@akkartik: excellent piece on convivial tooling, commodity browsers, and the role of abstraction:
I would prefer if software patents didn't exist at all, but in the meantime... has anyone thought of (or is there) a sort of "FOSS patent pool"? The Open Invention Network is a thing, but that's slightly different; I'm thinking a pool of patents that are available only for use in FOSS projects. Basically copyleft but for patents. If you can't beat 'em...
What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Has it been tried before and failed?
When I was an undergrad, I had a job on campus as a DECsystem-20 systems programmer. So when my colleague Rich Pattis announced that, in preparation for his impending retirement, he was clearing out his office and giving away, among other things, the PDP-10 front console he had rescued from the trash pile of another university, I jumped at the opportunity. Here it is, atop one of my office bookshelves. Note the 36 keys in the front row: its memory was organized into 36-bit words, not bytes.
Uh I just got DMed by the COO of Tumblr asking about hiring contractors to make us fully #indieweb compliant, and possibly even #fediverse integration. Anyone out there looking for work?
#RightToRepair will become an absolute necessity in the near future. Having all the supply chain completely fucked up and prices all over increasing like never before, people will need to learn how to do stuff themselves instead of pulling a credit card.
Btw, an example of this is the interurban network, which linked not only large cities, but small towns across the so called United States. Here's a map of electric railways on 1899 in Massachusetts, which is considerably better than any transit offered today. Interurban at the zenith of their technical development (which coincided with their ridership decline) could go 90mph. It's likely that without state intervention in the form of highway building these would still exist.
The dominance of automobiles in society is due largely to the past and continued intervention of the state on their behalf. There is absolutely nothing inevitable about cars as a technology, and most of this application of state power and resources is to make up for their shortcomings and suppress alternatives.
🇺🇸🔗 Procrastinator’s Guide to the 2021 November election in Philadelphia
November 2nd is right around the corner. Time to work on your voting cheat sheet.
https://billypenn.com/2021/10/16/procrastinators-guide-election-philadelphia-november-2021/
Systems Engineer @ Linode