Edit: It was said at least 2 times, and I can't remember if it's the same person

Rick Beato making clear what is happening on the music scene just as Cory Doctorow or Adam Conover talk about the Internet

some projects/ideas i found in the last couple of years, that try to solve our current problem of the internet being a centralized structure that is controllable by big corporations or governments and not so easily usable with mesh technology or when not being connected for long amounts of time

https://scuttlebutt.nz/docs/introduction/

https://ipfs.tech/#why

https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

https://www.inverse.com/science/39507-mesh-networks-net-neutrality-fcc

https://zeronet.io/

https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/low-budget-p2p-content-distribution-with-git.gmi

https://geti2p.net/en/

https://redecentralize.github.io/alternative-internet/

https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns

https://netsukuku.freaknet.org/

https://hyperboria.net/

https://urbit.org/

https://agregore.mauve.moe/

https://www.hyphanet.org/

http://libertreeproject.org/

Someone should make a variant of Khan Academy with the same content (which is under Creative Commons) but no non-libre software, call it 4khan, and list the "4 essential khans" (you khan run the program as you wish for any purpose, etc.) on the homepage

Happy 2024! The Eco-Libre project published our 2023 Annual Report for last year.

[!Eco-Libre 2023 Annual Report](https://www.eco-libre.org/2023-annual-report/)

Eco-Libre is a volunteer-run project that designs libre hardware for sustainable communities.

> Eco-Libre's mission is to research, develop, document, teach, build, and distribute open-source hardware and software that sustainably enfranchises communities' human rights. > > - Eco-Libre's mission statement

We aim to provide clear documentation to build low-cost machines, tools, and infrastructure for people all over the world who wish to live in sustainable communities with others.

Executive Summary

• Eco-Libre was founded June 24, 2023
• Begun searching for land in Ecuador
• Four projects created on GitHub
• Currently 2 active contributors
• 2024 priority is finding land and R&D on Life-Line

Michael Altfield registered the domain-name eco-libre.org on June 24th, 2023, a few weeks after arriving to Ecuador.

Over the next 6 months, Eco-Libre committed research and designs to our GitHub org for four projects (licensed CC BY-SA) which address some of the essential requirements for a new community's basic human needs: clean water, shelter, electricity, and ecological processing of waste. By releasing these designs under a libre license, it allows for other communities to build their own infrastructure with minimal effort, and it encourages collaboration on standardized design concepts.

As Eco-Libre's projects mature, we will build experimental prototypes in our own community. To that end, Michael is currently traveling around Ecuador by bicycle in-search of land to found Eco-Libre's first physical site.

In December, Eco-Libre was joined by Jack Nugent, who has since committed contributions to the Eco-Libre Life-Line project.

The priority focus for Michael in 2024 is to determine the best region in Ecuador to buy land where Eco-Libre can physically iterate on projects.

The priority focus for Jack in 2024 is to finish the research, design, and documentation of the Eco-Libre Life-Line project.

Projects

Eco-Libre was founded this year (in 2023). In our first 6 months, we've begun work on four libre hardware projects. All of them are currently in the early research stages.

Eco-Libre Launch-Nest

The Eco-Libre Launch-Nest was our first project. The concept is to build a small-footprint, high-occupancy structure for sustainable living of 30-people.

| [!CAD screenshot of a 6-story masonry structure with a large array of solar panels and three large parabolic solar dishes on the roof](https://www.eco-libre.org/2023-annual-report/#launch-nest) | |:--:| | Eco-Libre Launch-Nest 2023.09 |

The rooftop has sufficient space for 72 solar panels (2 meter x 1 meter) and 3 parabolic solar concentrators (16 square meter).

The structure is six-stories above-ground, which is the recommended maximum height of a confined masonry structure in an earthquake zone. It also has a basement.

The building is designed with external, enclosed, firewalled staircases on either end. These are symmetrical and designed such that the building design can be rotated around a center courtyard to have four Eco-Libre Launch-Nest structures that share the same stairwells.

Currently only basic, incomplete architectural design-work has been done in CAD. Before a structural analysis can be assessed (eg to determine the location of columns), further work needs to be done on finishing the placement of windows, doors, and dividing walls.

