@SilverEagle@floofy.tech
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

SilverEagle

@SilverEagle@floofy.tech

Hi! I'm Silver Eagle. He/🥚/They, Furry, LGBTQ+ 🏳️‍🌈, Aegosexual, Leftist, Neurodivergent, Open-source Software Developer and Disability/Accessibility Advocate.

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arch, to random
@arch@floofy.tech avatar

Mildly insane, but go with me - if you were going to serve a single HTML file from a Kubernetes cluster, how would you do it.

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

@arch you want to serve that static HTML page I'm assuming?

This is kind of a novel approach: https://lipanski.com/posts/smallest-docker-image-static-website

arch, to random
@arch@floofy.tech avatar

Let's find out what gender Discord thinks I am

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

@arch what how

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

@arch now we wait

arch, to random
@arch@floofy.tech avatar

Nearly at 24 hours awake ;;-

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

@arch Awh I hope you can get to sleep soon doggo

SilverEagle, to random
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

I was watching the iFixit teardowns of the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin and I had to stop myself at this shot, where the inside of the Humane AI says "Made with trust, truth + joy", and I don't think they could've picked three better words for what I feel like AI takes away from my life

SilverEagle, to random
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

With systemd now poised to replace sudo as well I can't help but be a little bitter about the way in which the concerns about systemd being an ever-scope-creeping behemoth of attack surface area controlled by one (admittedly rather unpleasant) person were swept to the margins and everyone pushed forward with it like nobody cared, and now our modern Linux distro choices just treat it like an inevitability and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it because it was "already decided" years ago

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

@sertonix what do you run?

SilverEagle, to random
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

Remember my toot the other day about how package managers should all make remove and uninstall aliases of each other because I keep forgetting which one is the right one for that specific package manager?

Well, I looked into it for Composer (the PHP package manager) and it turned out nobody had ever bothered to ask about this in the entire history of the project, so I submitted a pull request and today it got merged with "Sure, why not".

So there. Now NPM and Composer both don't care which you use. Ranty toots moving the world forward again. :P

SilverEagle, to random
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

Ugh my inner cynic is having a hard time with the whole Redis and Valkey thing.

I know Redis was a weird VC disaster and is not the same as the dev that once made it, but it's still really weird to see a lot of the same companies that prompt relicensing on the part of FOSS software by ruthlessly making billions off it while giving nothing back suddenly throw all their weight and support behind the fully-FOSS fork Valkey.

It really goes to show you that, for these big companies, open-source only really matters in as much as it represents free labor that they can continue to exploit for capital gains. If that's in danger, then they do something, but in the everyday reality where maintainers struggle endlessly, they don't lift a fucking finger because the system is working exactly as intended.

After years in FOSS myself, my rose-colored glasses on the "nobility" of how capitalism engages with open-source are completely gone. I just hate everything about that combination now.

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

@arch Yeah...on the one hand, the well-capitalized Valkey is likely to quickly outpace volunteer efforts on the other projects...on the other, god I don't sleep well at night thinking I'd be supporting a project that AWS only threw money at so they'd have something they could continue to exploit.

The problem is that I can't personally contribute meaningfully to a C-based project, or I'd be throwing more than just lip service behind Redict.

I was really hoping a Rust-based implementation of Redis would show up out of the woodwork, but so far none seems to have done so.

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

@arch I guess I just look at C/C++-based applications these days and think "Well, if I have to...", but if there's a golang or rust alternative out there I'll jump for it every time.

No, it doesn't guarantee a better or safer application, but I feel 100% like a language that looks out for things like memory safety is a bit of a "force multiplier" for dev efforts...you can get more out of fewer devs with a smaller cross-section of vulnerability.

Sure, Redis is a "solved problem" but if there's gonna be some scrappy underdog out there, it would be even more advantageous for it to be built in Rust, because it doesn't have ten thousand devs eyeing it up and down the way Valkey does right now.

SilverEagle, to random
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

I feel like all package managers across the whole world should make "remove" and "uninstall" aliases of one another because I absolutely can never remember which package manager uses which and they all respond to the wrong one like you're just completely nuts for having thought it was right

SilverEagle, to random
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

These days I use Docker as the main way of distributing my server-run open-source software, because it's about the only widespread, reliable way of shipping a stack of tools as complex as the one I'm using to a group of end-users who neither need to, nor want to, know anything about what's running under the hood and just want a turnkey solution.

Every few days, I'll get someone storming into our chats and demanding we support a non-Docker option or they'll take their "business" elsewhere.

The truth is, for years, we did. People hated Docker so much they demanded we keep another version running. And that other version was 10% of our user base and 75% of our GitHub issues. Users kept hosing their servers or installing crap on top of or alongside our software, and the support burden for a single developer was just absurdly high.

If you're mad that I only support Docker, don't yell at me, yell at those other people. They're why you can't have nice things.

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

And yeah, you better believe we tried the "This installation method is available, but not officially supported and is at your own risk, and if you aren't super tech savvy, you will fuck this up and should just use the Docker image".

