Adrian Cochrane @alcinnz@floss.social

@robdaemon @humanetech @natecull @theruran The browser is just a weird VM with too much builtin layouting concepts.

HTML Canvas is just a framebuffer, WASM is just binaries, websockets are sockets.

On the plus side: Building a UI in HTML gives you immutable messages between UI and backend, you can run your frontend elsewhere (like with the X Window System), code is sandboxed, hardware can be accessed when permitted by the user.

Next step: Build a browser in your browser.

Hello friends, my company is hiring an Engineering Manager, among several other roles. If you're passionate about functional programming, solving novel problems, creating category defining software, and working with some of the loveliest people I know, please reach out. Transwomen and BIPOC to the front please! (Bonus: you'd be working with me as the Product Manager and I'm pretty ok!)

What you can do to stop #chatcontrol :

1. Provide negative feedback on the proposal
⌛️ Feedback period: 13 May 2022 - 15 July 2022
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/12726-Fighting-child-sexual-abuse-detection-removal-and-reporting-of-illegal-content-online_en

2. Phone your MEP

#programming #osdev did i mention that making a font is a pain in the butt?

#batmenTournament Round 2 Match 5! Final match of Round 2, next I'll be running one-on-one matches between the winners!

Zorro is a masked sword-yielding Californian adventurer when it was part of Mexico. Likes carving "Z" into wood. Long running franchise, and I didn't include non-US films!

The Lone Ranger is a Texan masked cowboy with fancy clothes & horse travelling with native american Tonto who resurrected him.

The Green Hornet goes undercover, with his sidekick being the skilled one.

#Firefox 100.0.2, Firefox for #Android 100.3.0, Firefox ESR 91.9.1, and Thunderbird 91.9.1 are all out now to fix two critical #security vulnerabilities. Update your installations ASAP!

#infosec #infosecurity

Flatpak App of the Week: Pika Backup – Keeping Your Data Safe Was Never Easier https://9to5linux.com/flatpak-app-of-the-week-pika-backup-keeping-your-data-safe-was-never-easier

The Firefox team for some reason just really hate the file:// protocol. People are missing it on Android and they just don't care.

I don't know what program, VM or protocol it will end up being, but we absolutely NEED to bring "locally stored documents/data as first class citizens, even on mobiles" back to the table. Or we'll be webserfs begging permissions from oligarchs' computers forever.

If HTML can't do the right thing, it's going to be something else.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1329243

bored of free, open source software. i am now only interested in "win32 shareware and abandonware"

- fast on modern computers
- extremely large catalog, basically infinite
- huge variations in quality, mysterious
- usually just like 1 exe file
- try it! dont like it? delete it!
- consistent UI look-and-feel
- when it's not visually consistent it's at least Visually Rad
- no source code no cheating
- modify functionality with game trainer Poke utility, resource editor, or cracked copy of IDA Pro

Such chat bot would helpfully remind you of your appointments and tasks at the right time. It would give you weather update in the morning, perhaps with news highlights if you care about those. Since it's implemented in a modern IM fashion, you could mark tasks as done by clicking a button in the message, or jump to article by clicking on a link, etc.

And per modern trends, you install "skills" to get more functions.

Sounds at least plausibly useful, right?

Turns out, we kind of already have that.

2/

Here's a crazy friday night #UI / #UX idea: what if we put notifications front and center on #mobile?

(Yes, another 🧠💩🧵 incoming.)

The current zeitgeist is that notifications are a problem. As they work in practice, they sure are.

But consider a virtual assistant. Beyond voice, which is hot right now, chat-based interfaces are also a somewhat popular trend.

Imagine a chat-bot based virtual assistant, implemented like in a modern IM app - with buttons for commands, so you don't have to type them out.

1/

One silly program I'm proud of is "optfuck": https://gist.github.com/cadadr/5e559d0bc260f1ecb08f59c16a512430

It's a very basic Brainfuck interpreter, with a twist: instead of the usual Brainfuck language, you write your Brainfuck program using command line arguments.

Example included in comments in program source, lines 19--27.

I made this #dylanlang playground some time ago. It's a little bit inspired by the Go playground. Feel like giving a new (old) language a try? https://play.opendylan.org/

If you want a really, really, REALLY, rough description of the language it's somewhat simplified Common Lisp semantics with infix syntax and a clean separation between compile time and run time.

Happy hacking!

"Guys, I have an idea. Let's make a browser optimized for the kind of people who don't opt out of telemetry, and market it to privacy-conscious people." -- Top minds at Mozilla Corp

If you market to privacy-conscious people and you base all your decisions on data from telemetry, you're gonna get a very skewed perspective. You'll see disproportionate representation from fans (people who want to enable telemetry because they love Mozilla and want to help, and will rationalize any decision Mozilla makes) and very non-technical users who don't know what telemetry is and how opt-in/out works. Technical users who disable stuff like telemetry, analytics, etc. are going to look like a rounding error.

This explains a lot of Firefox's changes.

"That’s what aggressively weaning ourselves off fossil fuel would look like.

And that’s what the banks are not doing."

A discomfiting study, again, of the role of how the assets of tech firms, simply by virtue of being held in banks, do much more damage to the environment than all the constructive changes they might make. This one is from longtime campaigner Bill McKibben.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/could-googles-carbon-emissions-have-effectively-doubled-overnight

I find it important that he says here and in his book The Invisible Computer (1999) that we must start from scratch:

#Unix was designed for the computing environment of then, not the machines of today. Unix survives only because everyone else has done so badly. There were many valuable things to be learned from Unix: how come nobody learned them and then did better? Started from scratch and produced a really superior, modern, graphical operating system?

MoeNavigator development can continue after I finally found the source of the memory leaks in the browser engine. They were caused by an abstract class that didn't have a virtual destructor, causing undefined behavior. With that big problem out of the way, version 0.0.1 of the engine may soon be released, followed by version 0.1 of MoeNavigator. There are only a few tasks left before the release:

https://codeberg.org/moenavigator/moenavigator/milestone/674

#MoeNavigator #Browser #WebBrowser #FLOSS #Software #Development

Want an example of where Fedora Silverblue 36 trumps the usability of macOS? See the gorgeous new screenshot feature (part of GNOME 42).

1. What do you press to take a screenshot on a Mac? I keep forgetting the silly combination… On my machine, it’s the Print Screen button.

2. The screenshot feature is entirely intuitive with no hidden functionality; it remembers your choices and lets you record stills or videos.

😍

#usability #design #fedora #fedoraSilverblue #gnome #macOS #linux

My first drawing with #uxn #nasu. Slowly getting used to how it works. The sprite stuff looked cool but one thing at a time. :)

Some things feel a bit obscure and there are 0 help text, but then this program is made up of 1400 lines of assembly which is just amazing. I'm reading a bit of the manual at a time and it's real fun.

(I don't think these program are meant to have help texts and tooltips - you're supposed to read the manual and experiment. There are a lot of "aha" moments and the design choices feel solid after those moment.)