Notices by Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social)

@futurebird @mcc I was so mad when I went into walgreens last year and they were selling "rainbow disney" things and they didn't even say pride, just "rainbow"

cowards

@mcc @futurebird lmao

As someone who really dislikes the mega-containerization approach and has been unhappy about it since Docker came in with a splash about a decade ago, I'm happy to see a pretty well written criticism of the idea that conatiner systems like Flatpak, Docker, etc are doing a good job of making things easier or more secure for users or devs. They aren't. https://blog.brixit.nl/developers-are-lazy-thus-flatpak/

So here's me speaking favorably about Debian, Arch, Guix, Nix, etc. And all of those can use Guix or Nix as a userspace package manager.

But lord have mercy. Don't use these mega black box systems. You're just accruing a gigabyte sized ball of technical debt for every component in your operating system if you use those.

you could take more taxes from me in exchange for more trains, I'd be happy with that

@jwildeboer It could be that with the restructuring towards being a 501c3 that this could be getting better but I'm skeptical

note that I like to post to Manu's posts because they are *empathetic*. Like me, Manu really likes many of the people who are working at the W3C and knows that many of them really do believe in their mission, despite that the organization ends up being compromised repeatedly (EME is the biggest example).

The reality is that standards organizations should be perceived as a a commons, and our society is not well structured to fund the commons. Trust me, as a person who's been in the constant work of scraping together funding to advance FOSS-oriented decentralized networking tech for over a decade, it's rough. And it's easy to be compromised for reasons that are easy to finger-wag at from the outside. Fundraising is so stressful, and finding a funding path that allows you to stay clean is... hella hard

@jwildeboer The *usual case* at the W3C is that corporations overtake the standard, the only reason that didn't happen with the SocialWG is we were considered a laughing stock at the time, they were sure we couldn't succeed

Now that they want in, it'd be different

@jwildeboer For more on why this is read Manu Sporny's blogposts on the topic

this one especially, "Rebalancing how the web is built":
https://web.archive.org/web/20200120154851/http://manu.sporny.org/2016/rebalancing/
and a bit more focused on a specific case with what happened to the Web Payments group (it was shocking for me to see):
https://web.archive.org/web/20200115004913/http://manu.sporny.org/2017/w3c-web-payments/

The freedom to generate one's own keys is an essential right.

Get suspicious of anyone who's telling you that keys need to come from a "trusted device".

@mauve yes, which is also why I don't use certain kinds of tech which have become "accustomed" to not having reproducible build pipelines

@mauve If it can't be packaged in Guix and people have tried, that's a bad smell ;)

Which of these worlds sounds best for FOSS:

a) a world where all the projects have clear steps to compiling, participating

b) a world where you trust the developers to compile and put things together from black boxes, don't touch them, the devs know what's best for you

fuck flathub/flatpak/docker as "the way to run FOSS software", go guix and nix and debian

down with "father knows best" architecture

I need to get a laptop:

- Which has *working* multi-monitor support. Like, not just the laptop and *one* monitor
- Supports a FOSS'y system (running Guix). Using some nonfree stuff from the nonguix repo is okayish but I'd like as little as possible
- CAN RUN BLENDER AND I ACTUALLY MEAN IT
- No really my last two laptops, if I ran Blender, the whole desktop would crash (yes really) even though this last one I bought specifically so I could run Blender again
- Supports a high amount of ram, 32gb+
- If I don't have to put any money in Microsoft's pocket great, but really... the above is more important.
- Big bonus if it can run coreboot, even bigger if it runs coreboot *by default*

Any suggestions?

I got a System76 last time, which was nice except that (I don't blame them for this one) the ATI radeon drivers *did* crash on running Blender and (I do blame them for this one) it doesn't support multiple monitors, the usb-c monitor stuff is not supported, only the one hdmi slot it had with it, and the screen is too small for it to serve as a second monitor as my desktop.

I'd like to support System76 in some ways, but I'm a little bit burned by the multi monitor thing, which really hurt my productivity.

Thoughts? Recommendations?

Andrew Whatson's presentation on Pre-Scheme is up and is super awesome https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/prescheme/

https://video.fosdem.org/2023/D.minimalistic/prescheme.webm

Aligning Spritely with the Guile, Scheme, Guix communities seems like it's turned out to be a very good idea for us. Productivity is really high over here and the set of tools are really good.

The next release of guile-goblins is gonna be a *MASSIVE* step up in usability too. Should be out soon. Get hyped.

Twice a month someone shows up in the #spritely channel saying "I'm going to rewrite Goblins in Rust!", usually without having used it yet (also not realizing that a couple of common Goblins patterns don't have a clean mapping onto Rust at present)

I love the enthusiasm of Rust's userbase, but...

And by that I mean a couple of really core patterns. I usually say "try to write a general-purpose revokeable proxy *without* using code generation, that can work with any types" as an exercise for someone to get it.

(It's not that it would be impossible to build a type system which could do static analysis and support that, but Rust's doesn't. I have a sketch for a propagators-based type system that might shatter the false dichotomy between static and dynamic strongly typed systems but that's a far future thing and not my current fight.)

I don't think I expressed what I wanted to well here, based on the replies. This was not meant as a dig at Rust or to declare it incapable. I think it's done awesome things. It was really a combo of the following:
- Admiration for the enthusiasm of people in the Rust community to *implement*
- A wish that people would try Goblins first before declaring an intent to reimplement
- An expression that, while all paradigms are implementable from all turing complete languages, certain languages are tuned to solve certain problems in certain ways and that affects what feels *comfortable* to do.

If you're looking for a promising young developer at your organization may I recommend hiring @juliana

Reasons why you might hire @juliana :

- She's cool
- She's made contributions to Guix and a few other FOSS projects
- Webassembly to RISC-V compiler internship say what
- She co-hosts a podcast sometimes which is pretty good https://podcast.librepunk.club/tctc/
- You'd be helping out a smart translady figure out what's next
- I said so, it's a good idea

@oborosaur @PeterBronez I'm very interested in Fuchsia! My main complaint about it is: why not target some of the more community oriented hardware out there right now? Fuchsia on pine64 hardware for instance would be really interesting