papa @papa@mastodon.sdf.org

@sobercatholic
An interesting article:
https://catholicherald.co.uk/news/2018/12/11/did-angels-really-carry-the-holy-house-of-mary-to-loreto-italy/

public authorities "can secretly compel tech companies and individual technologists, including network administrators, sysadmins, and open source developers – to re-engineer software and hardware under their control, so that it can be used to spy on their users. Engineers can be penalized for refusing to comply with fines and prison"... sounds like a nightmare but it is reality in the #UK and #Australia https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/new-fight-online-privacy-and-security-australia-falls-what-happens-next #eff #spy #privacy #security

A defence I hear often when complaining about surveillance: "we don't have the money to go after everybody!" And it's probably true, today. But what if a future dictator has more money? What if you're innocent but got on some list somewhere and now they feel justified in singling you out? "They are too poor to spy on me" is a lousy defence compared to "It's illegal to spy on me and I will sue them if they do, and there are organisations that will help me if I need it!"

All the strongest anti-gun voices in my social circle are also the strongest anti-police voices and I'm really not sure what they have in mind.

GitHub is proprietary software. Think of it! 🤔
"Today contributing to a FOSS project more often than not requires using GitHub" - "I talked to [...] technical students of my university [...] and they thought git is just the interface you use to talk to GitHub" - "git was created as a way of escaping the reliance of a proprietary software company running a centralized service" - "GitHub has created many of the problems git was created to solve" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_nK6nP_RCY#t=8m00s

@maiki I did up some basic rules for a Poppins RPG years ago. Mechanics were based upon child logic and reality bending. Goals were moral and scene based. "Poppins" was a title given to agents. They were sent in for the big jobs

"JavaScript growth and third parties" by Steve Souders https://speedcurve.com/blog/javascript-growth/

"JavaScript is the main cause for making websites slow. [Compared to 7 years ago, ] 1st-party JS doubled from 53 KB to 106 KB. 3rd-party JS octupled (!) from 32 KB to 258 KB."

What's most remarkable is that this happened even with the rise of bundlers, which effectively make 3rd-party JS "look" like 1st-party. In other words, that 1st-party growth is probably node_modules; the 3rd-party growth is ads/trackers/???.

I'm so old than when I learned COBOL* they made us write the code before we could put it in the computer. And before we wrote the code we did a flowchart.
---
RT @ReinH@twitter.com
People keep talking about typed programming languages and ok but like how else are people writing code? Pen and paper?
https://twitter.com/ReinH/status/1072636280817766400

Welcome to a new Traveller subsector! UWP: https://campaignwiki.org/traveller/uwp/2745717360 SVG: https://campaignwiki.org/traveller/map/2745717360 #traveller #hex #map #rpg

sometimes I wonder if the most effective form of donation in terms of helping make the future a better place might just be to send boxes full of Ursula K. Le Guin novels to public school libraries all over the country

#celebrate #pdp10 #36bits with twenex.org happy #dec10 day #hack #vintage #computing

What do you folks want from #Brexit? I'd like to see it go back to a vote, and not happen, because I'd like to see a political machine operate, and I think this is a fascinating lesson for history.

Also, if it works out, California is gonna get ideas! ^_~

~ Searching through the Rare Books collection in the university library ~

Librarian: Can I help you? Are you looking for something?

Me: Yeah, so there has to be like a cursed amulet or something that I can use to trap Alexa, Siri and Cortana in forever, right?

Librarian: Haha (waits for other patron to leave) follow me

Stars can't be green for the same reason you can't make iron glow green-hot! It goes from dull red, to white hot, to bluish hot. The thermal blackbody radiation curve that peaks in the green has equal parts blue, green, and red, so it appears kind of yellowish-white to us. If green stars were possible, our own sun would be exactly that! If you think about it, you're glowing like a star right now, just only in the infra-red spectrum, can't see it (unless you have an infrared heat camera) ✨

Browsing @snowdusk_ 's and @tomasino 's phlogs on @SDF phlogosphere through GOPHERUS client for DOS (nice courtesy of Mateusz Viste) running on FreeDOS on hardware-accelerated QEMU on NetBSD with Intel HAXM backend
http://gopherus.sourceforge.net/

#gopher #sdf #freedos #netbsd #16bit

It needs a new battery and the WiFi is dubious, but I really like the Sony Clié PEG-UX50/E. Especially when it cost me ten bucks on a local flea market.

It's already part of my everyday carry and phlogflow.

What if programming with more than one person involved just inherently sucks and the history of software development has simply been a series of futile attempts to combat that?

"There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing"

-- Aristotle