Adrian Cochrane @alcinnz@floss.social
Enthusiastic and graduate software developer, environmental activist, fan of (german) board games.
Odysseus Web Browser lead developer.
@mako @mike_hales Free Software was built to free people from their shackles. Free Software was almost exclusively built by Free Software people. It would be a good thing if people arrived into the world of Free Software with humble aspirations to learn how the Free Software collaborative mode of production came into being in its 30+ years of existence, and undeniable success.
I just wrote a new project description for Odysseus, feedback please? Show more
" Google may be like the borg, unstoppable and unforgiving. But there are the implants, which are well-made, and a decent community and on-going growth. Facebook is pure predatory."
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/how-facebook-punked-and-then-gut-punched-the-news-biz
:/
"The weird but telling indifference to the effects of [Facebook's] actions on other members of the ecosystem in which it operates – so much on display in the ‘fake news’ and Cambridge Analytica stories – is just as visible in these core business practices. Publishers were desperate and often stupid and Facebook took that desperation, used them up and spit them out."
"Being a small independent publish is never easy. It’s a bit like being a small proto- mammal (think a ferret or small rodent or perhaps a pygmy marmoset) in the late dinosaur age: rapid movement, lots of hyper-vigilance and stay lucky because someone may step on you. But in many ways the audience era is vastly better for us than the scale era, even though recent years have been some of the most challenging in the company’s history."
"But the tech model of scale in which you grow rapidly and create network or path dependence, buy or destroy other entrants and then extract monopoly or robustly defensible rents doesn’t really work in [news] media."
-- TPM, https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/how-facebook-punked-and-then-gut-punched-the-news-biz
Please boost for visibility.
#art #mastoart #pencils #artmaterials
Looked at the text handling within GTK4's GSK renderer. And it operates very simply by caching each "glyph" (a concept roughly corresponding to letters, etc), and copying each of these glyphs into their appropriate places.
I think GTK should find this goes further for them then it does for WebRender, as more fonts & variations tend to be used in webpages than native GUIs.
Also I'm no linguist, but I think there's cursive alphabets this code would not be able to handle. Anyways I trust GNOME.
Yeah, that's still a terrifying violation of our privacy.
This is evil.
I’m sick to death of people being precious about #GMO produce. Functionally there is no difference between a grape bred to have little or no seed and a grape that has been modified in a lab for the same thing. Y’all are just scared of science.
You wanna talk about #Monsanto charging for “licenses” for their crops, ok. Talk about agribusiness killing the planet, ok. Talk about corporations copyrighting genetic code, ok. These are all valid concerns.
But the science is sound.
Puzzled . . @mako makes a clear pitch on "Free software production needs free tools" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_nK6nP_RCY&feature=youtu.be
And is very clear on #commons and #P2P (though says most code comes from solo not collaboration!). Yet not a hint of coop ownership of #platforms to keep tools honest & open (GitHub!). Surely tools today become platforms? And platforms require collaboration even if code doesn't? So why doesn't #coop follow automatically, as we talk tools? How does libre not equal coop in FLOSS world?
@alcinnz I'm building a home-made computer called #Kestrel3, and growing its abilities starting from a small, single-FPGA design that truly has a reduced architecture that just barely fits these qualities.
Longer term, I hope to evolve it into a multi-FPGA design. It's occurred to me that my ambition is a computer that mixes the valuable elements of Atari ST and Amiga and Commodore 64/128.
>>
A timely reminder.
In general languages tend not to have dedicated syntax for I/O, preferring to have APIs for it. Instead they allow those APIs to be written in a lower level language.
So Python calls C APIs to do I/O, C makes kernel "syscalls" via Assembly, and the kernel calls Assembly APIs. Or it reads & writes special pointers.
And at each stage more processing is done. Because simultaneously communicating effectively and efficiently with various hardware, humans, and other software is hard.
In creating programming languages & computer hardware there's only a very small handful of operations which absolutely must be supported, the rest is convenience.
This includes the ability to store data to be read later, to repeat instructions, do different things for different inputs, and to communicate with the outside world. Then add abstraction as it's required to use these practically.
Today I'll discuss how langs do I/O, as they tend to deal with it differently to the others.
free: in english its ambiguous and "libre" or "gratis" is prefered when theres confusion
open: you can physically review code that may still be restricted by copyright, therefore you arent necessarily able to modify or use the code
libre: you have the liberty to do what you will with the software
Hello! I’m a newly-minted CS PhD (UC Santa Cruz) and Assistant Prof at Pomona College. My research area connects videogames, AI, verification, and specification recovery. I’m also really interested in GPGPU and other forms of energy-efficient computation. I’m on a mission to help my students replace the games industry and Silicon Valley with more humane alternatives.
I want to learn more about equitable instructional, assessment, and evaluation design!
I'm working on a list of what it means to "commit responsibly." What would you change/add to this?
1. Not committing bugs or broken builds
2. Not leaving in dead code or print statements
3. Formatting code to your style specifications
4. Using meaningful variables
5. Providing documentation where necessary
6. Using descriptive commit messages
No matter what I try, I always come back to #elementaryOS. I just can't get away from it :/
Rest In Pieces, general-purpose computing.
While I wasn’t watching (because, seriously, life’s too short to care about the train-wreck of an operating system that is Windows), Microsoft apparently outdid Apple last year by releasing an app-store-only flavour of its desktop OS & now it’s expanding that as an option to its other versions (Home and Pro).
Soon devs may be left as a special privileged class able to use Windows machines as general-purpose computers.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/03/07/windows-10-s-mode-coming-soon-editions-windows-10/
