@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.

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Slow Software - Mark McGranaghan & Adam Wiggins @ Ink&Switch: https://www.inkandswitch.com/slow-software/

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Questions are the answer, how to have deeper conversations with anyone about free software philosophy - Lori Nagel @ LibrePlanet 2023: https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/questions-are-the-answer-how-to-have-deeper-conversations-with-anyone-about-free-software-philosophy/ (video)

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Deleted files in a freshly cloned git repo - Manuel Matuzović: https://www.matuzo.at/blog/2023/deleted-files-clone/

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Recommendations for Tools for Backing Up and Archiving to Removable Media - John Goerzen "The Changelog": https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10500-recommendations-for-tools-for-backing-up-and-archiving-to-removable-media

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

A path to niche skill-sets and community - Cendyne: https://cendyne.dev/posts/2023-05-29-a-path-to-niche-skillsets-and-community.html

alcinnz, (edited ) to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Got CatTrap running again, & passing its tests! To use the new Balkón API.

Now it supports richtext!

Next to make sure I'm handling font sizes right, add inline whitespace, & reconstruct the tree I passed to Balkón.

https://git.argonaut-constellation.org/~alcinnz/CatTrap

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Now I've reconstructed the tree of laid-out inline elements! Except I still need to compute their boxes...

timbray, to rust
@timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

Wow, lousy (& educational) weekend for online communities. & ripping themselves apart due to not having thought through how to deal with garbage people.

Axiom: Any online anything that has people in it will have garbage people. The time to figure out how to deal with them is before they start throwing garbage.

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@timbray I on the other hand consider figuring this out more important than slapping a CoC online!

(Though I did put careful thought into the CoC I chose)

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Surveillance advertising has lots of overhead.

There's extra clientside processing gathering data (this bit has been measured).
There's extra networking downloading those javascripts & uploading their data.
There's extra serverside processing deciding which ads to show you.
The ads need to be downloaded (which gets more expensive as they get more "engaging").
Increasingly there's the time waiting to be able to dismiss the ad.

All there solely to get you to buy more stuff! Unacceptable!

1/2

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Oh, and don't forget all the intermediaries put in place to avoid accountability!

Advertising may have its legit role in ensuring we're aware of things, but the current industry does more to undermine that role.

As an amateur browserdev I oppose surveillance advertising! If you want to advertise online place static ads on strategic sites.

I certainly won't go the way Chrome is... Might be a bit computationally cheaper, but the ends are still bad!

2/2

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

I'm preparing to skim the bulk of LibICU.

I'll start describing this tomorrow, & leave less-core components to study after Pkg-Config.

P.S. If you're wondering why my recent such threads are shorter: I'm summarizing more heavily. Going over more code, taking more time to write each toot.

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Distributing freedom: How package managers empower software users - Sebastian Crane @ LibrePlanet 2022: https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/distributing-freedom-how-package-managers-empower-software-users/ (Video)

Regarding language-specific package managers, I'm in favor. As a useful & simpler variation on this problem. Though it'd probably be helpful to have standards the transition into system packages. Haskell already provides Nix packages for every "hackage".

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

P.S. I have heard of a tool "Fucking Package Managers" to package software for multiple distros simultaneously, but I struggle to find it in search engines.

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs - Phillip Carter @ HoneyComb: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/hard-stuff-nobody-talks-about-llm
Simon Willison's description: https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/27/hard-stuff-llms/
Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36096811
I would say I really don't mind being "behind on this curve"!

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

3Demos: A collaborative visual calculus system - Nikolas Nyby @ LibrePlanet 2023: https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/3demos-a-collaborative-visual-calculus-system/ (video)

steely_glint, to random
@steely_glint@chaos.social avatar

My Chrome has just updated and is now offering me some "Ads Privacy" options.

What they tell me is how f-ing invasive the Ad web is.

Why would I want one site to tell another what I'm interested in ? No Gossiping behind my back !

And no Google I don't want to help measure the effectiveness of ads since effectiveness is a synonym of making me do something I didn't intend to.

The Googlers obviously think this s**t is normal - am I alone in thinking they have lost their minds?

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@steely_glint Yuck!

