if you've got donations to get in before the year's end (I know I do!) consider donating to @spritely! we are building the next generation of decentralized social infrastructure and could really use your help to continue our work! donations directly fund software development and everything we do is free software, open source, and free culture.
I wonât go into how I got here this morning (maybe in a blog post sometime), but I realized a reason so much contemporary software turns me off: itâs ugly.
So much of it is so goddamned ugly, on the outside and/or the inside. I struggle to think of more than one or two that Iâd consider beautiful in the last 10 years.
It would be easy to say that this doesnât matter so long as it meets the measurable criteria, but anyone familiar with humans knows better.
Now Iâm on the lookout for the beautiful software, the beautiful code.
totally agree with the argument from system creep against systemd and docker etc.
Q: how do i X?
A: well first of all convert everything in your software stack to a docker container / systemd service...
has anyone else also already run out of spoons?
this holiday is excruciating this year
my mind, and as a result my body have been an absolute wreck these last 18 hours
Gonna make an audiophile power supply where it uses rotary transformers in the power supply, instead of terrible noisy digital BINARY switch-mode power supplies.
The incoming AC voltage is simply used to spin a axle, which has multiple generators (at different voltages) attached to provide the 12v, 5v, 3.3v, etc voltage rails used to power the motherboard and accessories.
hot startup idea: winnebagos but on rail. cruise ship but trains. whole apartment complexes that travel around
Day 25 of the #DecemberAdventure!
https://eli.li/december-adventure-2024#section-24
Much graphics, such pixels. 2 approaches to fir trees.
star trek episode where an ancient human asks riker âhave you accepted our lord and savior jesus christâ and riker deadpan replies âam i supposed to know who that isâ
i really wanna comment on christmas, this time around in 2024.
the supposed joy that the birth of christ is supposed to carry doesn't really sit well with me.
i am no christmas scrooge. i like being a happy and affable person. i am also no misanthrope, i truly enjoy the company of others. but i have always found it hard to feel hope around this celebration, it feels forced and manufactured now.
easter always feels more intimate, a time i can be vulnerable with myself. the death of christ, his 'sacrifice', and then his resurrection feel very relatable: i have heard it said, you must first fail in order to succeed.
the redemption and atonement of easter feel way, way, deeper and more realistic than the air of celebration around christmas.
still reading a lot
the bulk of edgar snow's red star over china. the detailed description of the long march is especially awe-inspiring.
ernest mandel's chapter summaries of marx's grundrisse.
whole load of articles and speeches given by chinese economist chen yun, around the time of the adoption of socialism with chinese characteristics.
It's time for a new generator! This time it's 1994's Sega CD port of Konami's Snatcher.
(This is what Hideo Kojima did after the first Metal Gear)
#lispyGopherClimate #live #christmas #podcast https://archives.anonradio.net/202412250000_screwtape.mp3
@kentpitman #haiku + underannounced #AI climate costs
#commonlisp #lisp Exciting to have #gamedev #powerhouse @mdhughes https://gitlab.com/mdhughes/mcclim-console https://itch.io/profile/mdhughes
and #mcclim #dev @jackdaniel https://turtleware.eu/
intersecting.
I'm adopting this vintage game terminal + grid for my lisp packages (around my own https://codeberg.org/tfw/lispmoo2 ). Also #Sandewall's #beliefDesireIntent in my own #lispmoo2.
join
still on my reading kick.
started going through plato's phaedo for the first time, and i'm waiting to find the passage about materialism that leibniz talked about in the discourse on metaphysics.
i also spent time going through the stanford uni philosophy encyclopedia. i read the articles on leibniz and wilfrid sellars very carefully.
over the last two or so years i have been having a weird crisis of faith in the traditional materialism and atheism that is the orthodoxy in australian radical leftism.
it's not so much that i have any religious or spiritual faith, but that, like leibniz, i am very worried that radical leftism is in a state of chronic forgetting.
large sections of the left are fans of taking a scalpel to the history of ideas and cutting concepts out as if they had never existed.
it is at this point that i look at this zeal for leftist iconoclasm and despair. i truly feel like being faithful to the revolution requires not piety and purity of the mind, but a critical understanding of the sum total of history.
it does not work the way they say. you may erase something from cultural memory, but history has its own plans. i am no nietzsche fan, but his concept of the 'eternal return' seems to capture what i am getting at.
my personal attitude is that i would rather know and sit uncomfortably with the truth than live in blissful (wilful) ignorance.
like hegel said, you must 'tarry with the negative'. mere negation is half the process of achieving truth and finality. the only way to solve a contradiction is to go through the contradiction, not just simply suppress it.
Reminder that I made a #YouTube video about Christmas themed computer viruses and malware, if anyone wants some seasonal #hacking #history
https://youtu.be/4ZPjZFgsCp0
Finished the clock in time for the gift exchange.
This tribute to M.C. Escher by Katsuhiro Otomo (of Akira fame) gets me every time đ
I'm thinking on some valid subset of #HTML that would look fine when displayed as-is, but can be preprocessed and enriched into something else. One of the elements I already implemented is captioned <pre> block:
<pre c>
auto var = 3;
</pre caption for this block>
that turns into
<figure>
<pre lang=c>
auto var = 3;
</pre>
<figcaption>caption for this block</figcaption>
</figure>
The magic here is that both forms are valid HTML, so I can preview both of these in the browser, and it will mostly be similar!
The goal is to have as many of these vanilla-looking elements. Elements that are progressively expanded to more complex and useful entities in my build scripts. But it will certainly take some time to come up with smart ways to exploit HTML for this.
It's interesting to me that after the Steam Deck encouraged devs to support Linux (at least through Proton) and proved that Linux is decent for gaming, that some people (albeit people already more technical rather than normal Gamersâ˘) deliberately switched to Linux for gaming, just so they could use Gamescope and Gamemode