Wow, an exciting and unexpected honor seeing INVENTING THE RENAISSANCE on the #BSFA awards l long list for best nonfiction long-form. It does indeed relate to SFF reflecting on the myth of dark & golden ages in fiction. (And quoting Firefly & Babylon 5 😉🚀)
@grimalkina I've had too many conversations where pointing out that nearly half of women STEM grads have left those fields after a decade earns me a stock "well, we need to train more women for STEM careers then" and ... I'm like, my friend, my brother, you call yourself an engineer but I say "half of X falls unaccountably out the side of process Y after Z time", and your answer is "we need to shove more X in the front end?" If you said this in a meeting about making cat toys you'd be fired.
Why there’s no European Google?
And why it is a good thing!
My answer to the European Commission "call for evidence on Open Source."
https://ploum.net/2026-01-22-why-no-european-google.html
#geminiprotocol link: gemini://ploum.net/2026-01-22-why-no-european-google.gmi
In the early days of personal computing CPU bugs were so rare as to be newsworthy. The infamous Pentium FDIV bug is remembered by many, and even earlier CPUs had their own issues (the 6502 comes to mind). Nowadays they've become so common that I encounter them routinely while triaging crash reports sent from Firefox users. Given the nature of CPUs you might wonder how these bugs arise, how they manifest and what can and can't be done about them. 🧵 1/31
"I thought that we (men) were better than this, but I was wrong"
https://neilzone.co.uk/2025/03/i-thought-that-we-men-were-better-than-this-but-i-was-wrong/
RE: https://mstdn.social/@JugglingWithEggs/115932678575633726
Here's a thought... maybe constraining economic activity isn't so bad?
Perhaps... just a wild idea here... we're not just put on this planet to increase shareholder value and line the pockets of the rich.
What if we considered arranging society so that its primary function was to ensure the welfare of people -- all people -- and "economic activity" can take a backseat for a few generations and see how that works out.
What if we started from the idea that all people have inherent value regardless of how much wealth they have or create?
So we've strayed a very long way from Nextcloud's task manager, but the older I get the more I see "Who does the dishes after the revolution?" as one of the first questions that should be asked in any progressive space. I've seen at permaculture camps where the men wonder off to form a drumming circle while the women set up the cooking rotas and compost station. I've seen it at the meetings where the men stand up and give inspiring speeches while the women organise drinks and take the minutes
RE: https://social.coop/@afewbugs/115927624405622429
I love where this thread goes
After spending far too much personal time this weekend playing with a little arm64 soc that is supposedly fully supported upstream, I'm thinking there would be a lot of value in a tool that would take a dtb file and give you a kernel config that had all the drivers needed enabled.
The device/bus topologies and dependencies on SoCs are really complex, and hunting down one by one what random driver is missing that is preventing some other driver to load can be a real time sink when just trying to get a kernel running. And starting from an old BSP config doesn't help much as the upstream drivers may be renamed or under a different config.
But it seems like having supported dtb compat strings in the CONFIG setting in the Kconfig files might be helpful to generate this.