HakFoo

@HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org

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xsecur, to books
@xsecur@noc.social avatar

Enshittification of Libby & Overdrive. This was long time coming. This deserves attention and we need more independent libraries.
https://tweesecake.social/@weirdwriter/112465274302648993

@bookstodon @books #books #ebooks

HakFoo,

The problem is never on the tech end, assuming you wanted to make a good platform. That’s probably a 400-level CS class project, especially if you’re only dealing with a single library system that doesn’t have multi-million-user-scale and five-nines reliability needs.

The pitfalls are 99% about the business relationships and having to pre-enshittify the system to service them-- getting the publishers to trust the platform will enforce DRM and related random shitty deals (i. e. that ebooks have to be retired after n loans, as though they wear out like a paperback). I’d expect there’s virtually no trust for a new player.

What’s needed is mandatory licensing. The libraries and their software dev partners decide what terms they want, they get a standard price card, and the publishers have to eat it.

HakFoo,

I feel like the Atmega range asks an awful lot for what you get in 2024.

Of course, that could be because I designed a project around the Teensy++ which was always pricey and promptly disappeared from stock. I redesigned to use a CH32V305 breakout instead- 1/3 the price and probably way more performance which my terrible code is just busy-waiting into the ether.

I like WCH’s product line in general; it’s full of zany stuff.

HakFoo,

ARM was designed because the 6502 was approaching end of viability, and Acorn (the maker of the BBC Microcomputer) needed a next-gen product. At the time, RISC was the trendy thing, and I suspect the 286 and 68000 were too expensive to adapt for their products; they weren’t pushing £5000+ workstations like IBM or Unix vendors.

It was light and small because they had a small team; low power was a happy accident.

HakFoo,

No wonder DEC went broke. My VT220 didn’t come with any hunks crawling out of the screen Ringu style.

HakFoo,

In a world of blood-drinkers, would we eventually have the “Coke” or “Bud Light” of blood, a mass-produced consistent product, or eould we go straight to craft-beer and elitism?

local anti public transportation comment

Saw this comment on a local news post about the mayor’s state of the city address and the mayor mentioned some of the new public transportation initiatives including adding another line to the train, I was under the impression that Amtrak was a success until the rails became denationalized and corporate greed limited the...

HakFoo,

Amtrak was historically a lifeboat. By 1971, passenger rail service was haemmoraging money. This was the year the Penn Central formally went insolvent (an all-but-foregone conclusion from its inception, but still, at the time it was the biggest bankruptcy in history at the time).

The government promised the freight railways they’d take the burden off their hands, and they mostly all lined up and said “sure, take our ancient coaches and obsolete E8s!” They never controlled the rails outside the Northeast Corridor and a few other corner-cases. Perhaps there was a bit more good-faith cooperation earlier on with the freight carriers, but it was never a big priority for them.

I find any claim of short-term viability questionable: it would take them years just to refurbish and retire obsolete equipment. The only possible angle for savings would be by combining redundant routes from different private operators. However, they probably had to quote optimistic situations to paper over the legitimate real reasons we need passenger rail. (among other things, it’s scalable to rural communities in a way air isn’t)

HakFoo,

I had a similar positive experience with Gamescope, which tamed a game that freaked out every time I moved the moude onto the other monitor.

Maybe Wayland’s healthy place is as a secondary window system you launch inside your normal X11 session.

HakFoo,

I think I’d be a lot more excited about Wayland if I felt like I can get a compositor that matches my tastes.

I want to iconify things to the desktop, not relying on a taskbar-alike. Nothing seems to offer that. Hell, the taskbar is often a third party program.

I want to double-click to shade. Labwc just added this, a feature that X11 window managers have been offering since the 90s.

I want an aesthetic that’s got real depth and skeumorphism, rather that flat and featureless. Maybe something offers that, but there are plenty of X11 choices that have beveled buttons out of the box.

The charm of Unix systems used to be flexibility, buy Wayland seems to be an extinction-level event for traditional window management. Nothing fills the gap of FVWM or WindowMaker. But gosh, I can get 92 flavours of tiling compositor and windows that ripple when dragged.

HakFoo,

I wonder if it might be an unreproducible moment in history.

