Nicola Busanello mizu@identi.ca

Best thread on the internet right now

yr welcome

Ubuntu on Windows seems to me to be the natural consequence of https://www.devever.net/~hl/windowsdefeat.

Hoping to remove about 200 ifdefs from git-annex..

"culture of design-focused self-promotion" explains why javascript etc libraries have such unbearably shiny websites. "design as a signal of how up to date or nice a library is"

Also probably applies to a lot of other stuff. Probably obviously to many, but not to me.

I do realize the irony in self-censoring a curse word when talking about a program named "assword"

(Extracted from Sussman's most recent talk on flexible systems)

Variations on an Arithmetic Theme by Gerald Jay Sussman and Chris Hanson

A diamond is very pretty.
But it is very hard to add to a diamond.

A ball of mud is not so pretty.
But you can always add more mud to a ball of mud.

attributed to Joel Moses and / or Paul Penfield

Ian: Well for us mere mortals... If we were lucky we could log into a computer through a 2400 baud modem from home and so having UNIX at my own computer at home where I could log in as root and do anything I wanted was, inititally very interested to me.. The novelty starts to wear off and it just becomes software, another OS system What really grabbed me off the bat was the community. That was what really grabbed me and you have to understand at the time, it was a completely foreign notion that I somehow had stumbled upon this group of people that were interested in the same things that I was interested in who had basically for no particular reason built this thing, this operating system and it had actually worked and I could do my work on it and I had not paid a dime for it, they did not ask anything of me when I download it or used it. And whenever you are in a situation like that when people have given so much to you, one of the first instincts is like what can I do for you, what can I give back?

via Gabriella Coleman

Debian.org RTC: announcing XMPP, SIP presence, and more Kudos to Pocock and the rest of the team(s)!

Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Ohm are in a car.
They get pulled over. Heisenberg is driving, and the cop asks, 'Do you know how fast you were going?'
'No, but I know exactly where I am,' Heisenberg replies.
The cop says, 'you were doing 55 in a 35.' Heisenberg throws up his hands and shouts, 'Great! Now, I'm lost.'
The cop thinks this is suspicious and orders him to pop the trunk. He checks it out and says, 'Do you know you have a dead cat back here?'
'We do now, asshole!' Shouts Schrödinger.
The cop moves to arrest them. Ohm resists.

#humor #science

Excellent

via https://diasp.eu/posts/3374211 

I just read "Goodbye, OpenStack" (thanks for the link @David Thompson) and it has me thinking about a number of things:

• Those I know who work on OpenStack complain about its insane complexity; there's even a comic about it. OpenStack seems like a lot of things at this point. A good number of them seem like things I want to succeed: an API for on-the-fly-provisioning seems important, with a free software backing. That seems great. So does the storage system Swift... we even have support for that in MediaGoblin.
• I've been long jealous of projects with tons of funding. MediaGoblin and most of the projects I actually care about are desperately resource-constrained. It's hard not to look at the sea of VC money out there and not feel like I'm hurting the project by not trying to tap into it, but then I think of all the compromises I'd have to make, and how much doing such things seems to affect real communities. But wouldn't it be worth it to be able to pay more people to make the dream come true? But looking above, OpenStack is pretty much the dream machine of money in the free software world. Having a ton of money pouring into it doesn't seem to help its coherence maybe?
• OpenStack's decision to use permissive licensing is frequently lauded as one of the reasons it's so well funded. That post seems to indicate that pretty much everywhere is running a proprietary fork, which makes OpenStack sound eerily similar to Android.

Maybe there's some value left in my stubborn, community-over-money, pro-copyleft direction. Then again, being a resource strapped outlier isn't always much better than the above. (And I'm still jealous of all that project money.)

I'd recommend following the link and reading all of the answers to the end, expecially the last one.