annoyed at FOSS, money, enshittification
FOSS doesn't seem to be "allowed" to be good. once it becomes good, it gets bought and locked behind a paywall.
And I guess that’s my wider point: these small things can feel like luxuries because they don’t save much time or effort - but cognitive load is a limited resource too, and lowering the threshold of effort a little can be the difference between doing something and not doing it at all
I once ran my own personal URL shortener but eventually killed it because it wasn't that useful, but I kept the links working, and in fact they still work _to this day_ because I converted them from a dynamic PHP web application to a little list of nginx URL redirects.
Google have comparatively infinite budget and can't figure out how to be a respectful web citizen.
EDIT: Yes, I know full well that Google are not *intending* to be respectful. You don’t need to tell me for the seventeenth time.
https://social.kernel.org/objects/39125e2b-0997-4c90-86f9-b16229bf4b52
devlog, programming language design (#3)
A brief sneak peek of what I'm working on :) This is very early days, of course! And it doesn't do very much yet. The syntax also still needs some work.
this week's expenditures on shareware preservation:
$4 for this canadian craptacular assortment of public domain and shareware games for Windows 3.1 and 95! admittedly, i was only interested in it because it featured a cockroach carrying a bindle on the front cover:
https://dialup.cafe/@vga256/112758835666872769
as it turns out, blessed were the many who got to witness this incredible Visual Basic 3 interface in its day. 🙏
although that has to be the most ominous sounding splash screen for a CD i've ever seen, like you're going to meet certain doom if you click through.
i've archived the CD image, and scans of the jewel case over at IA:
https://archive.org/details/bestofwin95_2
enjoy!
#retrocomputing #softwarePreservation #gamePreservation #shareware #dosgaming #win31
devlog, programming language design (#2)
Update: I now have a basic interpreter that does numbers, bindings, functions (and function calls), and a special type of function that I have been told looks a lot like fexpressions. Also basic arithmetic, and some (most?) of the syntactic sugar has been implemented in the parser.
*taps the sign*
Choosing to host a community on a "free" proprietary platform offered by a for-profit is choosing short term ease and long term pain, and often comes at the expense of privacy. These tools _will_ get shitty and extractive. And what then?
Community migrations are painful and lossy.
We must select tools for our community while considering a time horizon longer than the economic boom/bust cycle.
yes, the filesystem is stodgy and boring and has a billion shortcomings.
but it is a really solid substrate for building things on. its user-level metaphor is shallow and pretty transparent.
and proponents of replacing it always seem to end up thinking more about the features they imagine having, and less about the stodgy and boring reality of substrates.
show me that you understand that you are building new _foundations_ and i will be right there with you.
devlog, programming language design
I'm finally starting to work on my language design project for real! It borrows a lot of ideas from the Lisp world, though with more (familiar) syntax sugar and significantly less parens.
Some of the goals include dynamic typing but strictness in a few well-selected (albeit unconventional) places such as mutability, discouraging 'clever' and fragile code, and having a very small amount of 'fixed' core language mechanisms with the rest of the 'standard library' being separately versioned (modularly, not monolithically).
The end result will hopefully be a language that is both easy to pick up, *and* easy to reason about and maintain, with a minimal amount of semantics to learn, internal capability security, and able to run in a wide variety of environments (including embedded) despite the use of a garbage collector.
Non-goals include static typing, rigid adherence to existing paradigms, emulating existing languages, and supporting corporate use.
r/TransDIY is not in fact dead https://www.reddit.com/r/TransDIY/comments/1e6cbpg/welcome_back/ but now would be a good time to back it up before it inevitably happens again
obsessed with this thread https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/apologizing-for-piracy/m-p/13413680
property relations depend on us building prisons in our own minds.
i was this kid, in beirut, using cracked and pirated software to learn how to program. stuff that was never released in the middle east or stuff that wouldnt make sense to buy for a 10 year old. and guess what? microsoft didnt go out of business. and i have a career in media art and software engineering despite being from the armpit of the world. win win. intellectual property is fake, steal from corporations, kill the cop in your mind.
Speaking of which: if you're interested in building your own search engine for something, and want to test out this software, let me know! All it should require to know is basic (JS) programming knowledge, and jQuery syntax. The backend handles the rest of the complexity. The software will run on a laptop easily.
(For hopefully obvious reasons, I will not assist with unethical projects like scraping personal information)
“We are Volunteers for Paris 2024 and we resign due to the lack of Covid-19 measures … we are more and more worried of the lack of any actions from the organizers to address the epidemic of Covid-19 that is still going on across Europe and the world. We demand effective sanitary measures against the virus”
“Covid-19 pandemic threat denial is not an antidote to contamination”
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
Feel free to flirt, but if you want to actually meet up and/or do something with me, lewd or otherwise, please tell me explicitly or I won't realize :) I'm generally very open to that sort of thing!
Further boundaries: boosts are OK (including for lewd posts), DMs are open. But the devil doesn't need an advocate; I'm not interested in combative arguing in my mentions. I am however happy to explain things in-depth when asked non-combatively.
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.