Notices by Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social), page 57

@alexiscounsell I'm a little short on paid work right now, I'm in New Zealand (close enough?), & I know Python! Amongst other things...

I also know the web excessively intimately.

> the BASIC that Gates sold.. had been developed.. on a Harvard PDP-10, using an 8080-emulation program.. adapted from earlier code..The demonstration... was the first time [it].. ran on the system it was intended for. #Gates sold it by announcing a product that didn't exist, developing it on the model of the best version available elsewhere, not testing it very seriously, demonstrating an edition that didn't fully work this modus operandi became #Microsoft's trademark.
https://web.archive.org/web/20051013072349/http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_1.html

Ah, this is so much easier when I tackle CatTrap one layout property at a time!

I've successfully wrote the code to compute widths! Now to tackle heights...

It's so frustrating to dig in to recent pop culture history and see the same story time and again:

- Small studio creates a cool thing with their own money and releases it.
- mid sized studio gives them some money, and distributes the thing widely
- a decade or three passes, and now it's out of print, and the mid sized studio is now part of Sony or whatever.

I'm trying to chase down ownership of indie films and direct to video stuff, and I keep ending back up at Universal or fucking Disney.

I hate that.

@konstantin Here's a blog from someone who's stood up a public Apache Solr instance with a custom frontend: https://blog.searchmysite.net

He uses Scrapy to crawl registered sites.

@konstantin By far the difficult part is feeding information to return in search results, but Apache Lucene is an excellent such software project! Its heuristics are by far the best internationalized!

I'd recommend using either the Apache Solr or ElasticSearch wrappers to get something a a bit more out-of-the-box.

@brainblasted "That isn't already supported by existing bindings", tall order there!

@doctormo Oooo! eSpeak!

Would need some talented-linguist as a patsy to give all the credit to, but in terms of the code itself...

Yeah, CSS4 *could* suit. But SVG would require powerful CPUs for the time, PostScript did & they're roughly equivalent.

It is amusing that printers at the time had more powerful CPUs than the computer they were connected to...

@doctormo Wayland & SQLite comes to mind!

Also it probably would be good to have an edge (on inclusivity) in the office-suite race, so would Harfbuzz & FreeType be good candidates? The graphical capabilities at the time were quite limited, but they could run well with a display-list rasterizer graphics chip!

The tricky aspect is "how well could I pass off broad internationalization as being plausibly of that era?" Could I bring back the Unicode spec?

I’m a big fan of when a project draws a line in the sand (based on experience!) and says “this is the way to do things”. So much easier to frame my opinions based on a hard line. Anyways, I asked @fimion to write about JSON:API which “standardizes” REST APIs because I’ve seen him advocate for it before and he did. The response format is okay, but I really like the URL pattern structure and I could probably clean my API up a lot. https://alex.party/posts/2023-02-17-why-i-like-json-api/

So they complain about the SEC "regulating through enforcement" rather than clarifying the rules, when, actually, the rules are already very clear and enforcement actions are just that -- not the whimsical application of some new underlying rule that the agency refuses to explicitly articulate. Again, it's community ideology, and it gets into people's heads even when its against their particular interests.

A lot of crypto people are the same way about, say, securities regulation, despite the fact that pretty much every token other than Bitcoin and a small handful of other genuinely decentralized networks, neatly fits within the standard definition of a security. Some libertarian crypto types are like, "So what, fuck the law" which is admirably honest. But mostly people play dumb about how or why securities law clearly applies to this or that -- without exactly realizing they're playing dumb.

So you get real discomfort from tech people around even pretty weak proposals for beefed up privacy protections. You get this kind of squirming uneasiness even from tech folks who DO see that surveillance capitalism biz models are problematic. They still find it hard to reconcile themselves to the idea that nearly their entire industry, and their own wealth, is based on companies following the money within a legal structure that left basic rights unprotected against new technical capabilities.

But silicon valley tech culture reflexively treats this point of view as a kind of benighted luddism. So much of the tech economy has had a deep vested financial interest in systemic privacy violation, attention hacking, and preference manipulation that people involved in it have become ideological about it in the OG Marxian sense, which is to say the legitimacy of the whole deal FEELS neutral, natural and apolitical while objections to it FEEL ideological, even radical.

I've gotten to the point where I think we'd be better off in almost every way, very much including actually useful tech innovation, if we had very strict data collection/privacy laws and simply banned targeted advertising. I think freedom and democracy require a robust right to privacy and that we have really imperiled ourselves by treating its systemic for-profit violation as some kind of unobjectionable, neutral manifestation of free enterprise.

The closer I get to this stuff, the clearer it is to me that "addict/surveil/extract/sell" biz models have ruined the internet really are wrecking mental health, propagating disinfo, dissolving social cohesion, etc. with very little real compensating upside. I think the case for this gets stronger everyday. But there is a TON of resistance to this among "tech people" generally, even those who work for places that would benefit from the demise of surveillance capitalism.

@wlknsn E.g. See all the excitement (including amongst so-called "open web advocates") over iOS allowing webapps to send you push notifications! Some are even dismayed that you actually have to add-to-homescreen before the webapp can do this.

I have a fair few thoughts on this I've been sharing...

After a year at a big, crypto-involved fintech company, I've become increasingly aware of a couple different kinds of annoying industry "mood affiliation" about policy and regulation that muddies a lot of thinking to the point of uselessness.

@lightweight Yeah, & I believe the UX of the dominant taught them this helplessness. And I really don't like what these' over-sandboxedness taught people about how computers work!

That did lead me to be overly cynical about sandboxing...

So the only time I let pages send network requests is upon loading a page. Upon activating links, form submissions, etc.

Form submissions represent consent to upload the entered data. POST submissions represents consent to save cookies.

Folding consent into requesting an action is the optimal strategy!

Also placing buttons out-of-the-way where there's no pressure to click them, & careful wording, are also good strategies!

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