@aral@mastodon.ar.al
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

aral

@aral@mastodon.ar.al

I make small things.

My posts are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/)

🍉🌻 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️

#SmallWeb #SmallTech #web #tech #privacy #humanRights #personhood #democracy #aral #fedi22 #searchable

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aral, to random
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The problem with billionaires is that they’re billionaires.

aral,
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@jcf Taxing the shit out of them would be a good first step.

Miriamm, to random
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"You may think the idea of hellfire belongs to an age when people’s lives were shaped by the threat of eternal damnation.

Wrong, it seems: generation Z and millennials in the UK are significantly more likely to believe in hell than baby boomers"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/19/younger-britons-more-likely-to-believe-in-eternal-damnation-study-finds

aral,
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@Penguinflight @Miriamm Was just coming here to say the same thing :)

aral, to ai
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Machines aren’t taking over.
Corporations are taking over.

Worry about the right thing.

aral,
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@RobExmoor Sadly, in this analogy, we are the cows.

jwildeboer, to random
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Dear "AI" companies/projects. I want to opt-out of you using my blog, code or other things. How can I do that? Oh? I cannot? That needs some work then.

aral,
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@jwildeboer Bare your teats, Jan, for Silicon Valley doth wish a suckle.

alx, to random
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Good morning everyone. The second day of the conference is starting. Being in the UK, I'm an hour delayed so I will start micro-blogging a bit later and miss the first speakers.
Here is the link to follow the plenary session this morning:

https://www.beyond-growth-2023.eu/lecture/plenary-3-addressing-the-limits-of-resource-consumption/

You can follow this thread for updates about the conference and everyone is invited to contribute.

See you in a bit

aral,
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@alx 💕

aral, to random
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Privilege is the luxury of remaining neutral on issues that destroy less fortunate people’s lives.

aral,
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@davep No one is asking you to. Saying you’re neutral on an issue is something quite different to what you just described.

aral,
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@alx Exactly.

(Which is why folks who purport to be so rub me up the wrong way something rotten. I mean, just admit it, you’ve chosen the side of the oppressor. I swear I have more respect for people who do for some morbid reason.)

aral, to random
@aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

So this year I proactively decided to step outside my comfort zone and write up a few call tor proposals to mainstream developer conferences because I want to start talking to everyday devs about the Small Web. It’s been… an interesting experiment so far given I spent the decade and a half or so before Covid almost exclusively doing paid invited keynotes about the problem it seems odd folks are more likely to pay to hear about the problem than to learn about a potential solution for free.

Lucille Ball shrugging.

aral,
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@LynneJones Hey Lynne, here’s a talk a gave almost a decade ago now that might do the trick. The issues I present are still as valid (if not more so) today.

https://small-tech.org/videos/the-camera-panopticon/

ianbetteridge, to random
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    aral,
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    @emma @ianbetteridge Someday I really hope someone will explain to me what the deal is with Zizek. I really did not enjoy any of the time I spent in his company. He struck me as a right asshole.

    aral, to fediverse
    @aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

    Been testing @MonaApp for a while now and just bought a license for it. It’s a one-time activation (which I hope will be able to sustain its independent developer). Check it out if some of your devices are still stuck in Apple’s walled garden.

    aral,
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    @marco @MonaApp Yeah, that’s the one I got too :)

    Grutjes, to random Dutch
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    Geen hoger beroep in de rechtszaak over door de , en dus is de uitspraak vanaf vandaag definitief!

    Aan iedereen die hier vijf jaar lang voor heeft geknokt: bedankt!

    De rechtszaak draaide om de vraag of etniciteit een rol mag spelen bij een selectiebeslissing. Nee zei het hof, etniciteit mag op geen enkele manier, ook niet een klein beetje, een rol spelen in beslissingen om mensen te controleren.

    (1/3)

    https://controlealtdelete.nl/articles/uitspraak-marechaussee-definitief

    aral,
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    @helma @Grutjes 💕

    inkstainedmags, to random

    I just read three quarters of Foundation by and there hasn't been a female character yet.

    aral,
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    @inkstainedmags I wish I could say it gets better.

    being, to random
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    US citizenship is such a PITA I am seriously considering giving it up

    aral,
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    @being Unless it’s got some sort of risk attached to it, I’d say keep it. You never know when it might come in handy. It’s looking pretty bad over there right now but tomorrow, here might be the same or worse. It’s good to have options.

    (I gave up my Turkish citizenship because it was becoming dangerous to have it. Don’t regret it. But I’d probably keep a US citizenship if I had one*. As is, I’m holding onto my French with both hands.) :)

    aral,
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    @being * Said as someone who is seriously considering not stepping foot in the US any time soon. No huge desire to be gunned down in a random act of violence or anything.

    aral, to opensource
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    I swear anyone who explains to me what is again gets an instant block.

