- @thorgalle
Good perspective!
Hadn’t heard of deep fakes being used in financial scams, it’s concerning. Then again, the cult-like following of Trump and whatever he (supposedly) says is also concerning.
In protesting one injustice, one should be careful to not condone other injustices. That is what I take away from this piece.
The specific examples of pro decolonization statements seem to fail in that regard. But perhaps they are taken out of context. And even if the writer's interpretation is correct, do these examples represent the larger protest movement?
Is it naive to say that colonizing autonomous land is bad, and that rape and murder are also bad? I want to believe that 99.9999% of the people agree on the latter, irrespective of their opinion on the former.
Imagine you want your timeline to only be posts from your mutuals, or only posts that have cat photos, or only posts related to sports — you can simply pick your chosen feed from an open marketplace of feeds developed by our team and third-party developers.
For users, the ability to customize their feed gives them back control over how they spend their attention.
Interesting! I don't really know anything about BlueSky except that Jack Dorsey is involved, and that it's invite-only. But this part triggers me to learn more! Regardless, I'm happy on Readup & Mastodon.
I originally felt like refraining from commenting, because I could get in trouble for that. Here goes nothing.
Inspiring, a good tip!
Unfortunately, most of them are subscription-based, and I don’t think paying 7-10 EUR monthly to keep track of the two workouts I do per week is worth it.
I totally get subscription fatigue for small things like this. On the other hand, to make a small one-time payment sustainable for a creator, the product needs continuous growth - which can be a gnarly goal.
Maybe a "one-time payment for 2 year of updates" model would be a good middle way - but that doesn't jibe well with App Store distribution.
Sad but expected! What consumer tech is supported beyond 10 years? I'd be curious to know. I do think the "permacomputing" movement is an interesting thing to read up more on.
I haven't used GitHub Copilot yet. But it sounds like it would (surprisingly) be a bargain in favor of the developer today, at least price-wise. I assume it won't get killed, so either innovations will lower the costs in the future, or it willl be priced higher.
Interesting! That Hallstatt "wall" sounds more impressive than it was, though.
Wow, a zoomed-out scene can actually look realistic without detailed knowledge. Here's an example video on X, I might have been fooled if I saw this first.
Your WordPress blog can now become a profile for the fediverse. This means your readers can follow you and receive all the latest posts from your blog directly on their preferred platform. More so, they can engage in enriching conversations by replying to your posts, with their replies reflecting as comments on your blog post, creating a synchronized and interactive experience.
This isn’t new - what’s new is that is was enabled for Wordpress.com users. But it is cool. I tried to find an example, and found Ed Everett’s WP blog as presented by Mastodon.social because his appeared first in my Mastodon search results. It seems like this plugin:
- attempts to transfer the entire content of a blog post to a ActivityPub post
- includes the article cover image, and any inline images, as attachments of the ActivityPub post
- adds a link to the original WP post at the end
This might scramble your intentions as a writer, because your inline images can be required to understand the text. But ActivityPub likely doesn’t support inline images (not sure). I wonder if there is a plugin setting for how to handle posts: could you set it to only post excerpts?
The beauty and challenge of a protocol as open as ActivityPub is that the clients will vary greatly too, just like with RSS readers. The reading experience might not be good. In the example link above, his posts are clipped to a maximum length with “Read more” buttons to see the whole post. But when opening the same profile in my iOS Mastodon app (a different client), the content is immediately fully shown. I would personally like to avoid that when scrolling a feed).
Regarding Readup…
This development makes me consider again how Readup could “enter the fediverse”. I think that would be valuable too, and I see three separate opportunities or stages:
- A one-way cross-posting integration connected to your preferred Mastodon account, using Mastodon’s API. This could work similarly to the current Twitter/X integration, but wouldn’t have the same content size restrictions (depending on the instance…)
- Readup.org as an ActivityPub server. For example, @thorgalle@readup.org would be followable in Mastodon, or on any other ActivityPub platform that enables following others. Where this gets interesting is comments:
- comments by other Readup users on Readup posts could be syndicated to other platforms as well…
- … but if someone comments on another platform, should that be shown in Readup? I’d venture, not by default, since it would violate Readup’s “comment only after reading” concept.
- Readup as an ActivityPub client: this is even more complicated, but very powerful. Recently, I’ve been reading many articles here that I found because they were shared on Mastodon (including this one). What if I could read these in Readup, and reply to the original Mastodon post that shared it using Readup? It would make Readup not just a client for reading and sharing/posting, but also a client for commenting.
I think all of the above are fun, and could each in turn expose the Readup platform to a wider audience.
Correct premise: many FOSS projects need money.
I recently unblocked Carbon Ads on regex101.com (which is not even open source, but the site asked so nicely, and is so good). Now I'm wondering if Carbon is still an "ethical" network. This popped up prominently in a related search. Sad that Codesponsor seems to be down, and that Triplebyte has made a controversial pivot in 2020.
Fun! Reminds me of electric bike conversion kits, which are on the market and (only) 5-10 times cheaper compared to his projected price. I hope this venture succeeds.
Fascinating! Good in a way that BYD is democratizing electric cars, finally. Maybe bad that this happens with Chinese government subsidies & cheap labor. But I'm not sure how we're going to rule out fossil fuels from all cars if they remain the more expensive option. Hopefully this adds competitive pressure to innovate on cost reductions.
The other day I was also surprised to see that an optician's stall in my neighbourhood mall in Finland was replaced by a "Voyah" EV SUV showroom, of which I had never heard. There are lots of Teslas here, I wonder if I'll start seeing more Chinese brands.
The country’s current best-selling Chinese models are from Volvo and MG, both originally European brands now owned by Chinese companies.