Eco-Libre Life-Line

The Eco-Libre Life-Line project is a series of components making up an infrastructure to deliver a clean water pipeline to a community. This includes:

| [!Photo of a small weir funneling watter into a 200L barrel with an expanded metal grate covering its opening](https://www.eco-libre.org/2023-annual-report/#life-line) | |:--:| | Eco-Libre Life-Line 2023.12 |

1. Collection of raw surface water (eg from a stream)
2. Removal of large organic debris & sediments
3. Removal of small particles
4. Removal of harmful bacteria & parasites
5. Clean water storage

Michael started the Life-Line project after visiting a number of communities who had constant issues with their water systems breaking or failing to provide clean water. The goal is to design a low-cost, self-cleaning pipeline of systems that require minimal human intervention (max routine maintenance twice per year).

This year we have half-finished the "intake" component in CAD, which consists of building a weir in a stream that funnels turbulent water onto a downward-sloped HDPE barrel with a fine-mesh screen atop it. This design exploits the energy in falling turbulent water to clean the intake screen, and it prevents the intake from being clogged by organic debris during heavy rainfall.

Special thanks to Jack Nugent, who joined Eco-Libre in 2023 and has contributed to research, design, and documentation of the Eco-Libre Life-Line project.

The goal in 2024 is to finish the "intake" component in CAD and also to design the "settling tank", "pre-filter", and "sand filter" components in CAD.

Eco-Libre Genesis-Booth

How do you sustainably begin to build a community on land without electricity and without any structures?

The Eco-Libre Genesis-Booth is a simple storage shed with >1 kW of PV solar panels on the roof. This is the first structure to be built when jumpstarting a new off-grid community. It provides the power, storage, and outdoor workshop space needed to build-out the community.

| [!Photo of a small structure with 4 solar panels on its roof](https://www.eco-libre.org/2023-annual-report/#genesis-booth) | |:--:| | Eco-Libre Genesis-Booth 2023.06 |

This year we've made a simple footprint for the Genesis-Booth in CAD that's 4 meters x 2 meters -- just large enough to fit 4 solar panels (2 meters x 1 meter each). Further work is needed in CAD, but this year we also delved into making a framework for our documentation.

The Eco-Libre documentation is written in reST, generated by Sphinx, and (currently) hosted by GitHub. This is an exceptionally flexible continuous documentation solution that allows for versioned documentation matching versioned releases, works well with git, can be exported to many different flexible formats, and can be extended with custom directives written in python.

The highest priority for the Genesis-Booth is to finish this documentation as a template for other projects. Ideally this should be designed in such a way that information about Eco-Libre in general is seamlessly added to all project's documentations in a reusable way.

Eco-LIbre Treasure Tower

The Eco-Libre Treasure-Tower project is a 7 meter x 6 meter structure for storing and processing a community's waste, most importantly their food & fecal compost.

| [!Photo of a tall 6-story structure with a wrap-around ramp and several doors on each floor](https://www.eco-libre.org/2023-annual-report/#treasure-tower) | |:--:| | Eco-Libre Treasure-Tower 2023.07 |

This structure is 6-stories high and barrier-free, with a wrap-around ramp. All but the top-floor have three doors:

1. Access door for maintenance
2. Deposit Closet
3. Deposit Closet

Each deposit closet contains facilities for the collection of human urine and feces and is slightly staggered in elevation so the user's deposits fall by gravity into their designated collection areas for processing.

Separately from compost, this structure also serves as a storage area for recyclable waste materials, such as metal.

This year a first-draft design of the structure has been designed in CAD, but it's very premature.

Next, a second design prototype (where the two deposit closet entrances are on the same side) should be drafted in CAD and compared to the existing design.