    I’ve freely shared nearly everything I’ve created in four decades of programming and I’ve been writing free software exclusively, at great personal expense, for over a decade. (So I haven’t been working at fucking Google or Facebook and hacking on my personal hobby project in the evenings, which seems to be a particularly common trait among )

    FOSS is just one feature of .

    https://small-tech.org/about/#small-technology

    aral,
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    @Life_is You’re right but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

    aral,
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    @sallyjeffery Aw, thank you, Sally; made my morning 💕

    aral,
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    @edendestroyer 💕

    aral, to random
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    Do yourself a favour and read the whole of @VjosaMusliu’s chapter (it’s chapter 9) on “British Hospitality” in Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe.

    PDF: https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0331.pdf

    (And read it till the end even if it makes your blood boil because you’ve had to go through similar life-draining bullshit – I know I did before I had my EU citizenship. Because the end is just… chef’s kiss) 🤣

    aral,
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    @ana_valdi @VjosaMusliu Welcome to corporatocracy.

    Extreme close-up of hands counting $50 bills in a seamlessly looped clip.

    nattiegoogie, to random

    So ... I've been in IT for 20+ years, most of that time working directly in databases.

    That whole thing about Twitter, FB, Reddit, Google, whoever ... "deleting" your data after you jump thru the right hoops.

    That's all bullshit.

    I mean, even apart from the whole "market, monetize, sell and spy on our userbase" thing.

    DBAs, people who actually work with databases, we almost never actually delete stuff in a database.

    1/

    aral,
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    @nattiegoogie Which reminds me, I really need to post the latest bullshit letter I got from Twitter in my ongoing right to erasure dispute with them through the Irish “DPC”.

    Basically boils down to this.

    CC @noybeu

    bascule, to random
    @bascule@mas.to avatar

    Dear Anderson Cooper: do you think platforming Trump is going to make him go away?

    "Anderson Cooper scolds critics of CNN’s town hall with Trump: Do you think staying in your silo ... is going to make that person go away?”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/12/anderson-cooper-trump-town-hall/

    aral,
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    @bascule * platforming Trump for profit (kinda funny coincidence how it makes them richer to do so)

    atomicpoet, to random

    The event that made me leave mastodon.social was the decision by Mastodon gGmbh to make that the default server for new registrations.

    Rather than shrug and ask, “What can we do?”—and do nothing—I realized that this is the Fediverse. I’ve got options.

    I don’t have to be part of any server that gives me the “No!” feeling.

    Despite being a member of mastodon.social for 5 years, and donating money to the project, I think it’s going in the wrong direction.

    “But Chris, what about growth?” Some have said.

    If growth comes at the expense of decentralization, I don’t want growth.

    “But Chris, people don’t care about decentralization!”

    Then we’ll make them care. If they don’t care now, they’ll care tomorrow.

    And we’ll do this by making decentralized social media that’s so good, you’ll never go back to Big Social.

    We can’t compromise on this aspect. I don’t care what certain folks say, you can’t achieve decentralization through centralization.

    Some people call this idealism.

    If so, this idealist took the practical step up leaving mastodon.social.

    aral,
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    @torb @atomicpoet The default could round-robin with zero loss of usability. The reason it doesn’t is a business decision taken by the CEO of Mastodon (which I still can’t believe has now seemingly been adopted – non-ironically – as a title).

    SomaFMrusty, to random

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    aral,
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    @SomaFMrusty , is that the one by the fascist American oligarch?

    aral, to SmallWeb
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    Anyone here know anyone from Paddle that you can put me in touch with? (Or share your experience with them?)

    I’m reconsidering whether Stripe is the right solution for the initial payments option in Domain (https://codeberg.org/domain/app) or whether it makes more sense (and would be easier for folks who want to run their own Domain instances and become Small Web hosts) if I integrated a Merchant of Record (MoR) solution instead.

    aral,
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    @giuseppegv Thanks, Giuseppe 💕

    @ff0000

    aral, to random
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    Money is a legal fiction.

    aral,
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    @kpeace I was merely stating a fact about the fractional reserve system we have today. Money is literally magicked from thin air the moment a bank records a loan in its ledgers. Here’s a good article if you want to learn more about it:

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521914001070?via%3Dihub

    aral, (edited ) to SmallWeb
    @aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

    I do rather love being able to run tail¹ on my database tables² as I work on building Domain³ with Kitten⁴ ;)

    (JSDB keeps tables in an append-only JavaScript log which are read fully into memory when the database is opened. And yes, if you noticed the class names, you can store custom objects.)

    ¹ Actually: tail -f <database path>/table.js | bat --paging=never --language=js
    ² https://codeberg.org/small-tech/jsdb
    ³ https://codeberg.org/domain/app
    ⁴ https://codeberg.org/kitten/app

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