Natris @Natris1979@social.linux.pizza

Our brains literally evolved to NOT pay attention to boring stuff

We are forced to do boring things because that keeps other folks wealthy

The reason why you want to do hobbies all day is that you were supposed to be an artisan

Artisans were once seen to be the clearest sign of civilisation, not a burden

We have enough food now that all humanity could master the lyre

But we have chosen coin

and coin does not sing

It used to be (more) common for people to write HTML in a way where it would (also) look good in a Terminal based web browser.

It used to be (more) common for people to write HTML & CSS in a way where it would (still) look good if the CSS was not applied.

It used to be (more) common for people to write HTML & JavaScript in a way where it would (still) look good & (still) work if the JavaScript wasn't executed.

Those don't seem to be the norm nowadays.

Any tips for music making on Linux? I'm trying to record my guitar and add virtual instruments like drums.

video game communities that have a non-fandom wiki, boost if you agree

(you don't have to boost it's just a meme)

One of the unexpected joys of the fediverse over other places is the addition of weird domains appended on to everyone's usernames.

It makes the web feel like more than just four websites again.

It's both a signal of a smaller more intimate internet and also a larger and far more diverse internet at the same time!

Lunchbreak #teaching report~

Our university has a course (Special Seminar), where 1st year students propose 1-year research projects on anything of their interest, and get a faculty to supervise/help them.

I really love this course, it shows me the many different ways that students who just entered university understand Computer Science.

Also interacting with wide-eyed first year students fill me with energy.

Next post: The cool projects that students proposed to me so far.

For most of recent history, up until about 60 years ago, the act of creation was just a part of life. Everyone sang or played an instrument or wrote or performed or danced or Something.

But recording technology turned creative output in to a path to fortune and fame. Suddenly, if you weren't exceptional, then why were you trying at all?

This concept is, of course, bullshit.

How you used to get people looking at your website before "going viral" was a thing, in the Web 1.0 days when people surfed the information superhighway by clicking on links to go from site to site.

1. The "Links" page! Every site had a page that was just links to other websites that the site owner thought were cool. You could email other site owners whose sites you thought were cool and ask if they thought your site was cool too, and they'd link back to you.

Quoting an anonymous Twitter user (got harrassed for these statements):

"Safari is buggy" is a valid criticism.

"Safari is behind Chrome in features" is not a valid criticism.

Never forget that the browser vendors, including Google and Apple, seized control of the web from the W3C. These few companies have too much power over the web, period.

1/8

DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

https://torrentfreak.com/duckduckgo-removes-pirate-sites-and-youtube-dl-from-its-search-results-220415/

You know, I think we (as a society) made a mistake in going from PDAs to smartphones.

The distinction between them I'm making here is that a PDA doesn't have an internet connection and a smartphone does. (Yeah, yeah, Wi-Fi tablets and Palmphones blur the lines. This is a simplification.)

Imagine a device that follows the old Palm Pilot model: you do your stuff (email, reading, tooting, etc.) on it during then day and then it syncs overnight. The next morning, it's charged and up to date.

(ctd)

We pay to Steam, Netflix, Amazon prime, Spotify. But not to Wikipedia, Archive.org, Librivox, Project Gutenberg, for our favourite Linux distro.

The huge asymmetry between corporate and community has not emerged naturally. It is a product of our choices of not supporting community oriented projects.

The short conveniences vs the long-term good. We always chose the former.

In face of surveillance capitalism, we must and must change.

Building resilient systems

Systems are made of parts.

If you have too many parts, the odds of one of them failing go up.

If you have too few parts, any single part failing has a larger impact.

THEREFORE,

Arrange the parts in multiple phases over time. Like bulkheads, failures get isolated to a single phase.

Within a phase, use few parts to improve your odds.

Example: use git to generate your site, but host it on Netlify. Now you can build without Netlify and serve traffic without Github.