I didn't know Volvo was owned by a Chinese corp. Looking it up, I see both ownership numbers of 8.2% and 82% quoted (both links are Reuters). It's confusing.
One nuance where the article missed the ball is the technical "web" vs. "internet" distinction. HTML5 did succeed, in a way. We can access most services we use today on the web. Many desktop apps, and mobile apps too, are driven by web tech.
However, most web traffic is indeed going to giant, centralized services, as predicted. It is indeed the independent, open web that has taken a background role.
We'll pay for convenience and reliability, which is why iTunes can sell songs for 99 cents despite the fact that they are out there, somewhere, in some form, for free. When you are young, you have more time than money, and LimeWire is worth the hassle. As you get older, you have more money than time.
This is true! I wonder what the teenagers of today do here today. Spotify Free with ads?
A sober look (from 2019) at the state of micropayments in internet publishing. It could have mentioned Readup's attempt at automatically divvying up a reader's wallet, with the same conclusion: nothing succeeded so far.
I don't think we've seen the end of this space yet. I only hope that the winning system that emerges will be aligned with the open web (but I'm afraid not).
We all engage with a huge number of websites and creators on the web. I believe people aren’t necessarily good at attributing or rewarding the things that give them value.
"The right to demonstrate is fundamental to the Finnish society. However, we must keep in mind that enrolling in higher education is free for Finns, in comparison with countries where already tuition fees might be significant," she says.
It's always relative. Relative to recent Finnish history, and possibly other similar countries, students in Finland have reason to be angry and concerned.
For countries with a less-developed social system, "free education" is still something to strive for, with the nordics as an example.
Of course, zero tuition fees for full-time studies does not really mean free education. It's only really free if a scholarship takes care of your living expenses, which can also be significant (and they are becoming ever more so).
“His life just sucks. It’s so stressful. He’s just so dedicated to these companies. He goes to sleep and wakes up answering e-mails. Ninety-nine per cent of people will never know someone that obsessed, and with that high a tolerance for sacrifice in their personal life.”
I indeed can't even fathom what this must be like... SpaceX, Tesla, X, Neuralink, ... maybe his character twists are his way of burning out.
The drink that can both cause and cure headaches! Quick don't-feel-guilty read.
Makes the AGPLv3 plain to understand! Good that Readup has this license.
Apple forking BSD is implicitly portrayed as a bad thing, but apparently Apple hired BSD devs & is contributing back some code to FreeBSD. I wonder if there’s any significant ill sentiment towards that fork event, couldn’t find much.
Kafkaesque. Gotta read that book some time.
To be continued, and I hope, defused!
I've been playing GTA 5 for the first time this month. So far, the game has impressed, amused and disgusted me (with Trevor, that is). It's entertaining!
This reminds me of a related long read about GTA IV (and cocaine): Video games: the addiction by Tom Bissell in The Guardian, that I apparently never posted, but appreciated enough to remember today.
Outside of the inarguably violent missions, it is not what GTA IV asks you to do that is so morally alarming. It is what it allows you to do.
Fun facility, this sounds really useful!
This is one of many corollaries that present when systems and social structures of a society support common workers — the work done is reliably good work.
These establishments are no longer the only option for non-meat-eaters, and they can’t rely only on that customer base. To thrive, they really need 70-80% of their customers to be omnivores.
This is a "making of" blog post from Dominic Szablewski, who rewrote the game wipEout (1995) after its Windows source code got leaked. He was able to make it playable in modern web browsers. I never played it before (it was released a bit before I was born), but having enthusiastically played later Wipeout instalments on the PSP & PS4, this really piqued my interest!
3D/game programming is not something I'm familiar with today, but some of the challenges described here were relatable from a general programming perspective. It also shows how getting a conceptual understanding of the old code represented the bulk of the work of writing a modern implementation that is true to the look and feel of the original.
The rewrite is just one fifth of the size of the original.
It's hard to justify writing C these days. It's not the language you'd start a commercial project in. So this wipEout rewrite was a welcome excuse and by far the largest C project I ever worked on. I had an absolute blast cleaning up this mess!
I can imagine how rewarding it is to piece this project together!
I’ve been increasingly interested in the motivations behind, and implications of, Open Source / Free Software, for different kinds of projects. This GNU article has an outdated reference to a CD-ROM, but the philosophy should remain intact. With regards to selling it, I think “Free Software” has a kind of naive feeling to it.
And yet, several big platform projects do so profitably (by hosting, providing support, or paid feature development); like Discourse. Or successfully in a non-monetary way, like Mastodon. But these two initiatives also appeal to self-hosters. Is there an FOSS platform initiative that is intentionally/mainly centralized, and successful?
It would be sad if subjects Bomman and Bellie actually didn’t get promised compensation. This was a beautiful documentary, and they made it so for a large part. The cinematography was also unexpectedly artistic, given the elephant refuge theme.
Lots of weather terror in Norway, Sweden and the Baltic states the last two days, but Finland (at least Helsinki) is oddly missing from the list. Bad predictions didn’t materialize, and we’ve had some nice, sunny days with a just a little bit of wind.
Interesting reflection on the decision process of abandoning a community project (or not)!
Fascinating how owning such an expensive, high-tech vehicle can suddenly put you in a precarious situation. Great products are about more than great features, their lifecycle and support matter too. Despite the blow to the industry, this particular article seems like a good marketing plug for Lemmo and the other companies that provide a non-electric riding mode.
Science-fiction war, one and a half century ago. I had heard about this before, but never looked up the extent of Zeppelin war deployment.
Not a happy ending! Macabre to imagine this chain of dead people.
Nice that visitfaroeislands.com is keeping their "old" site online!