I suspect the Cambrian explosion of X11 window managers came from two things:

  • Propriatery and former-propriatery systems with unique look and feel (see, for example, Open Look/olvwm) There was also a tendency to copy any style you could (WindowMaker copied NeXTStep, IceWM mocked OS/2, and when those cute QNX demo discs came out, within days there were lookalike themes). It feels like the last major outside inspirations, MacOS and Win1,1 are converging on almost intrrchangeable insipidness.
  • The 1990s/2000s customization era. Machines were finally powerful enough to do mildly nifty things, but still attainable by hobbyists gluing together pixmaps and this bred stuff like Enlightnment E16 or Afterstep

Do these forces still exist in 2024? It seems like Unix Porn today is a bunch of neokvetch windows without even a titlebar to provide a personal statement.

HakFoo,

Could someone post a [rice list? I’ve got $35 right here and a hankering for the abolition of copyright.

HakFoo,

If they’re so awful, why do we need aggressive tarrifs to keep them off of American streets? I don’t think anyone was making people buy them over domestic alternatives…

(muffled sounds of discord)

WTF?! Xi Jinping himself busted down my front door, grabbed my debit card, and put down a deposit on a new BYD. And what’s worse, he picked one in that really insipid grey that you can never find in a parking lot.

HakFoo,

Cents since 1982 are mostly zinc with a thin shell of bronze. They’ll rot badly if compromised with a hole.

HakFoo,

So the Nippon Ham company is starting with sausages with bones, and working their way up to the perfectly round cylinder of roasted meat with a large straight bone through the centre that anime and video games have teased us with for decades.

Gotta start somewhere.

HakFoo,

Dark, pee-pee soaked heckholes please.

HakFoo,

And before that, a bad firmware flash could garble the MAC.

HakFoo,

And before that, a bad firmware flash could garble the MAC.

HakFoo,

I sort of liked GTK back in the day when it was still the Gimp Tool Kit first and foremost. When it was 1999 and your other choices were a broken Lesstif, an early C++ centric Qt, clumsy Tk, and pre-Cambrian Xaw, it was nice to have something full-featured and tasteful.

Now I hesitate to pull in a GTK app because it won’t theme right (I want to use the same bitmap fonts I liked in 1999, but apparently Pango stopped supporting them) and runs the risk of convincing the package manager to dump several gigs of GNOME crud on my drive.

I gather even the GIMP itself no longer tracks current GTK-- it’s become solely in service to GNOME and their absurd UI whims (* * * * client side decorations)

HakFoo,

GNOME always seemed to be a solution chasing a problem, particularly once the licensing fears for Qt/KDE were settled.

But now it’s one of the things Red Hat seems to impose on the world. Feels like everything controversial comes out of them or Canonical. I guess they have the commercial cash to prop up things like GNOME and Wayland and systemd and snaps until they gain traction, while more community-focused products can’t break the world for no reason.

HakFoo,

So next they’ll use AI-generated infantry?

HakFoo,

Xbps on Void does it for sure.

HakFoo,

I always wanted to see a dentist with the branding “Sharp Fangs - Dentistry for Goths.”

They’re like gyms-- all the marketing materials are 1000% interchangeable.

HakFoo,

Why can’t we subsidize American carmakers more?

HakFoo,

Monster Musume. It’s far better than the premise would lead you to believe. Rachnera best girl, incidentally.

HakFoo,

Someone needs to register a .owo filetype and use it for Very Important Business Things.

HakFoo,

There’s no circle to square.

American liberals are incapable of going for the jugular. Biden can’t do squat, and is surrounded with a party that doesn’t know how to do squat. Trump and the GOP has an easier time because outside of maybe a wall, they don’t have any deliverables to build; he goes in knowing his mission is to bust the place up.

Now, I can see why they’ve learned helplessness: there’s very little on a lot of real economic or envitonmental issues they can touch that won’t get capital riled against them.

But they seem to have gone the same way on the low-risk social issues too. They had 40 years to say “Roe is a compromise we’ve all agreed to shirk behind, maybe we should codify it to take it out of the discussion.” Ditto trans rights, gay marraige, etc. These could have been safely vaulted 10 years ago, before they became the bugabears they are now.

I think they revel in the “more-civil-than-thou” righteousness of inaction. Thry didn’t have to go too aggressive to protect that stuff because it would cause needless conflict. Actually closing the door to the henhouse isn’t respectful to the fox.

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