"Slide" Brombek @brombek@social.privacytools.io

I ordered my MNT Reform. I am SO EXCITED! https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform

Where other computing choices are heading in the direction of being locked-down-planned-obselesence--black-boxes, the MNT Reform provides a repairable, tinkerable breath of fresh air.

@aral I know these 700 solutions for one problem are sometimes really annoying. But keep in mind: Software ecosystems work just as natural ecosystems, diversity brings stability. I one fails you, you can use another. That's one big advantage in contrast to non-free systems!

@craigmaloney
Welcome To Windows, where installing apps gets reinvented with each app
@aral

Hello, welcome to Linux, here are the apps you installed using Snap. Here are the apps you installed using Flatpak. Here are the apps you installed using apt. Here are the apps you inst- wait, where are you going… what’s wrong? WE WERE JUST GETTING TO KNOW EACH OTHER!!!

(cont.)

Security is hard. Decentralization is hard. Usability is hard.

Being first to market is *easier* if you drop some, or most, of these.

So, shitty startups get to market first, and then crowd out the decent-but-necessarily-slower projects.

Every time you recommend a tool that follows this pattern of abuse, you are enabling it. You, personally, become a part of the problem. You, personally, help a shitty startup crowd out a decent project.

(cont.)

(cont.)
3. startup makes a horrible business decision or gets bought up by someone onerous; it's inevitable, it's a startup.
4. everybody's shocked, shocked™, but still go with "using it for non-sensitive stuff, too late to move on"
5. rinse, repeat.

Do you know why we don't get a proper, decentralized, easy to use software solutions? This is why. Because we keep letting shitty startups crowd out the good projects.

(cont.)

Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan evacuate 70k people after a hydro dam broke... but nobody will make news of it since it's not #nuclear

https://news.trust.org/item/20200502080925-zpt2m/

It is amazing, and also depressing, watching national- and global-level strategic health/science/politics communication being done over Twitter, a platform expressly designed to make communication hard.

People resorting to Tweeting screenshots of Tweetstorm essay screenshots, because they need to discuss and fact-check complex logical arguments line by line, and Twitter just didn't think that was an important use-case and actively wanted to disincentivise it.

That makes my programmer soul sad.

https://download.fsfe.org/campaigns/pmpc/PMPC-Modernising-with-Free-Software.de.pdf

covid19 climate change

Thanks to @id1660@twitter.com, a lovely new record syntax has just arrived in Idris 2.

(Imagine! Accessing fields with a dot! Who would have thought it was possible! :))

Being a good developer isn’t about writing good code. It’s about making tools that improve people’s lives without compromising their rights, freedom, and safety.

@jk

This toot is okay I guess but it would be much cooler if it were a reactive Python AI microservice inside a Docker container in a Kubernetes cluster inside a hypervisor inside Javascript that's running on Sir TIm Berners-Lee's original vintage NeXT which was used to create the Web, all of which is being glimpsed in a reflection of the iris in a photograph of one of the replicants in that "enhance" scene in Blade Runner: Director's Cut

Tip: Google has over 100,000 employees and a brazillian lines of code - if your business does not, it probably shouldn't be taking its engineering cues from a company that deals with a completely different class of problems than yours

(Regarding Docker, k8s, and the rube goldberg machine of problems popular ops encourages)

"It’s not a castle built on foundations of sand, it’s sand castles built on sand foundations on a sand planet, and your application is the little toy flag stuck on top."

@kaniini Using your brain makes you a communist, you should know this.

@shpuld
Yup.
But then, a step up from webapps is a stable, publicly documented protocol, and multiple native, FOSS clients, fitting well with their target environments.

And then the next step up is a common standardized protocol for multiple similar services, with native clients that allow you to connect to multiple such services in parallel.