Forest @forestjohnson@pixie.town
- member of
- https://cyberia.club
- webmaster @
- https://capsul.org/
I am a web technologist who is interested in supporting and building enjoyable ways for individuals, organizations, and communities to set up and maintain their own server infrastructure, including the hardware part.
I am currently working full time as an SRE 😫, but I am also heavily involved with Cyberia Computer Club and Layer Zero
Joined Feb 2021
Forest
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Stepping down as Framework Linux Community Ambassadors
We are Tommi and Fraxinas, Framework Linux Community Ambassadors since September 2024.
We apprehensively followed the developments and the debate concerning Framework’s endorsement and support of Omarchy. We have no direct experience with this Linux distribution, its community, nor with the political environment around it. We did not speak up before now because learning about all of it and keeping up with all the commentary would have been a full-time job. Unfortunately we do not have the time to read every single comment on the dedicated forum thread.
Despite our admittedly limited and superficial understanding of this matter, we believe we have witnessed and read enough to make an informed decision and take a clear position.
The statements from Framework and from Nirav Patel (its CEO) made it very clear for us that Framework is not a company we feel represented by any more, and surely not a company that we want to represent as Ambassadors.
To be frank, it is not even necessary to dive into the petty drama about the recent events in order to provide an explanation of our decision. We are deeply disappointed by a company that is self-proclaimed as the resistance of the tech industry, the good David that intends to stand against the big tech Goliaths that are devouring it. Framework’s behaviour brought to surface an embarrassing and absurd inability to take an explicitly political position, blinded by the Western patriarchal narrative that technology in itself is not political. By trying to keep everyone happy (or at least not to make anyone mad) inside a fictitious “big tent”, the company proved to be no better than any of its Silicon Valley peers, dismissing comments about DHH, and comments about fascism and racism as not strictly related to the main mission.
We were proud to be ambassadors because we believed that Framework not only made products that empowered those who purchase them to fully own and repair their devices, but most importantly because we wrongly expected that this would imply changing the paradigm and the narrative about tech companies altogether.
We were offered the possibility of having a 1:1 conversation with Nirav Patel. We did not take it, because it is self-evident that our opinions are in contrast with the statements that he already made. Too bad, Framework is going to lose much more business than it would have if it simply acknowledged a mistake, took a deep inward look, and questioned its own values and stance.
In a world that is burning, thorn by conflict and greed, it is not enough to be “less evil”, to be radical only in some cases, and be moderate in others. We wanted to be ambassadors of a company that does not see fascism and proprietary software as two distant topics, but that recognised the entanglement of politics and technology, of capitalism and authoritarianism. It seems that this is not the case.
Farewell, Framework. We will miss the shining brave idea we had of you.
The following statement was cross-posted on Framework’s Community Forum.
#Framework #politicalTechnology #SiliconValley #CalifornianIdeology
@notplants I remember having a lot of technical issues with TUI's like 10 to 15 years ago. They would never work correctly on the shell that I had access to. For example, a some sort of weird Unix shell for windows that I may have been using at the time. Or maybe the TUI was part of a installer for Linux that I had to click through, but it wasn't working w/ the virtualbox display or something. Or maybe I'm trying to set up a automated build of a piece of software. And I have to somehow configure my automation to click through the TUI, but it's really brittle and hard to manage.
These days I feel like TUIs have less technical issues where it's completely broken... The standards for terminal emulators have increased. But they still have all the same usability issues typically. They seem to thrive on hidden modes and missing affordances. Even just basic foundational things, like pagers being inserted by default on certain Linux commands, I find it to be very detrimental and tech-elitist.
The first time a user gets put into a pager, that will end their shell session completely because they will not know how to get out of it.
So every single cheat sheet for basic things like looking at journald logs, listing git commits, docker build etc etc also has to add in special syntax to prevent the pager from coming up or it has to explain what the fuck the pager is and how to get rid of it. Except none of them actually do that.
So, I think if we want TUIs to be a thing, we should probably figure out how to give them affordances and have certain standards they must meet (no hidden modes, must contain instructions showing how to exit and how to enter help if there's more than like 3-5 commands) for their inclusion into package repositories.
since alt-text length limit was not big enough, here's the rest:
> Now Bellsprout shows up and asks Tangela, "Hey, I want to learn how to do this too! Can I please run a capsul on your home server as well?" Bellsprout creates a new capsul on Tangela's home server. "This is so cool, I'm going to start my own capsul hub too, so I can help other people host home servers someday," Tangela says. Tangela registers the my-local-hub.org domain name, sets up dynamic DNS, installs the capsul hub software, and configures port forwarding on thier home router. Bellsprout installs the capsul cog software on thier home server, and migrates thier capsul vm to it. A network tunnel is created from my-local-hub.org to Bellsprout's home server. And thus, the process can repeat, again and again... From an experiment in a VM to a community resource. From a single-tenant home server to a multi-tenant one. And an insulated node stuck behind a NAT, to a new public service provider on the global internet.
plan for new version of capsul, explained by pokemon.
Read more at https://blog.breaksoftware.xyz/blog/returning-to-the-project-and-the-capsul-dispenser/
Forest
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arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.
This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.
Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.
