Csepp 🚱 @csepp@merveilles.town

https://gardenofcosmicspeculation.com/

destroying the idea of a software 'application'

we need personalizable tools that can be brought to any computing activity

RRS James Clark Ross via https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/our-data/images/webcams/rrs-james-clark-ross-webcam/

rule of parsimony

Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.

https://webring.xxiivv.com/wiki.html#unix+philosophy

I think Wine (and emulators in general) are going to be key for keeping control of our computers from being wrestled away from us. Personal Computing (not just PCs but computing in general) is being subsumed by cloud providers and subscription models and I for one am not about to give up the idea of Personal Computing.

If there's anything that I've learned from 30+ years in computing is that corporate interests are never in the users long-term interests. Ever.

Microsoft Github renewing $200k contract with ICE

"At GitHub, we believe in basic human rights," said Friedman, and then he laughed and laughed

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20906213/github-ice-microsoft-software-email-contract-immigration-nonprofit-donation

Amundsen-Scott South Pole station via https://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/spWebCam.cfm

At the moment, my view is something along the lines of:

- Do what you can as an individual, to the best of your ability
- Don't be overburdened by guilt if you can't do it all
- Be very conscious that not everyone is in a position to do what you think is 'doing the right thing' (including yourself)
- The system is pretty rigged against doing the right thing, so ultimately the system is the one that needs to change
- Individual behaviour change is probably a part of bringing about system change

MNT Reform 1 & 2 prototypes compared

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might at least be a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the money-changers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal. —Ursula K. Le Guin

Untitled Goose Game had more cultural impact than Borderlands 3

#climatestrikecanada

#ClimateStrikeBarcelona

I've collected a bunch of notes on collapsology and dark mountain. I've also mirrored these notes on the Webring Wiki.

https://llllllll.co/t/climate-collapse/23229/517

https://webring.xxiivv.com/wiki.html#collapsology

This morning, the "calm before the storm" while setting up the local "Repair Café. We fixed all sort of electronics, clothes, bikes... You name it!

My personal highlight is that one of my former students was there with me, and I was learning a lot about practical soldering from him.

A small thing maybe, but it makes me proud of the choices that got me there.

I can't stop thinking about this, from the #plan9 docs.

http://nopenopenope.net/posts/audio

Imagine a future where all computational infrastructure is biological. It grows, it lives, it dies, it decomposes.

Humyns play their role as orchestrators of complex adaptive ecological systems; drivers of speciation; transporters of biomass; cultivators; gardeners.