Notices by Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)

I know well how reduce the costs for building a browser engine, but how do we fund it?

That I blank on!

Suggestions?

@jonny Yeah, the thing is I don't see *that much* advertising on the indie web...

The surface web seems to serve as its own echo chamber! How do people stand it anymore?

Since I'm about discuss online maps...

(in the context of my hypothetical hardware-browser...)

Which maps are your fav?

HTMHell#33 make me one (input) with everything - Manuel Matuzović:
https://htmhell.dev/33-make-me-one-(input)-with-everything/

You know what's even better than not paying Disney? Contributing to their irrelevancy!

Finding somewhere else to put your attention!

Have I mentioned my Lackadaisy comicbook? Or my love for The Red Panda Adventures? Now that's some fun artistry!

If Magus Elgar can become as much a must-hear as Harry Potter was a must-see...
(Yes, I'm sympathetic to arguments that Harry Potter shouldn't've been)

What are some simplifications which can help make building your own browser achievable?

The biggest one I find: Don't bother with JS!

Some may argue that this disqualifies calling your work a browser engine, but JS support is a major step up in effort for an even larger step up in expectations.

The issue isn't so much JS as it is that central API "the DOM" designed in the midst of hype wrongly calling OOP universal. It epitomizes OO complaints!

1/2

To webdevs: I'm not saying "don't use JS"!

I'm saying "Avoid relying on it, use it responsibly!" & "Hopefully in the future you won't need it!".

Heck, you might need it less in the present than you might think you do.

1.5/1.5!

If there's one thing I've learned as a browser-engine dev: Everything is political!

The most mundane things (e.g. how we answer "what time is it?") has the weight of historical politics behind it.

Software freedom is a political project, you can't "leave politics out of it"!

It makes a lot more sense to ask "how is this political?" than "is this political?". Because it is!

One technology which I think deserves more hype (it is getting a *little*) are Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs)!

I made sure to include it in my exploration of a minimal yet inclusive OS (upcoming page), quote:

"In just the past decade Computer Science brought us the concept of CRDTs! Which represents your document as a series of edits, which combine such that no matter in which order these edits you recieved we get the same result!

1/2

Don't be clever - Go Make Things:
https://gomakethings.com/dont-be-clever/

Something I left out of summary of my hardware-browser hypothetical: It might be even better suited being a webserver than a webclient!

Just give it some nicer syntax & it basically already excels at routing (INI syntax?), templating (mustache?), & key-value storage (simplified YAML?)!

It already needed to excel at networking & (to store its own code) file storage.

It'd be tempting to include content-negotiated auto-transcoding, since it is made for transcoding!

@aral Sigh, in all their marketing Mozilla is *asking* to be held to a higher standard!

Worldwide community of activists protest OverDrive and others forcing DRM upon libraries - Greg Farough @ Defective by Design @ FSF: https://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/worldwide_community_activists_protest_overdrive_and_others_forcing_drm_upon_libraries

On Friday 8th December they're asking you to:

* Not use Libby, etc.
* Discuss the harms of DRM, especially in relation to libraries, with hashtag #DayAgainstDRM
* Don't watch any DRM'd or streaming-only media, etc for that day.

Pfft, trivial for me! I'll binge DRM-free!

JavaScript anti-pattern: self-documenting code - Go Make Things: https://gomakethings.com/javascript-anti-pattern-self-documenting-code/

Rhodes wildfires - Andy Bell: https://andy-bell.co.uk/rhodes-wildfires

@lightweight Credit to @aral for the term "Stay-up"!

@j

Published a fix for my Harfbuzz language bindings, which gives me a bit less faith in the reference docs I've been working too...

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/harfbuzz-pure

And I've had a think about how to fix some dataflow in CatTrap, and have started building infrastructure for that... I never expected percentages to be the tricky bit to implement...

Have you ever seen this image?

ChatGPT feels like the first, even when you are prompt engineering to get it not to be.

Photobit PB0100 RGB CMOS image sensor. Looks like ImageJ choked a bit on stitching the pixel array, there's some misalignments visible.

And it's crashing ImageJ. Guess I'll look at that separately. But the microscope itself handled it like a champ!

Here's a Xilinx XC3S400A in the meantime. Old decap, some damage around the perimeter.