All that yielded was people starting their GitHub issues with "I know you said it's unsupported, but..." or outright lying to us about what platform they're on to get support, only for us to discover the problem was caused by that after hours wasted.

In the end, we spun out the non-Docker (Ansible-based) support into a secondary repo, and said anyone who wants to take it over and maintain it is completely welcome to.

It's been two years and not a single person has ever, ever stepped up. But a ton of people have complained in that time that we don't have a non-Docker option.

This is just...such a fucking constant fact of life with end-user-facing FOSS. "I demand the free labor of people who aren't me!"

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

@arch Yeah, the whole thing is that I know my market pretty well overall. I'm not there for the hacker stations that want to have full control over everything (they're writing Liquidsoap scripts) or the terrestrial radio broadcasts (they're using commercial software that costs thousands)...I'm there for that middle ground, the hobbyist or semi-professional station operator who just wants to put music in and have radio come out, and doesn't much care how that happens.

For that audience, Docker is a perfect little "black box" of implementation. We can update any dependency we want and as long as users update, they're all on the very latest versions of everything.

I'd absolutely do a Containerfile (I need to look into this, you saying it is the first I've heard of it) or a Nix package (though Nix can just run my container), but yeah, Ansible was powerful but made assumptions about a base server state that were often not true, and that caused a ton of problems.

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

@arch we actually do support running our container workload as-is on Podman with Podman Compose...our little installer will detect if you're running Podman and use that instead of Docker :)

arch, to random
@arch@floofy.tech avatar

Let's see how smoothly we can upgrade the floofy.tech Kubernetes cluster.

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

@arch uhhh good...good luck

SilverEagle, to random
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

Oh my god. My fucking MOUSE'S software has a ChatGPT AI prompt maker built into it now.

Someone, anyone has to get it through to these tech critters that this shit is ridiculous beyond parody and needs to fuckin' stop.

SilverEagle, to random
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

The genuine Windows 11 experience is now indistinguishable from malware

Get this fucking shit OFF MY DESKTOP

SilverEagle, to random
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

In my free and open-source software, on the main dashboard a small message occasionally appears noting that we're FOSS software and we depend on donations. We made this because our donations have been steadily decreasing despite our audience and costs increasing.

Since then, we get lots of requests for how to turn the "annoying" message off.

Our response is always the same: we don't provide support in helping you hide the fact that our software is open-source and donation-based, but if you're resourceful enough, you can remove that message via custom CSS, which we do support.

Today I got an unusual reply: "Thank you for not providing assistance"

lmao so not only do you want to rob me of credit and support for the immensely complex software I just give away for free but now you want to be an asshole to me directly about it?

Another one for the pile of (at least for now, banned) users who need to learn how to talk to open-source maintainers.

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

Just to answer some FAQs about this:

The "we depend on donations, please donate" notification is just a small section of screen real estate that only appears on the administrator dashboard, only ever appears on the homepage of that dashboard (not on every page), and only appears once every few dozen hours or so. It's about the least nagging "nagware" to exist. And it still gets complaints.

Adding it did actually result in a minor uptick in donations, as many station operators assumed we were a big company just giving the software away but charging for other things.

It's incredibly easy to disable using the freely available "Custom CSS Branding" features we have inside the software. The users asking us how to do it simply want us to not only do the free labor of making the software, but to do the free labor of hiding that fact for them.

The public-facing components that non-admin users see have no nags of any sort, just a faded-out "Powered by $x" note in the footer.

SilverEagle, to random
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

In light of the xz thing, it seems like, for a fleeting moment, everyone cares about how fucking abused FOSS maintainers are, and how it's just so normal that we get talked to like the world is on our shoulders, and yet we are worth absolutely nothing.

I feel like capitalizing on this emotion just to totally drag every asshole who barges into my GitHub and wants to talk to me like I owe them something.

Because it's honestly every fucking day. "Oh, you're not as good as your paid competitors." "If you don't keep up with them, I'm taking my business elsewhere." "Our business depends on your software, how could you let this bug exist?" "I need an answer NOW or I'm declaring this software abandonware!"

I've been cursed out. People have repeatedly threatened to sue. One sent death threats! People find my cell phone number and call me on it. They harass me at all hours of all days on all platforms, expecting support they would never pay for.

That shit needs to STOP.

arch, to random
@arch@floofy.tech avatar

Sidenote, is it weird that I kind of like Comic Sans (or Comic Relief in this case) for Mastodon's interface.

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

@arch This made me refresh and, honestly...it's not terrible

maybe we should all take ourselves a lil less seriously on here

arch, to random
@arch@floofy.tech avatar

oh yeah? well my fedi instance has more emoji than yours

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

@arch :arch:

arch, to random
@arch@floofy.tech avatar

I am optimistic about this week.

I'm sorry about that.

SilverEagle,
@SilverEagle@floofy.tech avatar

@arch :myno_hug:

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