They've been trying to shove this in for a while now to great pushback... And if I'm asked, I'm definitely amongst that pushback as an amateur browserdev!

devinprater, to random

Lol so I saw a post on here a few days ago that was like “You shouldn’t ask people to describe their images, you should just describe them in a reply.” Okay sure, I’ll do that using AI tools.

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@devinprater I can see the point here (and it is what I do), but I certainly wouldn't ask it of you!

smallcircles, to random
@smallcircles@social.coop avatar

Ping @alcinnz want to pass recent finding to ya:

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/110445148829899767

I guess what Hixie is proposing is not in line with direction you wanna give to your browser impl? Not sure. But this intriguing. For a different project I've been looking a bit into - what I call a ". Everywhere." paradigm shift based on , and Component Model.

(Very much in 'hype cycle' stage for early adopters with growing attention in corporate world. Not so much so in circles yet)

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@smallcircles Yeah, not the direction I'm going. But if I'm asked about a web platform for "intricate web applications" out of existing standards, that'd be more-or-less what I'd propose!

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

I should be able to get CatTrap running again tomorrow, I've theoretically adjusted all the code to use the new Balkon APIs! Just need to work through compiler errors...

Though I would want to make some tweaks afterwords. Add some output restructuring, & I'm needing to reconsider conversion factors between Harfbuzz & CatTrap...

ajroach42, to random
@ajroach42@retro.social avatar

You know how there's a bunch of critical infrastructure powering the internet (and presumably a lot more than the internet) is badly maintained and underfunded (often by just a few people)?

We know about several examples in the open source world, but I'm sure we all also know about several examples in each of our personal lives, in each of our places of business.

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@ajroach42 I hear horror stories about Australian disaster management...

No one is keen to fund that work! Because they don't see the immediate need! But when there is a need, their government ends up relying on hobby projects.

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

To be clear: I am implementing almost all of CSS in Haphaestus. There are few things which don't make sense for me, mostly old layout properties for which there are more convenient alternatives now.

But there are very good internationalization & accessibility reasons for document layout to be as complex as it is!

I need to be able to render different languages, & to be able to combinations of them.

Also: Seperating style from semantics is vital for my vision!

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

I've just uploaded my threads on...
Linux's "capabilities" privileges: https://adrian.geek.nz/gnu_docs/system#kernel-side
FreeType's support for traditional Windows fonts: https://adrian.geek.nz/graphics_docs/text#windows-fonts
My initial Skimming of Apache Solr: https://adrian.geek.nz/network_docs/searchmysite#miscallaneousoverview

I've just prepared to skim LibICU to finish my discussions of the text-rendering stack. I'll study Pkg-Config between that, & resume skimming Solr after Pkg-Config.

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

How to Build a Native Web Component From Scratch - Go Make Things & Teach Jenn Tech: https://gomakethings.com/how-to-build-a-native-web-component-from-scratch/ (Embedded YouTube & GitHub)

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

JShelter for browsing securely - Libor Polčák @ LibrePlanet 2023: https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/jshelter-for-browsing-securely/

Makes some LibreJS talking points I disagree with (I prefer Haketillo aiding me in actually exercising The Four Freedoms), but JShelter is a vital project!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@freakazoid It was discussed at last year's LibrePlanet. A browser plugin aiding you to block, edit, & share any JavaScript on the pages you visit. So your JS runs instead of the site's.

Includes a codeforge under the assumption that many people would want to edit the same site in the same way.

alcinnz, (edited ) to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

For it's more traditional UI I have a couple subprojects planned for Haphaestus:

  • "Bureaucromancy" will provide menus for filling in webforms.
  • "Hearth" would provide a startpage with an addressbar, bookmark-management, topsites, webfeeds, etc.

Popquiz: Which show did I source these names from?

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Single vote on that popquiz, which was correct!

In part I named my current Haphaestus after the spacestation Wolf359 is set aboard.

Also both of us named it after the greek volcano god.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • thenastyranch
  • magazineikmin
  • osvaldo12
  • khanakhh
  • Youngstown
  • mdbf
  • slotface
  • rosin
  • everett
  • ngwrru68w68
  • Durango
  • anitta
  • InstantRegret
  • GTA5RPClips
  • cubers
  • ethstaker
  • normalnudes
  • tacticalgear
  • cisconetworking
  • tester
  • Leos
  • modclub
  • megavids
  • provamag3
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •