Notices by Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social), page 27

For those 1 million domains, we find around 433K distinct MX servers in 230K domains. The top 20 mail server domains there are:

They don't even need to do it deliberately—just an _accidental_ breaking change or a different interpretation with how mastodon works can shift clients that direction.

Do I know that what they generate will be incompatible with #Mastodon? No, especially right out of the gate they have several incentives to play nicely.

But those incentives become less and less as time goes on.

Maybe nothing bad will happen, maybe Meta will fall on their face, but I'd very much take this seriously regardless.

@atomicpoet I wouldn't say I am worried. This was bound to happen one day.

But I am disappointed that in all the years before the grassroots #FOSS movement wasn't able to create stronger foundations that would place them in a better position than they are now.

It is a fact of life, I know. #FreeSoftware has a big sustainability issue that is very hard to tackle.

If #Fediverse is taken over by the corporate world, FOSS projects are left to add to that or explore new areas to be captured later.

@gabriel It was a slow process throughout my youth.

I never had much money, so buying an OS for $100+ was prohibitive. Plus, you had to call up Microsoft and ask permission to move your license, what was all that about?

Since we lived through the 90s and aughts, we had a lot of obsolete hardware floating around, so why not make something out of it? Linux was good for servers, so that's what I used.

Eventually, it was easier to use Linux than Windows, so I stopped using Windows.

Yay! I've got a testscript computing the layout from an XML styletree!

I think tomorrow I'll get this rendering so I can see if I've implemented things correctly, tackle integrating text layout, & maybe tackle lowering tables. Made a start on that last task, but I've got other stuff I need done for my LibrePlanet demo next weekend! This is tight...

#ArgonautStack

CatTrap's coming together!

I've just added some more parsers for CSS properties (the font properties from which several length units are derived), & have almost got the library all hooked together!

All that's left (for now) is to handle lower <table>s to something I can lay out & create a test script. And ofcourse add support for laying out text!

Great read:
https://ploum.net/2023-03-09-losing-signal.html

> #Signal published a blog post on how we were all different and they were trying to adapt to those differences. Signal was for everyone, told the title. Ironically, that very same day, I’ve lost access to my account.

> I’ve suddenly been excluded from all the conversations with my friends because I very slightly but unacceptably deviated from the norm.

> 3yrs ago, I thought having a black and white screen on my own phone was more comfortable for my eyes.

@rysiek @ploum As a side note, I love how the article looks and behaves. For a few seconds, I thought I was in Firefox's reader mode.

@jayrope it's not just about power users. Every user should have the power not to have to use Google Play Services!

It is the fact that @signalapp (and many other day-to-day apps) all but requires Google Play Services that makes it an option available only to "power users" who can flash their phone and install MicroG.

So it's not that #Signal doesn't cater to power users, it's that Signal helps make certain things (using a privacy-preserving phone) a power-user-only thing!

@gabriel For me, it was very gradual. Hard for me to pinpoint anything specific.

Though I've always felt the anticapitalist roots in my bones!

Very interesting conversation between @parismarx and @danmcquillan on #TechWontSaveUs about #AI.

In terms of their critique on AI, its "huge potential" and the "future benefits" @danmcquillan suggests a way to contemplate progressive technologies: a kind of "prefigurative politics", that starts with envisioning better worlds, and then creating the technologies that are consistent with those worlds.

1/

@lightweight Yeah, thinking from a purely financial perspective is a problem. And many feel they don't have any other choice, which would be where the "privilege" allegations come from!

I wish UBI was enough of a thing that it's easier to check out of capitalism...

@frankie Personally, Liferea!

@lightweight Seriously it really doesn't take that much privilege, that much luxury to do this... The supposed sacrifices are minor!

It was an immense privilege to work with the very fine folks at Ink & Switch on Upwelling, an exploration of writer-focused collaboration tools: https://www.inkandswitch.com/upwelling/

Collaboration tools for software developers (git, etc) have been deeply explored and are rich in diversity and features. Writers' tools: not so much. With Upwelling, we leaned into recent advances in CRDTs to experiment with possible UX patterns for collaboration on prose.

Today I was reminded that HTTP/2 servers can deny communication quite unceremoniously by sending back a #GOAWAY signal. What do you do to resume communication? Simply retry the request? Or also refresh the #HTTP client that makes the requests?

Version control is essential for software developers, but Git is only really suitable for plain text files. Users of WYSIWYG text editors, graphics software, spreadsheets, etc. don’t get the benefits of version control (diffing, branching, merging, viewing history, etc).

Upwelling is a first step towards figuring out how we could build version control concepts into non-plain-text apps (in this case, a rich text editor) in a way that is usable but still powerful.

Upon "end" it removes the linesegment from the scanline & tests if its neighbours intersect. All while emitting those trapagons according to the given winding rule.

These results causes some micro-optimized code (often written in Assembly) to write the computed values from the given "pattern" into the appropriate bytes of the output image, possibly mixing with the previous value.

5/5 Fin! See also: https://adrian.geek.nz/graphics_docs/cairo.html

Until recently most productivity UIs were drawn this way.

#Rust 1.68 is out!

The coolest thing in there is the newly stabilized pin!() macro, which of course makes any value of type T into a Pin<&mut T>

This is like the old futures::pin_mut!() macro, but they've done some awesome magic (or: horrible hacks) to make it more ergonomic:

Ahahahahahahaha

Now I know why I've not heard of that "Arc" browser before - it's in private mac-only beta.

(also it's yet another blink user by a company that raised a bunch of capital and includes people from Tesla, Amazon, Snap, Slack, Pinterest - it's Silicon Valley: The Browser. The vibes aren't great)