“The reason why [the Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Meta oligopoly] and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.”
https://fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/

@lkundrak
isn't czech language beautiful?
return +/- 90y back to times of voskovec and werich and their forbinas (vsi vod ni a vsi vodni). nanosekunda is calling for such scetch/forbina :)

(edit: i can't resist:
werich: (koukaje na voskovce) nad cim premyslis?
voskovec: jak dlouha je nanosekunda? a da se to vubec zmerit?
werich: vsechno se da zmerit a nezalezi jestli je na nose, nebo na necem jinym. dlouha je, dle meho soudu, stejne )

@ljs @pony @vbabka

@pony
i went on karosa from pilsen to brno 20y ago. i think it was 7 or 8 hours with scheduled breaks in tabor and jihlava. drinked almost whole bottle of dobra voda while waiting for the bus in the long queue.
when i saw karosa, i realised drinking before departure was not good idea. every stop i evaluated possibilities to pee. i gave up after 1.5h and went to driver and asked him to stop. response was that in tabor is scheduled break and that there are toilets on station.
last minutes before tabor i saw black mist.
even i didn't drinked situation repeated before jihlava.

@lkundrak @ljs @vbabka

Something I've learned from my experience working in software development: If you measure software developers (and probably any people) on any metric, they will change their behavior to optimize for that number. They will do this even if you don't reward or punish or judge or evaluate them using that metric. If they know the metric, they will change their behavior.

This means you need to be very, very careful that anything you measure is what you want people to optimize for.

my university has converted our office telephones to Microsoft Teams. when i grumbled about this to a favourite sysadmin, this is how they responded 🔥

“Microsoft has actually brilliantly leveraged the lousy security landscape -- for which they are in no small part responsible -- to capture even larger market-share, as we now need commercial entities to produce the software required to protect us from their failures, and therefore need a more uniform environment to achieve the necessary scale. The uniformity then guarantees an ever greater scale for the inevitable conflagration. Monocultures guarantee one big fire instead of a bunch of small survivable ones. We really have no interest in learning from evolution, in no small part because it would produce fewer billionaires.

— Local Cranky IT Guy” [shared with permission]

#Enshittification

I spent a not insignificant part of today hoping that a solar storm would come and make computing impossible for a little while.

Imagine if #Firefox, #Chrome, and their derivatives could render Markdown, AsciiDoc, LaTeX, EPUB, and Gemtext as seamlessly as they handle PDFs. This could revolutionize the way we publish lightweight websites, making it as simple as dropping a text file into a directory.

#smolweb #smallweb #indieweb

(somebody knows an influential person at @mozilla ?)

@allsystemsgo i heard that some systems are actually not go today

@lkundrak
actually periodontitis is more prevalent in male population :) maybe ladies rubs more borshtsch into their gums
@oleksandr

@oleksandr
maybe it will be beneficial to gums as prevention of periodontitis
@lkundrak

@oleksandr
depends on fineness of grinding probably. dehydrated soups were never sniffing friendly. except some pea soups i recall from childhood, it was powder only
@lkundrak

A tribute to Daniel Bristot de Oliveira from Linux Plumbers. https://lpc.events/blog/current/index.php/2024/07/06/in-memory-of-daniel-bristot-de-oliveira/

I'm really really really not interested in computers getting more powerful.
I am super interested in them being more repairable and modifiable, drawing less power, lasting and being supported for way longer etc. That stuff still gets me excited

@hny

@vbabka @oleksandr @pony @lkundrak

@lkundrak
aktualne na ceste z michalovec do prahy pres kosice bez brejli na cteni :/
@oleksandr @pony

@RezzaBuh
znc v brn v narodnim? jinak outfit dobry :)

In software architecture you have to recognize when you're adding a rocket stage.

In rockets and aeroplanes it's a simple truth that weight adds more weight. To carry more you need bigger engines, a bigger fuel thank, more fuel. More weight becomes even more weight.

For rockets to make it out of the atmosphere they use multiple stages. Each stage carries the rocket to a certain height, once the fuel is used up the stage is ejected so the next stage can push forward a lighter rocket. So adding a stage will get you further, but at the cost of much more machinery, engineers, and complexity. You now have a much heavier rocket to launch.

Switching to kubernetes, kafka, microservices, a single page app, ... is adding a rocket stage. Maybe it's what you need to get where you want to go, but be clear about the extra weight, operational cost, engineering overheard, mental overhead.

@lkundrak
maybe time to migrate back from cmake to autotools
@mansr

@nowster
put vegetable, meat, noodles to stock and you have soup. remove it and you have back stock :)
@liw @pwaring