms/resin

And for more about its design philosophy:

https://njms.ca/posts/ethical-anti-design.html

I keep thinking of Robert Ashley's motto for my old music department, "If you're not weird, get out" and how to make a more nurturing, undergraduate-focused version of that.

I don't want normies to get out. I want them to de-normify at least temporarily: Be weird. Have fun. Do something absurd with your whole heart. Make something beautiful out of rubbish. Make something ugly our of pure tones. Find the place where your system starts to fail and sit there for a bit.

Anyone have a good (open) corpus or generator of human names that covers a good amount of the different types of names people can have?

Preferably tagged with ethnicity or nationality. The names don't have to be real, just representative.

@eumiro@fosstodon.org maybe?

honestly my biggest achievement is getting my chaos lesbian selfie on wikipedia

They: "Imperative programming let's me know exactly in which order things get executed!"
Modern CPUs:

first: I think that the power war is about corporate interests, which has never been shy in using any means - now they use a conflict in the community (struggle 2) to divide it, in order to consolidate power.

It is the dilemma of FLOSS, that its achievements are being used to amass immense profit and power by the platform industry. In commons theory, this is called "enclosure" and means the exploitation of "free" resources. free means "owned by no one" (and economic theory knows only two types of ownership: state and private) - even if in fact, these resources are maintained by informal communities. this is the case in land-grabbing from indigenous communities around the world, and I think in a way also in FLOSS.

It also points to another aspect in FLOSS: I was inspired by feminist activists to read the FSM as a feminist manifesto - because it addresses exploitation and offers a way to change it. And indeed, if you look at it that way, it is all about protecting a social practice (of programming). But the solution it takes, in form of the GPL, is acting on the level of the product of that social practice, not the social practice itself. This mindset of valuing the product over the social practice is also alive in the principle of meritocracy.

Using #Pinephone #Mobian as a main phone Day 4

I didn't make reports since day 1. On day 2, I sent and received a few sms texts. On day 3, I spent an hour on a phone call with my dad (he got vaccinated the day before, yay!). The internal speaker was on the quiet side at max volume, a known issue for which there's a tweak. The back of the UBports CE was very hot by the end. It might be useful to swap the back cover with the Plasma Mobile version which has a graphene tape inside.

1/x

@timorl

GCC does not satisfy the "one month" requirement: that's why we need better compilers (and languages)

But this IS a political issue!

If you cap complexity, you reduce costs and this way you reduce the power corporation can extort to users.

If you can rewrite anything you run in a month, no company is going to betray your trust.

As for the "simplicity ideology with complex compilers" you are talking about, I think you are confusing simplicity and easiness.

Simplicity is very different from easiness: simplicity provides freedom, easiness produce lock-in. But more often than not, simple tools requires more mental effort than easy one.

IMHO simplicity should always be preferred in Free Software.

#sputnik #corona #vaccine
Not that I care too much, but this is interesting.

1. few weeks ago (in a desperate PR action) the govt of Slovakia bought 2Mio doses of Sputnik V vaccine.
2. instead of directly distributing it, the govt asked the national testing institute for medicines (or whatever is the name) to approve it
3. the institute finally delivered a report stating that a) the docs to the vaccine is severely incomplete, b) the Russian producer refuses to answer further questions both from the institute and from EMA and c) they noticed that the vaccine batches across countries significantly differ in what they are and how they are handled. Most importantly d) the batch used for Lancet study of efficacy is different than the one Slovakia bought so it's unclear what are the real performance properties of this stuff. In turn, the institute recommended to use the vaccine only at significant risk as they are not equipped to evaluate this more thoroughly (only EMA is).
4. in turn, the Russian producer (after speaking to the now ex-PM of Slovakia) alleged this as fake news and
5. requested return of the whole delivery on the ridiculous ground that in a breach of sales contract the vaccine was put to test by a 3rd party lab.

Source of the latest points: https://twitter.com/sputnikvaccine/status/1380158709985329155

Well. Personally, I totally agree with the view that the conditions and scrutiny for admitting this vaccine shall be the same as for other producers, but Russian producer thinks otherwise and thereby withholds important information. They obviously try to force other countries to use this on the basis of plain belief that it works as marketed. And these antics about requesting it to be sent back, well... If they fully refund it too, I guess it should be OK. We learned something new about vaccine politics here though.

I agree with everything on this chart.. People tend to have the risks of an "AI war" in the future all backwards...

Another agency puts the coalition of Piráti and STAN on the first place in a Czech parliamentary elections poll! Many thanks to all our supporters!

@timorl I'm a bit late but you can do this by opening up the thread in their instance (click on the date by one of the posts (preferably the highest one) from said instance). Yw.

The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy - https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html excellent post by @VitalikButerin
, creator of the most interesting/important cryptocurrency, #Ethereum (v @azeem)