@alcinnz@floss.social
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

alcinnz

@alcinnz@floss.social

A browser developer posting mostly about how free software projects work, and occasionally about climate change.

Though I do enjoy german board games given an opponent.

Pronouns: he/him

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

eieio, to random
@eieio@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I put Breakout (aka Brick Breaker) inside Google Calendar! It lets you decline any meetings you shatter.

blog info + chrome extension link in thread!

video/mp4

grahamdunning, to random
@grahamdunning@post.lurk.org avatar

DIY styluses for playing mangled-up records

I was asked recently for some advice about turntable styluses for playing broken and mangled records. Flo from Plattenbau Kru - who use stickers, scratches, cracks and breaks to modify their vinyl - said the 'project is using up A LOT', as might be expected. Offering a couple of suggestions led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, thinking about how people use alternatives to standard cartridges and needles to generate different effects.

http://grahamdunning.com/2024/03/10/diy-styluses-for-playing-mangled-up-records/

andycarolan, to free
@andycarolan@social.lol avatar

Show visitors to your site that your content is human made and doesn't use AI!

Grab my badge pack for FREE (or pay as much as you want to help fund future stuff)

The pack contains 64 88x31px PNG and SVG badges in 8 colors and phrases “made by a human, drawn by a human, human content, written by a human, I am not a robot, never by ai, human content, there's no ai here!”

Finnish version upon request!

https://ko-fi.com/s/4662b19f61

matthewfeickert, to random
@matthewfeickert@fosstodon.org avatar

I'm looking for suitable reviewers for the Journal of Open Source Software (@joss) submission:

PyToughReact – A Python Package for automating reactive transport and biodegradation simulations

Anybody able to review this submission for JOSS, or suggest a reviewer?

https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/6125

racheled, to random
@racheled@mastodon.social avatar

If you’re a frontend developer who doesn’t give a shit about accessibility, why are you working on the part that people interact with? Do backend.

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

you've heard of security by obscurity. mathematical notation is elitism by obscurity

eniko,
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

people always tell me "mathematical notation is just like jargon, its just more efficient." no, mathematical notation is not like jargon

  1. jargon are words. anyone can put a word into a search engine and find a glossary of terms explaining what that jargon word means in some context. you can't do that with math notation unless you already know math notation

  2. jargon is almost never overloaded like mathematical notation is. the same letter or piece of punctuation can mean wildly different things in any given context and can even vary based on the font the symbol is displayed in inside one context

imagine if someone in software engineering used the symbol ⍼ instead of "garbage collector", except it only maps to "garbage collector" if it's written in sans serif. if it's written with serif, it means "compute shader" instead. but if its in comic sans it means "SIMD divide"

and also 98% of the time they used the ⍼ symbol it was inserted as a picture, not a copy/pastable unicode glyph. that's math notation

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

Software engineer: really when you get down to it computers spend most of their time just rendering text

Lay person: oh I guess that must mean it's real easy to render text since that's all computers do, right?

Software engineer: haha no it's impossible actually

mctwist,
@mctwist@mastodon.acc.umu.se avatar

@eniko I had to render my own text for an Android game I made, and while I used a font library to render my glyphs, I had to do the rest myself: text fitting; newlines; positioning; glyph texture map(including all its problems); vertices creation; uv mapping; batch rendering; color filters; and a lot more which I don't really remember from the top of my head. I can't imagine how much harder it could have been if I also had to render the glyphs from the font too!

doctormo,
@doctormo@floss.social avatar

@eniko

I was surprised to learn how dominant harfbuzz was. Everything uses it, from browsers to art tools to operating systems of all political and economic flavours.

Because text is hard.

mike_edwards,
@mike_edwards@mas.to avatar

@eniko
LP: Well, once you can render text, what do you do use it for?
SE: Times, dates, people's names and addresses
LP: Ahhh, and THAT'S the easy part, right?
SE: [weeps openly]

abucci, to midjourney
@abucci@buc.ci avatar

Nightshade 1.0 is out: https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/index.html

From their "What is Nightshade?" page:

Since their arrival, generative AI models and their trainers have demonstrated their ability to download any online content for model training. For content owners and creators, few tools can prevent their content from being fed into a generative AI model against their will. Opt-out lists have been disregarded by model trainers in the past, and can be easily ignored with zero consequences. They are unverifiable and unenforceable, and those who violate opt-out lists and do-not-scrape directives can not be identified with high confidence.

In an effort to address this power asymmetry, we have designed and implemented Nightshade, a tool that turns any image into a data sample that is unsuitable for model training. More precisely, Nightshade transforms images into "poison" samples, so that models training on them without consent will see their models learn unpredictable behaviors that deviate from expected norms, e.g. a prompt that asks for an image of a cow flying in space might instead get an image of a handbag floating in space.

-E

taichara, to random
@taichara@chirp.enworld.org avatar

I am starting to think I may look into Gemini instead of Gopher; not that I have any less interest in Gopher, but Gemini seems interesting and let's see what happens ...

I still have a lot to dig around and read about though, I'd hazard. And decisions to make, if I want to have a capsule of my own.

First to start with something to browse around geminispace ...

dillo, to random
@dillo@fosstodon.org avatar

Hello mastodon from the browser!

hexylena, to random
@hexylena@galaxians.garden avatar

https://postgrest.org/en/stable/how-tos/providing-html-content-using-htmx.html oh my word I love it I can finally get rid of those pesky languages and just use my beloved SQL for everything 🥰

hexylena,
@hexylena@galaxians.garden avatar

https://github.com/mkaski/pg_render HMMM OK YES LFG who needs htmx when we've got a rust based templating engine

hexylena,
@hexylena@galaxians.garden avatar

idk the older I get the more I want to cut out everything that isn't necessary. webserver? no html in an s3 bucket/folder on disk.

API endpoint? sounds like a great case for static files!¹

oh you need API endpoint that responds to a handful of predetermined query parameters like a webfinger? JK it's S3 AGAIN BTICHES with nginx to map those to files on disk²

wait an actually dynamic endpoint? fineeee let's rawdog the database with Postgrest

is it a good idea? probably not. is it beautifully cursed? hell yea I'm in. if it says cursed sign me up

¹ it's my favourite way to deploy APIs. I have three sites that do this.

² yeah I have done thisand you know what? I'm proud of it.

tjdungeonmaster, to random

Doomsday prepping, except instead of doing it by yourself you do it with your neighbors, and instead of building a bunker you build a just, compassionate, and sustainable community.

scy, to Ansible
@scy@chaos.social avatar

Are there people among you who have used both(!) and personally?

I’m currently using Salt for some of my personal & freelance infrastructure, but it feels like it’s losing the popularity battle, and I think about switching to Ansible.

I usually run Salt agent-less, local-only (config repo cloned to the machine). I assume that’s possible with Ansible, too?

How declarative is Ansible these days? I want to define target states, the system should figure out how to get there.

janriemer, (edited ) to ai

Seeing all this push to by big companies, there is a clear pattern emerging:
Companies have to somehow "proof" that are working by doing "scientific" studies, publishing papers and invite "special experts" who share their "success stories".

We have seen this pattern before: It was used in the tobacco industry as well! With the difference that the tobacco industry mostly tried to "unmake" scientific facts, whereas the AI industry seems to proactively create those "facts".

1/2

janriemer,

Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Industry Tactics

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/

"Within the industry, marketing experts had developed a powerful notion of social engineering, what early public relations theorist Edward Bernays had called the “engineering of consent.”"

Additionally, in the context of AI, companies like 's try to create in people: "Oh no, others are 55% more productive using AI! I don't want to be left behind!"

2/2

queue, to random
@queue@todon.eu avatar

As Best Buy removes physical media of shows and movies, I feel the need to post this XKCD comic, number 488.

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/best-buy-ending-dvd-blu-ray-disc-sales-1235754919/

RD4Anarchy, to random
@RD4Anarchy@kolektiva.social avatar

HOW DID WE GET HERE?
(a thread of threads, quotes, and links)

This is a collection of writings and research concerned with how we got where we are today, which is in fact the story of what has been done to us, and what has been taken from us.

By "us" we're talking about "the 99%", "workers", "wage slaves", all non-owners of private property, "the poor", unhoused people, indigenous people, even plenty of people who swear by capitalism and identify as "capitalist" yet have no capital of their own and no serious hope of ever having any worth speaking of. In other words almost everyone except for the very few who have had the power to exploit us and shape our lives to serve their agenda. We're going to examine institutions and concepts that have deeply altered our world at all levels, both our external and internal realities.

By "here" we are talking about climate crisis and myriad other environmental catastrophes resulting from hyper-excessive extraction, consumption and waste; a world of rampant inequality and exploitation, hunger and starvation; a world of fences, walls, tollbooths, prisons, police, bullshit jobs and criminalized poverty; a world overrun with cars and preventable diseases; a world of vanishing biodiversity and blooming fascism; a world where "democracy" results in being led by some of the worst of humanity; a world ruled by an imaginary but all-powerful and single-minded god: Capital.

Our inspiration and structural framework for this survey is this quote from "The Prehistory of Private Property", an important work from political philosopher Karl Widerquist and anthropologist Grant S. McCall:

"After hundreds of millennia in which all humans had direct access to the commons, it took only a few centuries for enclosure, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization to cut off the vast majority of people on Earth from direct access to the means of economic production and therefore to rob them of the power to say no. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned."

https://widerquist.com/books-3/#2b

Also recommended: "Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy"

https://widerquist.com/books-3/#4b

1/30

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

I've seen other terms, but I use the label "fossbro" to refer to a set of toxic attitudes which through their vocalness defines the software freedom movement to those outside it.

Comprising:

  • Ableism, thinking everyone should have the skills & desire to modify their software.
  • Entitlement, thinking they're the entirety of the community a FOSS project may wish to serve. Harassing you if you e.g. reduce the visibility of configuration options.

1/2

sara, to random
@sara@hachyderm.io avatar

accidentally wrote "saad" instead of "saas" in a text to my partner; they immediately coined "Software as a Disappointment"

and honestly, where is the lie

Archarzel, to random
@Archarzel@dice.camp avatar

Images released under "Foundational Use" or "F.U." license;

  • Non-commercial and Commercial use by individuals or businesses generating less than $750,000 USD in annual revenue: Use as a CC.0 license, effectively public domain, go nuts.

  • Else: kick rocks.

Support Indies 👕.

black illustration on grey background, depicting a dragon eating it's own fucking tail. For no particular goddamn reason.

shannoncurtis, to TwitterMigration
@shannoncurtis@mastodon.social avatar

hi, mastodon! brand-new here, curious/excited to see if this will be my place to connect to people & ideas going forward.

me: I'm a recording artist, PNW lover/resident, active participant in democracy, progressive, married to my favorite person & partner-in-crime @hilljam.

looking forward to getting to know more folks here to talk about fun, silly, & important stuff. and hopefully see cute cat pics.

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Wow! I found this talk very clarifying. I have seen some (not many) of the gripes arising from the situation Timothy describes bubble up into our broader FOSS community, and I think I now understand that better.

Now I'm left wondering how the complexity of a new OS actually designed for modern hardware would compare to Linux? There'd be no answer yet.

It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware - Timothy Roscoe @ USENIX ATC '21/OSDI '21: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo

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