Contribute to Eco-Libre

If you'd like to help Eco-Libre reach our mission to enfranchise sustainable communities' human rights with libre hardware, please contact us to get involved :)

Join Us eco-libre.org/join

Cheers, The Eco-Libre Team https://www.eco-libre.org/

re-publicado de: https://lemmy.ml/post/10400577

> re-publicado de: https://lemmy.ml/post/10399959 > > > Hey guys, the Fedora shill is back again to invite you all to this year's Creative Freedom Summit, that will be hosted from 23-25 Jan. > > > > It's a really nice event hosted by our Design Team for those that are interested in FOSS creative tools, like Inkscape, GIMP, Krita, Blender and more, as you'll be able to learn directly from its creators and or specialists in those tools. > > > > It'll be all hosted using FOSS tools as well (Jitsi for the speakers, PeerTube for the event stream + Matrix for the live chat), check it out! > > > > Also, for those that haven't seen last year's event, all of the talks are available on Fedora's YouTube channel and on the event's PeerTube channel!

I am trying to understand an idea that Richard Stallman proposed to promote music "in the age of computer networking." This is from an article titled Ending the War on Sharing: https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html

> We could support musical artists with public funds distributed directly to them in proportion to the cube root of their popularity. Using the cube root means that if superstar A is 1000 times as popular as skilled artist B, A will get 10 times as much of the tax funds as B. This way of dividing the money is an efficient way to promote a broad diversity of music. > > The law should ensure that record companies cannot confiscate these funds from the artists, since experience shows they will try. To speak of "compensating" the "rights holder" is a veiled way of proposing to give most of the money to the record companies in the name of the artists. > >These funds could come from the general budget, or from a special tax on something vaguely correlated with listening to music, such as blank disks or Internet connectivity. Either way would do the job.

What I'm having trouble understanding is whether the artist (musicians in this case) is getting paid per-listen, or if they are getting paid as a percentage of the total fund.

Is the idea that if an artist was responsible for 8% of the songs played on a platform, they would get 2% of the funding?

Has anyone else read about this idea? I wish it had been explained a bit better.

EDIT: I emailed RMS and he replied. Here is how the cube root system would work. I have labeled the quotes for clarity:

>RMS: I am assuming a program managed by the state, which measures the popularity >of each musician and distributes a certain pool of money among them. > >auomaticdoor75: Let's use a very simple example: let's say there's a treasury that >will pay out $10,000 to three different artists. Artist A was >responsible for 67% of the songs played on the platform, Artist B >was responsible for 20% of the songs played, and Artist C was >responsible for 13% of the songs played. Using your cube-root >idea, how much money would each artist receive? > > RMS: The cube roots are 0.8750340239643772, 0.584803579016074, 0.5065797363612384 > Add them and you get 1.9664173393416897.

> The A gets (/ 0.8750340239643772 1.9664173393416897) > = 0.444988968749288 of the total. > > B gets (/ 0.584803579016074 1.9664173393416897) > = 0.29739545482845087 of the total. > > C gets (/ 0.5065797363612384 1.9664173393416897) > = 0.2576155764222611 of the total. > > I do not say that the cube root is the perfect function to use. > It gives an example of how such a system can work. > A different function might be better.

So, it seems like you find the cube root of each person's percentage of the web traffic, divided by the sum of all the cube roots. The resulting quotient is that person's share of the treasury.

Hello,

Looking to see what new tools and stuff that are libre people are using today. Are there any drm free tele health options out there?

Hi all,

I want to try to learn Spanish on my own, right now I barely know anything. Asking in the libre culture community because I know a common answer is duolingo but I don't want to install an app store other than f-droid.

See also ESP Wiki's entry on Martin Goetz.

I was wondering what lore universes exist where stories and games could take place in.

First ones that came to mind are The Battle of Wesnoth and Pepper & Carrot.

Though can anybody think of any further?

Public domain is also valid, but it has to pd world wide and I’m not sure what that would mean. Authors definitely need to at least dead since 1943, but I don’t know if there were any countries that had more than death+80 (Spain, Colombia and Equatorial Guinea).

Public Domain Background Tracks

https://923000.blogspot.com/2023/09/public-domain-background-tracks.html

FOSDEM24!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2437745

> also on r/programming

A while ago I made an app for tracking baby activities because I became a parent and was horrified at how many permissions the existing apps required and how much tracking they contained. Both the app and the server are open source.

This is a web-app which also has an Android version in the Play Store (F-Droid didn't accept it because they don't feel like web-apps should be welcome in their store). On iPhones it can be installed as a PWA to the home screen.

