dentangle

dentangle, 17 days ago to random

NB: I'm not saying community service is a bad thing. Far from it. But it should never be compulsory.

I earned my Queens Scout Award from age 14-18, which involved hundreds of hours of community service. It's valuable, educational and humbling, but it shouldn't be handed out as a punishment, or used as slave labour.

If the point of #NationalService is education, make it part of schooling. Learning by doing, in the community, while at school? Sure, but we don't call that #NationalService

dentangle, 16 days ago to random

No Mojeek, entering a query in Russian does not mean I'm a bot. I'm just trying to search for the lyrics of a song. A little less xenophobia, please...

dentangle, 1 month ago to random

Linus demonstrating that any clear and well-reasoned proposal can still be attacked using nothing more than SHOUTY CAPS and calling it "idiotic".

Deftly ignoring direct questions, and side-stepping all attempts at logical discussion by deliberately and repeatedly mis-quoting the other person.

@kees I am in awe of your patience and calm 😉

https://lore.kernel.org/all/202404291502.612E0A10@keescook/

dentangle, 1 year ago to random

pet peeve: programs that try to be clever when displaying dates.

eg. "last modified 13 seconds ago"

It's already incorrect as soon as you read it and becomes more so the longer it sits in your terminal / web browser etc.

I'm currently looking at a tab on Codeberg that says it was updated "9 months ago". Which precise date and time? It matters. Just show me the timestamp! I'm trying to compare a ticket to a git commit see which happened first.

Status: no idea.

dentangle, 9 months ago to random

I can move my head again more or less fully for the first time in a couple of weeks, now that the muscle cramping in my back and neck has calmed down. 🥳

I will, for the next 24 hours at least, make a point of enjoying this, before I go back to taking it for granted again. 😃

#LongCovid

dentangle, 9 months ago to random

Well, that was an adventure.

After the heat last week where it was 38°C outside (and 30°C at my desk), I was hoping to get a bit more done when the cooler weather came on Friday. My #LongCovid body and brain had other ideas. After 3 thunderstorms overnight and several power cuts, I spent most of Friday and Saturday feeling shattered. Today, after deciding the brain fog wasn't lifting yet I thought I'd do something simple - the recycling.

dentangle, 7 months ago to random

Any time I hear politicians or journalists use the word "terrorist" I read it as a clear sign of bias and trying to imply that one side is evil and therefore any action is justified.

There are no terrorists, just people, some of whom are (war) criminals.

Replace terrorist with your favorite "evil" race from fantasy. eg. orc.

We can happily listen to Gimli chatting about enjoying hewing orc skulls, because they're not human. "Terrorist" is designed to make us feel that way about other people.

dentangle, 5 months ago to random

I love the smell of fresh pull requests in the morning. Smells like... community 😃

Thanks @jens

dentangle, 9 months ago to random

When I hear that an instance has 60 thousand users or some such number, I remember that I grew up in a town of 25 thousand people.

A town that size had a couple of highschools, restaurants, cafes, a few pubs, a courthouse, police station, hospital and train station.

The mayor had one of those gold chains of office and everything. He cut ribbons to open buildings, kissed babies to get elected and got his picture taken posing next to random objects the way such folk do.

Just pondering, really.

dentangle, 5 months ago to random

Sourcehut and Codeberg are both down, as is Sourcehut's status page on Codeberg.

I know about this because of IRC (distributed) and Mastodon (distributed).

dentangle, 1 year ago to random

To my utter astonishment, the NGI Outreach Office just declared all Open Source conferencing software as unfit for purpose.

"Following the technical problems and limitations we encountered when trying to use the open-source BigBlueButton software, we have decided to revert to a
proven commercial solution, ZOOM. We are fully aware that this technical choice is not fully in line with some of the values promoted by the NGI initiative..."

dentangle, 15 days ago to random

I've been trialling @Mojeek search again.

I really like the lightweight front page. Feels like Google used to circa ~2000.

Some more feedback:

1. I can choose the interface language (English, Deutsch, français). Great. However, this defaults to English. My browser has already sent you my language preferences in the Accept-Language[1] request header. Better to use that.

2. Mojeek has a dark mode option in settings. Why not use the prefers-color-scheme media query?

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Accept-Language

dentangle, 11 months ago to random

Doing a little more lcsync (#multicast file syncing) optimization.

