Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

getting really nice comments on my first post on my hobby VM project (https://enikofox.com/posts/introduction-to-bismuth-vm/) including from people who have worked professionally in the space, which is equal parts great and baffling to me

Its this part for me that tells the whole story: #atproto was designed for a new kind of advertising market, and when their VC money and puttering domain registration revenue streams dry up, control over the main firehose relay is a big gaping profit vector waiting to be capitalized on.

Telling people that, yes, they are doing *all* the horrible things you thought they would just makes us feel helpless.

When sharing news I will ask myself "is this *actionable* ?" If it isn't? It might not be worth talking about.

Trump is a reality TV star and the nation is enthralled with the drama. The court cases, the cabinet picks, "how dare they!" "How awful!"

You know how we look back at CRT TVs and go "Really? A fucking particle accelerator being guided by a bunch of RF signals to point at different parts of a phosphor screen was the easiest way you could see to display information?"

The modern CPU is even more bonkers. "We took sand, melted it and regrew it into a crystal of pure silicon. We then sliced it into sheets thiner than a human hair and used chemicals so toxic they are not allowed to be kept in normal structures, to poison and etch patterns into them. Those patterns are so fine and delicate that we create them by shining UV light on to the silicon through a mask. We can't use normal light because we are working with sizes less than the wavelength of blue light, and even then we have to do clever tricks with refraction patterns to make the pattern small enough. That we can do this at a scale that averages out to more than one 'chip' in arms reach of every human on the planet is completely bonkers. That any of this works half as well as it does is frankly a miracle. Particle accelerator screens and vacuum tubes make more sense honestly"

Saw this & it's so true. I'm reposting with alt text.

Like, I'm not the only one who noticed the intellectual monopoly industry utterly panicking and practically falling over themselves to make it go away, right?

Reminded of this by another (unrelated) toot: I feel like not enough tech people drew revolutionary inspiration and insights from Popcorn Time and the sheer panic around it

I mean well done for being honest I guess, but I'd say anything less than 100% potato isn't exactly a selling point

It's obviously not as bad as some FOSS project names, but it's kind of sad that the most useful and functional video player is called "video LAN codec". What a joyless programmer-y nothing of a name. Popcorn Time isn't a thing anymore, right? They should donate their name to VLC

Cool to see a company whose annual revenue is $250B announce a $1.25M open source security fund (that’s about three *minutes* of revenue), in a press release that without blinking or apparent irony (1) says maintainers need more time and (2) requires maintainers to take a multi-week, many-hour training program.

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/announcing-github-secure-open-source-fund/

#alt4me because i don't have the spoons and also nobody cares about my posts anyway

I'm really struggling to find a certain #monospace #font. I have seen it somewhere online. The special feature was the number characters, which were designed to visually represent the character's value by the area the ink covers of the rectangle around the character. E.g. "1" was very thin, covering 10% of the background, "4" covered 40%, "9" was reaaly bold and covered 90% of the background, and so on.

Does anyone know of this font? I saw it posted in the context of #dataviz #heatmaps #rstats

This applies to other more tangentially related stuff too. For example, I will be really excited about writing a book, and then put it off. Because why??

Because I don't deserve the fun it will bring? Because I'm savoring it?

Savoring something by hoarding it and tucking it away is joyless.

I'm not doing that anymore. I pick me and I pick joy.