Features:

• No tracking whatsoever
• End-to-end encrypted, no personal information is stored on the server unencrypted
• Track baby's feeding, diaper changes, breast pumping and sleeping (more to come)

Links:

• https://baby-journal.app - the PWA itself
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.baby_journal.twa - the Play Store Android wrapper
• https://github.com/RikudouSage/BabyJournalApi - the server source code
• https://github.com/RikudouSage/BabyJournalUi - the PWA source code

https://web.archive.org/web/20230624163406/https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230624001806/https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/

yay we are all terrorists direct Odysee link

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1109259

> Hello, > > Kat came up with an idea for a new LibreJam. Its all ASCII this time.

Pocket reposted an older QZ article about Leftpad and it's sort of reignited the controversy, at least for me.

Here's the link.

I'd love to hear what you think of this, but here are my thoughts:

One, why is this not in the JS standard library? It's a super commomly used method with equivalents in every programming language, right? JS is pretty notorious for being bloated (which isn't necessarily a bad thing IMO), but the fact that it lacks this basic function is kind of ridiculous?

Two, people were calling him out as the villain for having the audacity to delete a method he knows powers most of the internet, and to those people I ask: Have you even looked into why that happened? The most common story was just that he was butthurt because "NPM didn't treat him like royalty like he wanted", but, what actually happened was Kik, yes, the messaging platform notorious for being infested with child groomers, that Kik, wanted to publish their own library (I think it was an API for their app), and Koçulu already had a library called kik. So what does Kik do? Are they like any other programmer who would go "aw man, that name is taken, better come up with another name for my thing then!" No! They go to fucking NPM and essentially allege trademark violation (which is bullshit because Koçulu's kik was not a commercial product, and trademarks only apply to names used in commerce). But NPM still removes Koçulu's kik package, at which point Koçulu removed all his libraries and deletes his account in protest, and the rest is history. Long story short, it ends with NPM restoring his packages against his wishes, and as far as I know he never released anything on NPM again.

So, generally I see two hiveminds when it comes to this controversy. One is of course people mocking Koçulu for being a snowflake or whatever, that he needs to control his anger and not withdraw his packages because he didn't get his way. Obviously, I disagree with that. I think Kik was being a snowflake for throwing a hissy fit that their name was already taken for something completely unrelated, by someone who almost certainly did not even use their app. They could have named their library kik-chat, kik-app, kik.com, whatever, and it still would have been the same library and people still would still have discovered it. NPM claims that they did this to "reduce confusion", but at best that is massively underestimating the intelligence of people who already know how to program, and is a complete lie cooked up by their PR team at worst. Needless to say, I don't think he was in the wrong at any point of this.

The other hivemind was really mad at NPM, which is a step in the right direction, but they were mad that they restored his package. That makes no sense either, because one of the pillars of open source is that anyone can publish or distribute it as long as they distribute it with the original license and give credit. NPM is an asshole, but they still have the right to distribute an open source library. What we should be mad at NPM for is that they threw him under the bus by removing his package in the first place. Again, Kik has no legs to stand on and NPM was never in any legal trouble because of this, trademarks do not apply to non-commercial products. They're called trade marks. Trade. As in commerce. Also, it really highlights their priorities that they hold a corporation infamous for enabling children to be victimized in higher regard than someone making code used by the entire internet and not getting paid for it. I also don't see enough people being mad at Kik. What they did was absolutely unacceptable and they should have faced the brunt of the hate. Then again they've already shown themselves to be horrible so they probably would have shrugged it off or maybe even played into it for publicity.

What can the open source world learn from this? Well, for one, I think it has become clear that having your open source dependencies managed by a for-profit company is bad. I wouldn't be surprised if Kik paid NPM a ton of money and essentially "bought" the kik name like a fucking NFT. The solution would be a combination of package repositories managed by worker co-op nonprofits with transparent financial reports, and decentralized/independent package sources hosted by the authors themselves. If JS took inspiration from Java just a bit more and also made their dependency naming system work by domains, we would have gotten com.koculu.kik and com.kik.kik, and no conflict. Almost like a federated package manager. Especially now that NPM is owned by Microsoft and Yarn was always owned by Facebook, we really do not have a good, trustworthy JS dependency repo, which is a problem because like the language or hate it, it is still extremely important for our modern computing environment. I think it's long overdue to break their duopoly.

