@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
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My threads on Shadow over the past week have been uploaded to: https://adrian.geek.nz/gnu_docs/init
And on FreeType's Type1 support: https://adrian.geek.nz/graphics_docs/text#type1-fonts

It'd be appropriate to incorporate a certain sequence into that init page...

I've previously about passwords at: https://adrian.geek.nz/network_docs/bitwarden

Tomorrow: Type42 fonts in FreeType
Next: LibCap
Then: Windows fonts in FreeType
Later: Not GCC again!!

More at: https://adrian.geek.nz/docs

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Slow Internet? Find Out What Side of the Digital Divide You’re On - Aaron Sankin & Leon Yin @ The Markup: https://themarkup.org/build-your-own-dataset/2023/05/11/slow-internet-find-out-what-side-of-the-digital-divide-youre-on

See the Neighborhoods Internet Providers Excluded from Fast Internet - Joel Eastwood, Leon Yin and Aaron Sankin @ The Markup: https://themarkup.org/still-loading/2023/05/11/see-the-neighborhoods-internet-providers-excluded-from-fast-internet

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Jsonformer: A Bulletproof Way to Generate Structured JSON from Language Models. - rahul (cohere.io): https://github.com/1rgs/jsonformer (GitHub)
Simon Willison's summary: https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/8/jsonformer/

Seashells: https://seashells.io/
Simon Willison's summary: https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/8/seashells/

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Simple Truths About Personal Websites - Matthias Ott: https://matthiasott.com/notes/simple-truths-about-personal-websites

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Back to freelance - Hidde de Vries: https://hidde.blog/back-to-freelance/

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Learning cadence - Go Make Things: https://gomakethings.com/learning-cadence/

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Thunderbird Is Thriving: Our 2022 Financial Report - Jason Evangelho @ Thunderbird: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving-our-2022-financial-report/
Simon Willison's summary: https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/10/thunderbird-is-thriving/
Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35880504

The Platypus In The Room - D. B. Reunig: https://www.dbreunig.com/2023/05/08/ai-is-a-platypus.html
Simon Willison quoting it: https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/8/drew-breunig/

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

neodrag Vanilla - Puru Vijay: https://github.com/PuruVJ/neodrag/tree/main/packages/vanilla#readme (Github)
Simon Willison's excitement: https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/11/neodrag/

Weeknotes: sqlite-utils 3.31, download-esm, Python in a sandbox - Simon Willison: http://simonwillison.net/2023/May/10/weeknotes/

Transformers Agent - Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/transformers_agents
Simon Willison's summary: https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/10/transformers-agent/

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

A quick introduction to the WPE WebKit Project - WebKit: https://webkit.org/blog/14149/a-quick-introduction-to-the-wpe-webkit-project/

An overview of the WPE WebKit project - Claudio Saavedra @ WPE: https://wpewebkit.org/blog/02-overview-of-wpe.html

alcinnz, to random
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The web’s most important decision - Jay Hoffmann "The History of the Web": https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/the-webs-most-important-decision/

alcinnz, to random
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Delimiters won't save you from prompt injection - Simon Willison: http://simonwillison.net/2023/May/11/delimiters-wont-save-you/#atom-everything

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@nedfed @nekodojo I've got 2 clients which sync message history. Though unfortunately they don't sync crypto keys.

And my mobile client can do videocalls!

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

I've just started tackling parsing CSS colours! There's a fair bit of syntax to get through, but the "colour" module can help handle most the features!

Feel free to contribute to https://hackage.haskell.org/package/colour to make it trivial for me to support the entire spec!

This starts my work on "Mondrian"! https://git.argonaut-constellation.org/~alcinnz/Mondrian

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

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, (edited )
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@nedfed @twipped @rysiek Besides the fact I gave that project up in favour of GNOME Web, & in favour of tackling deeper complexities!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@nedfed @twipped @rysiek Yes, I know his stance. I don't believe I agree with it!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@nedfed @twipped @rysiek The stance I work from is that there is a beautiful idea behind HTML/CSS. I'm striving to highlight & explore that malleability!

Quality & inclusive typography has a certain amount of inherent complexity, but I strive to minimize all other complexity! Not supporting JS or the standard DOM is a lifesaver.

P.S. I may well end up bringing WindowsForms back...

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@nedfed @twipped @rysiek Yes, I think browsers are terrible VMs. They've gotten significantly more capable, but fundamentally they tackle the problem backwards! They start with a document format, then as they realize devs need lower-level tools they slot it in.

Top-down as opposed to bottom-up.

Then there's the 90's OO hype's influence on the design of the DOM standards...

UI-wise GTK's my choice, but I'm glad the other options exist!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@nedfed @twipped @rysiek Yeah, when I saw a bottom-up system would be more elegant & secure I'm essentially asking for a VM with standard raw I/O protocols.

What I'm griping about regarding OO here is the infamous "You wanted a banana, but you got the monkey holding the banana & the entire jungle" complaint. An over-embrace!

Personally I like elementary. I find it lighter, prettier, & more convenient than GNOME whilst using similar tech!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@nekodojo XMPP was in my list...

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@nedfed @nekodojo The other day I just sent a message from my personal XMPP server to someone else's! It federates!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@nedfed @twipped @rysiek From my reading: X does more than most clients want it to.

I'd rather apps continue to go through with taking on the computer-graphics smarts themselves, sending a (compressed?) video stream to the window manager!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@nedfed @nekodojo I've got 2 clients which sync message history. Though unfortunately they don't sync encryption keys.

And my mobile client can do videocalls!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@nedfed @nekodojo I'm using Snikket. A nicely configured & branded Docker-packaging of Prosody! Works pretty much out of the box, though it does require some DNS config.

Yes, Docker is a bit heavier than I'd prefer... I have my priorities!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@nedfed @nekodojo That's usually how I roll, but as I said I have priorities.

And I am very pleased with Snikket!

deadprogram, to random Spanish
@deadprogram@social.tinygo.org avatar

"The immediate fear of AI isn’t that us writers will have our work replaced by artificially generated content. It’s that we will be underpaid to rewrite that trash into something we could have done better from the start."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkap3m/gpt-4-cant-replace-striking-tv-writers-but-studios-are-going-to-try

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@deadprogram I hear there's precedence for this fear in what happened to the translation industry...

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