alcinnz

alcinnz, 1 year ago to random

A theme I saw yesterday & unwittingly contributed to: Old protocols are perfectly satisfactory. The issue is that as technology is brought to the masses it gets filtered through the lens of capitalism!

Personally I quite like:

• HTTP
• HTML (caveats)
• CSS (caveats)
• RSS
• XMPP
• eMail

I tend to be quite cynical about what gets sold as innovations, but I won't say there ever was a golden era of computing we've fallen from grace from.

~2000 had good standards though!

alcinnz, 6 months ago to random

Repeating a thought from a week or so ago: Maybe opensource devs & indie creators need our own payment processor?

Stripe's pretty nice, but I'd rather not rely on VC startups. Maybe a cooperative alternative?

To be clear this would be a business endeavor satisfying Visa/Mastercard/etc rather than a technology.

You may argue this shouldn't be needed, but it is. I often see fellow techies overlook this need when proposing Patreon or Bandcamp or (prompting this toot) YouTube alternatives.

alcinnz, 1 year ago to random

Service-as-a-Software-Substitute (SaaSS) is a judgemental term coined by the FSF to indicate there is no technological reason for some software to be an internet service. Only presumably financial ones.

Notably not all Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) qualifies as SaaSS, and many cases we may need to make SaaSS judgements feature-by-feature rather than product-by-product.

This is an important concept since proprietary software has now shapeshifted into SaaSS. Any favourite examples?

alcinnz, 1 year ago to random

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.

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alcinnz, 1 year ago to random

A common point of friction in opensource is that we promise people greater influence over the software they choose to use, but then maintainers already overworking themselves often fail to take all the input onboard. This often leaves both camps feeling disillusioned.

But moving past this dynamic is challenging.

And onboarding new help takes special skill that rarely pans out.

I don't what to advise (contributing money or skill helps), so something to be aware of?

alcinnz, 9 months ago to random

Every Phone Should Be Able to Run Personal Website - Rohan D: https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/every-phone-should-be-able-to-run-personal-website/

I also like the idea of pushing to make static webservers a standard feature in every consumer router!

alcinnz, 1 year ago to random

It's been calculated that individual climate action can sum to 25-27% of the needed carbon reductions. Sure this is nowhere near enough, but it is significant!

So I'd please like to stop seeing posts which implies that individual vs collective action is an either/or. We need both!

https://takethejump.org/
(There'll be a kiwi-localized link soon, followed by other countries)

alcinnz, 7 months ago to random

I keep revisiting the concept of designing a visual functional language, & I'm starting to think that maybe I should actually implement it. It'd be a smaller project than my browserdev...

Where you've start with a singular concept of a (pattern-matching) "brick" which can express the entirety of computation by composing them in different ways.

And the editor would include a debugger where you can watch expressions run with random input. I'd be tempted to implement a JIT as well.

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alcinnz, 11 months ago to random

Since I shared plenty of links discussing audio this morning, I think I'll briefly describe how digital audio works.

A speaker or microphone is a fluctuating magnet(s) inside a coil(s) of wire producing or receiving sound waves. Resisters inside a digital-analog-converter can convert digital numbers into voltages for a transister to amplify. Also we can wrap a DAC with a circuit to find the digital number which matches the anolog voltage.

We tend to "sample" audio in 16bits at 44.1khz.

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alcinnz, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

As I plan my next couple metathreads regarding a hardware-browser/communicator (expanding scope!), Opus-compressed (which I believe is a common codec IRL) audio for phone calls was giving me some qualms.

Reading the spec... While it'd certainly need additional hardware in our hypothetical architecture, its nowhere near what I feared!

I guess I'll write a bonus thread sometime soon ensuring I can handle DEFLATE compression!

@vertigo @screwtape I welcome tips!

alcinnz, 8 months ago to random

For decades now we've been authenticating into sites using passwords, a secret shared between the user & the website.

Passwords are fine if you only have a handful, say for the devices you use to interact with these sites or your password manager. But when practically every site we interact with wants us to register an account your not going to create secure passwords... Especially with the misguided "security requirements" on most sites!

Please use a password manager! I endorse Bitwarden.
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alcinnz, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

I'm curious how compelling my hardware-Internet Communicator hypothetical is!

So: Given the opportunity to implement TCP/IP, HTML/CSS, (not JS, makes the hypothetical less interesting), Gemini, XMPP, eMail JPEG, PNG, WOFF, Xiph media, DVI, USB, etc from scratch on a novel string-centric CPU (with a couple coprocessors) designed specifically for it... Would you be interested?

Respond to expand on what interests you, or if there's an alternate computer architecture which interests you more.

alcinnz, 6 months ago to random

While I certainly don't expect everyone to self-host, I think the difficulty of doing so is routinely exaggerated.

I frequently see tools for coping with corporate-scale needlessly treated as necessities.

I promise you: Self-hosting is easy for anyone with modicum of tech talent!
I speak from experience!

And I'm sure it can be made easy for everyone.
ISPs do incur the most unavoidable complications...

alcinnz, 10 months ago to random

Free idea for others to run with (I don't have the time): Visual functional programming!

Drag & drop "blocks" into "(pattern) -> (value) (fallback...)" definitions to define new blocks. Or provide intelligent autocomplete as an option.

That concept should be Turing Complete, & readily graspable (especially with a debugger). Programs written in it could be entirely self-contained.

Main challenge: Hooking up I/O people find meaningful.

I think it fits in @jos 's vision discussed yesterday.
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alcinnz, 6 months ago to random

Something that really strikes me is that there are certain policies which if we can get them adopted could unravel a lot of ideology for the better!

One I know by the term "modeshift" (thanks @notjustbikes !), that is designing our cities for more than just the car! Make other transport choices equally reasonable options, if not more so!

Another I'd posit is a Universal Basic Income. If we're not coerced into capitalism, we'll have more freedom to try other things!

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alcinnz, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to random

O.K., it seems like there's decent interest in my continue my hardware-browser hypothetical.

Follow-up question: In which direction should I take it? Multi-choice!

Feel free to expand or suggest more in replies!

alcinnz, 1 year ago to random

The amount of effort which goes into making our home computers work is absolutely incredible!

We mine the purist silicon sand we can find & extensively purify it further. We grow massive crystals from it's molten form, then slice it like deli ham using special saws.

In our cleanest & most tectonically-stable buildings we use complex expensive equipment to etch absolutely microscopic runes (mostly for memory) shaping how electricity flows through this otherwise non-conductive crystal.

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alcinnz, 2 months ago to random

I believe in the value of files, but I'm not convinced that folders are the best way to organize them.

Files (in open-standard formats) are our most powerful weapon against walled gardens! If you can take your things effortlessly from app to app! Allowing you to switch apps at a whim or combine multiple apps together.

There can be great business risk in not recognizing how mission-critical your files are. How you want them to outlast any particular service or software.

Ooooo, idea!

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alcinnz, 4 months ago to random

There's numerous ways to achieve the task of a "computer mouse", with the design I described yesterday being quite outdated. So what are the common designs today?

Most mice (or wireless "hamsters", lol!) shine a laser light askew at a surface to reveal any roughness it might have. An image sensor rapidly compares the last 2 frames to determine how far the previous has to be shifted to match the next.

Involves a lot of very clever arithmetic, & a "digital signal processor" to run it on!

1/5?

alcinnz, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to random

Reflecting on the concept of "Situated Software", & simpler platforms like Mu or UXN/Ververa I'm following...

https://100r.co/site/uxn.html

The thing that strikes me (I have seen others suggest this) is that many could do with a higher-level UI model. Some apps need raw I/O, but most don't. And would benefit from letting a wider diversity of people write renderers which actually work for them.

Design work is tricky here though.

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alcinnz, 3 years ago to random

I finished reading World Wide Waste by Gerry McGovern. I'd consider it essential reading for anyone working with computers!

https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/

It's well cited (though I still need to check those citations) & uses maths effectively to make it's point.

That computers + (surveillance) capitalism is actually worse for the environment than the predigital era. That we can and must move slow and fix things, and fund that vital work directly.

alcinnz, 5 months ago to random

Tonight I'll study the last few of the more trivial networking tools in INetUtils!

After initializing internationalization & parsing commandline flags tftp (literal named "trivial") chooses which port to connect to whilst registering an interrupt handler & initializer a "mode" global before running a REPL referring to a lookuptable of callbacks.

There's other REPL commands in tftp but (after parsing its args) "put" opens the specified file, configures a timer & timeout, ...

1/?

alcinnz, 9 months ago to random

It seems the time to remind you: I'm builing my own browser engines "The Argonaut Constellation"!

I see a need to illustrate an alternate vision for the web if we are to get the improvements we want. I see a need for a more modular engine to aid experimentation both regarding the web & elsewhere.

And well... Someone had to do it!

alcinnz, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago) to random

I'm curious: How much interest would there be in the visual functional programming I've been discussing implementing in December? Aiming to design a single graspable & expressive concept covering the entirety of computation! Like a LEGO brick.

It'll include some primitives for showing dialogs, importing/exporting files, generating random input, & TCP/TLS sockets. But I won't develop the stdlib much further than that.

What might you do with it? Vote & ideally expand in replies.

alcinnz, 4 months ago to sircmpwn

SourceHut is a suite of software-project management microservices centred on an OAuth server, common configuration, common branding, & eMail started by @sircmpwn . About as loosely coupled as any suite gets!

I self-host SourceHut components I find relevant to my Argonaut Constellation! For ease of forking it to explore potential enhancements to the web, & for it to actually be fully-functional in my browsers!

I'll keep my synopsis of its mechanics highlevel in fear of writing a userguide.

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