Forest
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🏕️ my adventures in self-hosting: day 316 (realist edition) 👩🏭
a blog post in which I discuss how my #Sharkey misadventures provided some illuminating insights... including how grateful I am for self-hosted software that just works (hello @gotosocial). Also: I'm super grateful for the dot world group that allows me to have a Sharkey account that actually works as intended (thanks @ruud )!
Forest
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Oslo's electric buses can be turned off from China, tests show
https://www.nrk.no/stor-oslo/ruters-egne-tester-viser_-oslos-elbusser-kan-fjernstyres-1.17629321
Forest
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The Ruby community: currently in a knockdown / drag-out fight over whether platforming fascists goes against their goals of software engineering.
The Python Software Foundation, quietly continuing to be the adults in the room:
@somafm
5reasons to pick DOOM
@filippo but that doesn't work under this assumption that everything is using passkeys -- how to reset via email when you lose the passkey to log into your email ?
Because otherwise, can't the email still be phished ?
People need to be able to _back up_ thier creds in a system they control, like a paper notebook or a password manager that they can access independently of their device.
Not everyone has two devices -- some people dont even have their own device at all!
This is not a theoretical thing, it has real consequences for people... My mother can't log into her apple account or social security account anymore because her device hardware failed. The helpful folks at the apple store just had her create a new account....
She did NOT lose access to the accounts whose cress she wrote down on paper.
Sure, but... Allowing people to log in with a pass key without them having first set up a backup of thier passkeys that they understand and control..
Taken to its logical conclusion, it just means that instead of phishing being possible, keeping any account for longer than the average duration between mistakes will become impossible, You will see accounts die permanently on a regular basis and people will have to recreate their entire digital lives constantly. The same thing happened with 2FA before the introduction of backup codes.
If you want to have safe browsing, I don't think that you get to just punt and push all the hard work onto everyone else. People are just going to turn safe browsing off and stop trusting you when you start gaslighting them, telling them that their very own thing that they created must be a scam.
Yeah this is a place where Ubuntu/gnome is much better out of the box, the secret store thingy and associated APIs (like keyring on Mac OS) "just works" whereas when I tried KDE on Debian, I had a similar experience. The api key thing may be new or unique to fedora, I just remember having to make an account to submit a bug report. But at least d-bus wasn't broken.
Fedora is kind of bleeding edge new, that's why I prefer Debian, its far behind and thus more polished at least imo.
KDE is kind of more flamboyant and has seemingly more bugs than gnome, but I like its developers attitudes a lot more and most of the UI feels better to me except for certain issues w/ file chooser. Nice thing about KDE is they will actually accept contributions if u wanna fix issues w/ ui design.
And I will second or third the ppl who said to install the proprietary GPU driver from nvidia.
Forest
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higgs bosom
Forest
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My local library has started a seed library!
They already created a tool library.
If you think this kind of thing is only for affluent or leftist places, let me assure you, if our poor town of 10,000 in a poor, red, Southern state can do it, your town can do it too.
Forest
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The Linux Mint installation was refreshing, everything that Win11 wasn't. It asked my language and keyboard type then asked to connect to WiFi and it ACTUALLY TOOK "NO" FOR AN ANSWER. It asked for timezone and local account name and info and spent 10-20 minutes installing the base system.
It found my printer without asking.
I cannot express how happy amd relieved I am that I successfully installed the operating system and features I wanted AND THE COMPUTER DID EXACTLY WHAT I TOLD IT TO.
That is such a rare experience anymore. The OS does the one thing it needs to do - act as a layer between application software and my hardware. Machine setup asked for the absolute minimum information to configure a usable system. One reboot and I have what I want - a fresh working system.
It's like going through the McDonald's drive-thru, ordering a cheeseburger, fries, and Diet Coke, paying, driving away, opening the bag and finding a cheeseburger, fries, and a Diet Coke plus a straw, napkins, and a few ketchup packets. Nothing in that bag is unexpected or unwanted or out of place or actively disruptive to the enjoyment of a cheeseburger, fries, and Diet Coke. So simple a well-trained and attentive teenager could do it.
It's so weird and so comforting to use software not steeped in dark patterns and twee designer excess.
@alisynthesis you forgot to mention that basically his journey went..
1. Physics PhD
2. I will help create a fusion reactor to save the world from peak oil and global warming
3. Actually fusion is really hard. It will be easier to save the world by simply re-inventing the entire industrial civilization economy based on open tech
Forest
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Introducing oavif: faster target quality image compression
https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/oavif/
oavif can be up to 63% faster than traditional target quality encoders. Learn how in the attached blog post!
@gcvsa I'm not sure what kind of solutions you are looking for, but... If you're interested in the more fancy option, I would maybe start by looking into Libvirt and Virt-manager.
This may vary depending on the hardware that you're using, but I know that the gaming community has come up with lots of ways to run virtual machines on Linux hosts at full speed so that they aren't slowed by virtual frame buffers and what not. I think its called GPU passthrough ?
- member of
- https://cyberia.club
- webmaster @
- https://capsul.org/
I am a web technologist who is interested in supporting and building enjoyable ways for individuals, organizations, and communities to set up and maintain their own server infrastructure, including the hardware part.
I am currently working full time as an SRE 😫, but I am also heavily involved with Cyberia Computer Club and Layer Zero
Joined Feb 2021
