social.solarpunk.au

social.solarpunk.au

vidak | @vidak@social.solarpunk.au

# LOCATION

The unceded, stolen land of the Wadjuk people of the Nyoongar nation. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land!!

# QUOTATIONS

You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. ~winnie-the-pooh

# MAIN INFO

(current operating system) emacs
(code) https://git.sr.ht/~vidak/
(blog) https://vidak.solarpunk.au
(peertube) https://spectra.video/a/vidak/video-channels

# SMOLNET

(main) gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/1/~vidak

# CONTACT ME

(matrix) https://matrix.to/#/@vidak:matrix.solarpunk.au

i am getting real tired of the same old talking points against socialism

most of these people have had no serious engagement with the history of philosophy, and wear it as a kind of badge

let me tell you now: liberalism and capitalist ideology are such, such narrow and limited worldviews

this is me being charitable, and assuming that the culture of their philosophies is actually carried out without hypocrisy

so even if liberalism was perfectly implemented, and it 'worked' according to its own understanding, i would never choose it--it honestly turns out to be a whole society trapped in a plato's cave

So, I've been trying out Wayland for a few weeks. How many years has it been since everybody were saying that it's time to ditch X?

Well, if that's the case, why am I seeing this?

  • Enabling Wayland support in Firefox causes menus to be corrupted.
  • Scaling in Firefox is randomly broken (logging out and back in fixes it)
  • Taking screenshots causes everything on the screen to shrink to half size while selecting what to screenshot.
  • Moving a browser window resizes it to half vertical size
  • After placing a window to be aligned with the top border, it sometimes moves down by 1 pixel, making it impossible to select it by moving the mouse pointer to the top of the screen.
  • On random occasions, parts of my IntelliJ IDEA windows starts flashing until I force a repaint.
  • HDR rendering looks horrible, so I have to turn it off.
  • Every time I reboot the computer, the monitor brightness gets reset to 100% (fixed it by disabling ddcutil on powerdevil)
  • And I just saw an article about the sorry state of colour management in Wayland.

Can someone tell me what's going on here, and why I should be using this thing?

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.

https://spritely.institute/donate/

I won’t 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: it’s 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 I’d consider beautiful in the last 10 years.

It would be easy to say that this doesn’t matter so long as it meets the measurable criteria, but anyone familiar with humans knows better.

Now I’m 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.

I added some movement code to my lisp raycaster

hot startup idea: winnebagos but on rail. cruise ship but trains. whole apartment complexes that travel around

Day 25 of the !

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 “have you accepted our lord and savior jesus christ” and riker deadpan replies “am i supposed to know who that is”

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)

https://deathgenerator.com/#snatcher

A black green with green text, reading:

This story is dedicated
 to all those cyberpunks
who fight against microsoft,
apple, and google every day
of their lives.

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 video about Christmas themed computer viruses and malware, if anyone wants some seasonal
https://youtu.be/4ZPjZFgsCp0

Finished the clock in time for the gift exchange.

Wooden clock made from fixed individual letters that show the current time. “ITS QUARTER PAST EIGHT” currently lit up.

This tribute to M.C. Escher by Katsuhiro Otomo (of Akira fame) gets me every time 😍

A raycaster in common lisp

using the repl is awesome.

an raycaster with green walls and black ceiling and floor.

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