I finally beat Farewell

A lot of times I’ll run apt-get update / apt-get upgrade on my server and there will be no updates to install. I only reboot if there is a new kernel or something. Otherwise, I can just restart whichever services are directly impacted by the updates.

Debian Stable is a rock. Nothing ever changes. I do recommend subscribing to the debian-announce and debian-security-announce mailing lists though.

VCs invest in emerging technologies like virtual reality and “artificial intelligence” because there is the potential to become a fixture of a small economy and grow with it. The time to do this with web browsers was in the 90s. The browser market isn’t growing, and it is already cornered by one of the largest monopolies in the world. They can’t be undercut on price (Chrome is effectively a loss-leader to promote Google’s other properties). They can’t be outspent on R&D. If you are seeking VC, you need to produce a return on investment somehow, and there is no way to do that without selling out the end users in an even more devious way than Google. There is no viable capitalist development model for web browsers. It is the kind of infrastructure which needs to be funded with grants or state funding.

What happens when we reach the point where it is practically impossible for companies like Yandex or Huawei to upstream patches? They are going to maintain their own trees, and those kernels will ship on millions of consumer devices.

Now that I’ve pondered this a little bit more. I think the shocking thing won’t be forks. There really are thousands of forks. But people will likely begin to coalesce around different upstreams in higher numbers than we’ve ever seen before.

$ whois lib.rehab
Domain Name: lib.rehab
Registry Domain ID: f265d2b186ee4f149136727a11e3155c-DONUTS
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.dynadot.com
Registrar URL: http://dynadot.com
Updated Date: 2024-07-30T13:43:50Z
Creation Date: 2023-06-15T13:43:25Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2025-06-15T13:43:25Z
[...]

The registration probably lapsed (because it was a meme domain) and somebody snapped it up in June 2023

While I’m at it, chapo.su also lapsed (but I doubt someone is going to bother stealing that. You need to apply and provide ID to the Russian state to register those domains. You can’t just plug a credit card number into godaddy).

4: building a physical mesh network to link nearby computers together over fast links (BATMAN for no se vende mesh here in LA)

5: developing a mobile adhoc mesh routing protocol that can setup a usable internet using only smartphones that interoperates with the fixed mesh noted in 4 (this will likely replace BATMAN, but is also a research problem and would represent a novel capability)

I think there is a strong tendency to put the cart before the horse when it comes to mesh networking. People imagine how cool it would be to have widespread mesh networks, but setting up a digital radio doohickey accomplishes nothing if there is nobody listening on the other end. We need social organizations first. Then, communications technology can be built to serve the needs of these organizations. It is very much a local organizing problem. The tech does not circumvent this.

There are secondary / tertiary methods of contact. People have accounts on other platforms like Twitter, Matrix, Telegram, Discord, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. There are other watering holes people can regain contact. The community would be utterly fractured, but such was the case when Reddit dropped the hammer on us. I think our past experience served well. Establish a life raft. Gather the troops. Plot a course forward.

That said, we were relatively lucky last time. The regime of censorship has sharpened significantly in the past four years since then. If the US government were to lean on Hexbear’s ISP (or domain registrar), a life raft on a service like Discord would fold like a house of cards (not to mention being 100% wiretapped). We would need more robust options. There is the Matrix server, but it is tied up with the same infrastructure. The people who use it have accounts distributed among various Matrix servers though.

No. We lost lib.rehab See for yourself.

They will turn the screws on the hosting providers if (and when) it comes to it.

Fools should have registered with a more reputable TLD, like .dog

Butterfingers are fucking nasty. I approve this technique.

Would be very cool if FreeCAD and LibreCAD became much more mainstream

IMO, it already has. Not world-domination status, but a great deal of progress has been made compared to 5/10 years ago, and growing. Largely driven by the introduction of affordable 3D printers. As the general problem of 3D modeling is increasingly solved, development of various processes in the Path workbench will likely drive increased small-scale industrial use, in a market which is currently dominated by LUDICROUSLY expensive packages like MasterCAM and Esprit.

In industry, its use is very marginal, but this is not necessarily a fault of FreeCAD. I know engineers who still use Pro/Engineer (even though we have seats available both in SolidWorks and Creo Parametric). People will use what they are familiar with. A lot of these people will never switch. Not to mention, any engineering work already done in one CAD system will likely be married to that CAD system for its entire product lifecycle. New CAD packages work their way in on the margins, either by providing a very niche / specific workflow where others fall short, or in solving problems the company isn’t willing to pay a license for. FreeCAD adoption is going to be driven mainly by new blood entering into the industry, and this will only become apparent as new product lines are developed.

As a CNC programmer, I use FreeCAD professionally whenever I can get away with it. I get to practice using it at home, producing models for my 3D printer. I am very familiar with its geometric constraint solver, whereas it is always a fight when I need to use Creo for one reason or another (and I have scrapped large parts because of “soft constraint” shenanigans). For me, FreeCAD is usually the fastest, most reliable option.

But I am a niche. I am the only person in the shop who uses FreeCAD. I am also the only person in the shop who edits G-Code in Emacs. For the engineers working directly with clients, they need to use whatever CAD systems the clients provide models in. While STEP files are the industry standard compatible format, they lack important contextual information like tolerances (not that many commercial packages incorporate this, but models usually need to be adjusted to the tolerance mean before entering the CAM pipeline). For the work I do, modeling individual components, one-off fixtures, and gages, or even producing prints to send to the toolroom for manual machining, FreeCAD is in a pretty good place. I can export either IGES or STEP, import it in a CAM program, and create toolpaths. For work on complex assemblies, FreeCAD has only embraced an official assembly workflow with this release, and it remains to be seen how this goes. For CAM work, a lot of legwork has been done on 3 axis milling, but in practice there are many processes (4/5 axis milling, turning, swiss screw, grinding, sinker/wire edm, water jet, laser cutting/welding/engraving, FDM/Resin 3D printing, etc.) and many more CNC controllers out there (Fanuc, Mitsubishi, Haas, Citizen, GF, etc.) which need to be nailed down.

Color is liberalism. Wake me up for the monochrome revolution.

LOST premiered 20 years ago.

People also put a lot of emphasis on the “I” in Artificial General Intelligence. It gives us the impression that we will have some kind of contraption with a button on it, and every time you push the button it conjures up a new, distinct digital agent of Albert Einstein. For a long, long time, at best, these things will conjure your average Redditor. People think if we create AGI we can tell computers to compose Mozart, but we’ll be lucky if we get anywhere farther than “I glued my balls to my butthole again.”

After an entire week of dicking around, my home-made Wayland compositor can display a mouse cursor! :o

microshaft winblows

This is why run Gentoo.

Nope. You see, this piece of paper over here says I own all the buildings in this neighborhood, and you must pay me half of your income every month. Because of this piece of paper.