I'm impressed with how responsive MLD triggering is, at least on Linux, where MLDv2 is supported. MLD is not a great protocol, but then it wasn't designed to be abused in this way 😁

Still not getting anything like tcp throughput for a 1 to 1 file transfer, but latency for file comparisons is a lot better than I'd expected.

eg. to compare two 4GiB files that are the same, rsync takes just over 1 minute (61s). lcsync: 17s.

dentangle, 11 months ago to random

Curry in Stafford

This wasn't easy to write, but here's a little story about curry, Long Covid, mental health, phone calls, avoiding Birmingham and choosing life.

https://blog.brettsheffield.com/curry-in-stafford

#LongCovid #Covid #CovidIsNotOver #CovidIsAirborne

dentangle, 1 year ago to random

As I neither work for an academic institution nor a large corporate, getting access to standards documentation and research papers is a major pain. So much knowledge is paywalled, and I often don't know before hunting down and reading it whether it will be of any use to me.

dentangle, 10 months ago to random

#LongCovid really is the gift that keeps on giving. New symptom unlocked!

I've had muscle cramps since Covid in March 2020. Calf, thighs, back - waking me up in the night. Tongue cramp anyone?

But for the past few days I've had a new one. 🥳 A cramping of the upper back and neck muscles such that I can no longer move my head. Even the imperceptible movement to look at a terminal on the far right of the screen hurts.

Brain fog is at a reduced lvl though, so I'm calling it a win 🙂

dentangle, 9 months ago to random

Hi @conservancy - I'm seeing some sporadic links to #FOSSY talks being posted by folks - where can I find the definitive list? Perhaps you would consider linking the talks from the schedule pages to make it easy to find them.

dentangle, 1 month ago to foss

All Your Base Are Belong to LLM

"The output from an LLM is a derivative work of the data used to train the LLM.

If we fail to recognise this, or are unable to uphold this in law, copyright (and copyleft on which it depends) is dead. Copyright will still be used against us by corporations, but its utility to FOSS to preserve freedom is gone."

https://blog.brettsheffield.com/all-your-base-are-belong-to-llm

#FOSS #OpenSource #FreeSoftware #LLM #AI

dentangle, 5 months ago to random

"Two days ago" here refers to a date in 2021, which is when archive.org archived the site.

Seriously, just display the actual date. Trying to be clever and showing a delta just means it will always be wrong. It gets more wrong the longer the browser tab remains open (unless you waste CPU keeping it updated).

dentangle, 6 months ago to random

Hi @devinprater

Can I ask your advice?

I'm building several program interfaces (some graphical, some console, some web) over the next few months.

Rather than punting accessibility as some kind of optional task to the end that I'll likely never get to, I'm trying to build this in an accessible way from the start.

I've never used a screen reader, and just installed Orca, as I've read this is one of the best Open Source ones. Any tips for a newbie, or should I just dive in?

dentangle, 4 months ago to random

"Living in fear" has become something of a dogwhistle, used to attack the Covid-cautious and make it somehow their fault for prolonging the Pandemic.

Ironically, the ones saying "Take off your mask - let's see your smile" and asking "How long are you going to live in fear?" seem to be the ones who fear being reminded of a Pandemic they'd rather forget.

#Covidisnotover #WearAMask #LongCovid

dentangle, 4 months ago to random

They're self-justified and they're impatient
And they like to roam the land
They were notified but they're complacent
They just don't understand

All bound for YOLO Land
All bound for YOLO Land
(Hey hey)
(Bring the mask back)

#WearAMask #CovidIsNotOver

dentangle, 3 months ago to retrocomputing

Is anyone else here old enough to remember back in the 2020s when NFTs were a thing?

#retrocomputing

dentangle, 2 months ago to random

Having now cancelled all of our streaming services, we watched something locally last night.

No ads.

No nagging to install updates*

No fighting with the interface to select language and subtitles.

No random buffering issues.

No random disappearing of content that was available minutes before on the same IP.

We just... watched a thing, and went to bed. 🍽️ + 📺 + 🛏️

Bliss.

dentangle, 14 days ago to random

It's raining again 🌧️

Look, it's nice of you to try but I don't think it matters how many times we wash this reality - we're never getting the stains out.