The Unclear Impact

Kristóf Marussy | @kristof@pleroma.marussy.com

Electronic Frontier Foundation eff@mastodon.social

The promise of the Internet is free and open access to information for and from all, and information gleaned from research should be no different. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/why-open-access-necessary-makers

Drew DeVault sir@cmpwn.com

"We moved to GitHub because everyone's already there"

"We shut down the mailing lists because most of our users prefer to use GitLab in their web browser"

"We're rewriting in Rust because we don't really have any non-x86_64 users"

"We're leaving IRC because Discord is more user-friendly"

What all of these arguments have in common is that they exclude people, centralize infrastructure, and eschew free software for proprietary solutions, all in the name of some ill-defined measure of "progress".

taylor nik@letsalllovela.in
wtf youtube-dl got DMCA'd by the recording industry

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-23-RIAA.md

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

Kristóf Marussy kristof
@eff Ironically, NPR displays a "Data Protection Choices" dialog that wants to track me and share my information "with social media services, sponsorship, analytics and other third-party service providers". Declining and going to the plain text site results in the linked article nowhere to be found...

Kristóf Marussy kristof
The increasing hostility of web services towards alternative browsers (e.g., Google deciding to ban logins from CEF apps https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/embedder-dev/STyM5ZNTHMM/POj1v_cqBgAJ and Skype specifically excluding open-source Chromium from audio and video calls https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/1010#issuecomment-643740388) is worrying. In a nicer world, people would migrate to services with better policies, but in ours, alternative browser are much likelier to die instead.

Kristóf Marussy kristof
I'm probably wasting too much time figuring out [Ledger](https://www.ledger-cli.org/), plain-text accounting with multiple currencies and writing Python scripts to convert my bank statements, but it's quite fun. Time to dust off the accounting textbook from undergrad!

ataraxia937@fosstodon.org ataraxia937@fosstodon.org

Self-hosters: Where do you run your services? On hardware in your home, or on a VPS / server / instance in a data center?

Kristóf Marussy kristof
Nonlinear optimization and other numerical packages seem to be stuck in the time before free software became a thing. Even if something is libre (or at least open source), there are dependencies with baffling licenses (proprietary packages with either an eye-watering price tag, or stuff you are allowed to download gratis, but not redistribute), and it's not always obvious which of the dependencies are optional. A significant chunk of these software being written in Fortran probably doesn't help, either.

Julia and JuMP [1] really seem to be a breath of fresh air in this area.

On a related note, spent the better part of today making an AUR package [2] for Couenne.

Kudos for the maintainers of the Bonmin [3] and Ipopt [4] packages for taking care of the dependencies!

[1] https://jump.dev/
[2] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/coin-or-couenne/
[3] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/coin-or-bonmin/
[4] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/coin-or-ipopt/

Kristóf Marussy kristof
Just installed https://github.com/andreimarcu/linx-server to share photos and snippets from my server. It's pretty cool, especially with the CLI client!

Although it probably wasn't the best of my ideas to try and run it with Podman instead of Docker.

a1ba a1ba@elbrus.mentality.rip
Hello from first ever Pleroma, and so Fediverse instance, running on Russian MCST Elbrus CPU.

Instance is running in testing mode and will die someday. Let this post federate further so the history will never be forgotten. :)

Kristóf Marussy kristof
Trying to debug a #Pleroma issue: https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/issues/2067

Kristóf Marussy kristof
It's probably a better idea to first write a blog and only then start to think about the technical issues of hosting it. But I'm first setting up my blog and learn about web technologies anyways, and only then start to think about the content. 😅 The same goes for a microblog / Pleroma instance.

josef jk@mastodon.social

how do i uninstall java script from my computer

Starwall the Spooky Ball starwall@radical.town

time was.

I made this because normal scienceposting doesn't quite capture deep time and no amount of numbers could ever help encapsulate the feelings that it elicits.

Time was in the beginning, time was meaningless. nothing changed. And then all at once in a massive explosion time was, now and things changed, civilization rose and fell countless times in the blink of an eye, and then the stars died, and things still changed. black holes danced their dance of gravity for trillions and trillions and trillions of years. atoms decayed. the elements began to fizzle away. unimaginable stretches of time, billions and billions of years of time elapsed, things continued to change, but the laws of reality and the unstoppable march of entropy tore even these behemoths, the singularities, to bits, and one by one they exploded. their light scattered out into the universe, illuminating nothing in one last cough for this dying universe. they were the very last beams of light. they ran off into the darkness in search of something to interact with, but their paths were empty. there was nothing left. they began to slowly cool down. stretched by billions of years of space itself expanding them, the units of scale became useless. gravity waves calmed until the ocean of spacetime rippled no more, and it sat motionless, at rest. nothing ever changed ever again. the whole universe had finally reached a point where space means nothing, where energy means nothing, where time means nothing. it became meaningless. nothing changed. Time was

The Privacy Foundation theprivacyfoundation@mastodon.social

The Mozilla layoff is terrible - not only for the former workers, but also the web at large.

If we are concerned about the future of a more private & secure web, without a monopoly - we might want to double-down on our support of Mozilla to ensure that more people keep their jobs.

Being vocal about the direction of & to appropriate channels is surely needed - less Google & more innovation.

Let's work to oust any leadership without the vision we all need for a better web.

Kristóf Marussy kristof
I wonder if, in several years, will text written in the Fira and Zilla fonts (typographic identity of the MDN) be seen as a remembrance of the more open web that could have been, or will it be sullied by what Mozilla would become (people weren't that enthusiastic about Goldman Sans, for example)? Or am I just too much of a font nerd for thinking about such things?

Drew DeVault sir@cmpwn.com

Firefox market share vs Mozilla Foundation chair salary (2.5 million/year in 2018)

via https://twitter.com/withoutboats/status/1217558588857544704

Ende Gelände ende_gelaende@climatejustice.global

A message from 'Alle Dörfer Bleiben':

In Germany, coal corporation RWE is set to destroy our villages in order to burn the 600 million t of lignite underneath. They want to displace us and trash the climate.
Please share the video & join our struggle for and that !
🌏 🏡 ✊

You can donate via SEPA bank transfer https://www.alle-doerfer-bleiben.de/spenden/

Amolith rainbow_dance amolith@social.nixnet.services

Don't make more "privacy-respecting" analytics tools. If you actually cared about privacy, you wouldn't fucking track people to begin with.

Kristóf Marussy kristof
re: Test IRC
@luxemboye Nice, even media links work -- so indeed it's possible to set aliases for mentions with URL rewriting.

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