Notices by Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social), page 56

@alcinnz @prometheus

Man, I SO miss buttons now.

I turned on my grandmother's old flip phone a few months back and got hit with a wave of -- not nostalgia, but realizing how much better even a stupid T9 keyboard is to a touchscreen-only device.

@nilesh I can think of a few reasons for consumers not embracing FOSS...

I think marketting has bigger impact on individual "consumers" than it does on businesses.

People feel more confident about getting the support & compatibility they need if they run something more popular.

The tendancy to stick with defaults.

We used to not be very good at UX. This is changing, but it'll take a bit to shed reputation.

Then there's the vocal toxicity I've seen a fair few anecdots of.

FreeType includes a submodule which renders glyphs to "signed distance fields", though I don't know why. Perhaps to aid automatic boldening?

A renderer class is exposed to the FreeType subsystems infrastructure, mainly consisting of a render method. This method, after initialization & validation, defers to another method & cleans up.

It also has methods wrapping FT_Outline operations. There's another extremely class with a different render method.

1/?

@drewpasmith @mpesce The testing regimes themselves are "flawed" (I'm being VERY polite). For 'intelligent cruise control' the system only needs to be accurate for 90% of the test. That's 25kms it can be wrong!
Thatcham Research, UK NCAP testers, have admitted the 'lane keeping' tests have been gamed by OEMs just to pass and not be good on the roads.
That's just two examples.
If only we had a recent example of OEMs gaming tests to the detriment of us all, say over emissions or something.

Never ask a lawyer if it's OK to do something (it's always "no"). Ask them to explain the risks in doing so.

Never ask a programmer if something is possible (it's always "yes"). Ask them to explain what is involved doing something.

Never ask a doctor if something will make you better (it's always "maybe"). Ask them to explain the conditions under which a treatment/procedure will work and what could go wrong.

TabFS - Omar Rizwan: https://omar.website/tabfs/
Simon Willison's excitement: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/19/tabfs/
Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34847611

Expand and Stabilize, Explore and Craft - Matthias Ott: https://matthiasott.com/notes/expand-and-stabilize-explore-and-craft

What makes data serialization similar to an abandoned freight rail station? And why are spreadsheets more like a city than conventional languages? https://tomasp.net/blog/2023/vague-spaces/

@HarryTuttle So many ideas, so little time? I can relate to that!

I think I'll start uploading The Argonaut Suite to argonaut-constellation.org ...

Oooo! It occurs to me that it'd be appropriate to package animations into their own module. Name it after some early film cartoonist... "Fleischer"'s the first such name that comes to mind.

@robey Honestly though, typing's not my bottleneck.

Sure Copilot could type faster than me, but what really eats up all the time for me is figuring out why my program isn't doing what it should. Copilot threatens to make that even worse, instead I find rigid typesystems extremely helpful!

The Glasgow Haskell Compiler is an excellent pair programmer! Without any of this AI nonsense.

@robey You want a life-model decoy?

All my #ArgonautStack repositories now have "Contributing" sections in their READMEs! I hope I worded them correctly to not scare people off from trying a new system & contributing patches.

Well, I didn't add it to Typograffiti since I'm leaving the existing repository on GitHub... I suspect whatever I write there I'd still get my contributions via GitHub, under the assumption that that's easier for me.

I'm adding contribution instructions to each README in my Argonaut Stack akin to: https://git.argonaut-constellation.org/~alcinnz/harfbuzz-pure#contributing

This documentation is specifically designed to be brief & lenient to help future contributors overcome any fear of trying something new. Feedback would be appreciated!

#Freelance #Linux Project Administrator within a small EU institution with a small IT team

• 2nd level support tasks
• Project management for the current IT environment (working closely with ext. providers)
• Escalation and follow-up of tickets (incident, change request) to relevant stakeholders until they are closed
• Implementation of IT good governance policies and principles
• Input into the ongoing reflection on IT infrastructure modernization towards open source
• Drafting procedures.
🧵

That should do it! I'm now calculating padding, border, & margin sizes. As per the spec.

Margin computation needed a couple special cases to handle the "auto" keyword.

I'll integrate my calc() interpreter once I've got the basics tested...

I'll take a sizable dinner break than carefully draft documentation on how to contribute patches.

@Lobau They sound like true artists! I like their sentiment...
I wonder why why they're specifically dissing Sony in the footnote?

I also wonder if they'll achieve their dream of making a movie? I'd be keen to see it!

Anyways it might be fun to try this tool out & storyboard cartoon visuals for an audioshow I love...

Anyhoo, John Carmack was a genius. Now back to our regularly scheduled poop jokes.

I've drafted code to compute width & height with configurable min/max values as well as percentages of parent values. With a testable abstraction. Into "CatTrap".

Yes, Haskell is a nice language for this!

Still need to draft code for adding whitespace according to the CSS Box Model, & tomorrow I'll get this tested. Then it'll be time to implement grids!

#ArgonautStack

I really want to start a video rental store.

This is an absurd idea.