IDK, that's the end of my rant. Didn't really mean to write a wall of text, just saw this article and got me wanting a retrospective, but yeah. What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? Why or why not?

Internet Archive on Mastodon: As most of you know, our library is being sued by 4 corporate publishers who want to stop the Internet Archive from lending books. The date for oral argument has just been set for March 20.

Privacy means being in control of ones own personal information. It does not mean secrecy but deciding on your own what you share and with whom and what you do not share. On computers you can only have this control over your data when you have control over your computer. You should be the one deciding what your computer does, what software runs on its processor, what it does with your hardware and what it does with your data.

That is your personal freedom. Software should respect this freedom. That means you have to be in control of the software. This requires the following things:

• You should have the freedom to use the software for any purpose. Only you should decide and control what you do with your hardware and data.
• You should have the freedom to see what the software does. The software should be transparent and open source. To be in control of your data and your hardware, to be able to freely decide over it software should be open source so that you and anyone else who obtains a copy of it can freely check and see for themselves what the software does.
• You should be allowed to freely modify the software. To be in control of the software and in extent your device and data you need to have the right to modify the software to your liking: to remove any features that you dislike, that handle your hardware or data in a way you do not approve of, to modify features to your liking so that they suit your use case and use your hardware and data in the way you choose and to add new features so that you can do with your hardware and data what you choose to.
• You should be allowed to freely redistribute and publish the software and your modifications to it. You should not be forced to keep your copy of the software and your changes to it to yourself. Others should have the ability to profit of them as well if you want them to and you should have the ability to profit of the work and modifications of others if they want you to be able to. Your freedoms over your device are only effective if you can run the software developed and published by anyone. You should not need to develop all changes to the software yourself. Everyone including people who cannot develop software themselves should have freedom over their device and data and people developing and modifying software should have the freedom to collaborate and to build upon another. Innovation, peace, human culture and progress depend on people working together and building on the work of others.

Software that adheres to these freedoms is called free software. Free as in freedom.

You can only own a device if it runs free software. You can only have privacy if your personal information is processed by free software.

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

cross-posted from c/softwareengineering@group.lt: https://group.lt/post/44632

> This kind of scaling issue is new to Codeberg (a nonprofit free software project), but not to the world. All projects on earth likely went through this at a certain point or will experience it in the future. > > When people like me talk about scaling... It's about increasing computing power, distributed storage, replicated databases and so on. There are all kinds of technology available to solve scaling issues. So why, damn, is Codeberg still having performance issues from time to time? > > ...we face the "worst" kind of scaling issue in my perception. That is, if you don't see it coming (e.g. because the software gets slower day by day, or because you see how the storage pool fill up). Instead, it appears out of the blue. > > The hardest scaling issue is: scaling human power. > > Configuration, Investigation, Maintenance, User Support, Communication – all require some effort, and it's not easy to automate. In many cases, automation would consume even more human resources to set up than we have. > > There are no paid night shifts, not even payment at all. Still, people have become used to the always-available guarantees, and demand the same from us: Occasional slowness in the evening of the CET timezone? Unbearable! > >I do understand the demand. We definitely aim for a better service than we sometimes provide. However, sometimes, the frustration of angry social-media-guys carries me away... > > two primary blockers that prevent scaling human resources. The first one is: trust. Because we can't yet afford hiring employees that work on tasks for a defined amount of time, work naturally has to be distributed over many volunteers with limited time commitment... second problem is a in part technical. Unlike major players, which have nearly unlimited resources available to meet high demand, scaling Codeberg's systems...

TLDR: sustainability issues for scaling because Codeberg is a nonprofit with much limited resources, mainly human resources, in face of high demand. Non-paid volunteers do all the work. So needs more people working as volunteers, and needs more money.

I'd like to try Matrix, but I still don't know of a good client. I don't want Electron on my computer, so the official client is out of the question. I tried nheko, but I didn't like it (though I can install it again if it turns out that there is no better option).

So, can anyone here recommend me a Matrix client? Either terminal-based or GUI, both are fine.

I am new ,how iI can I share my paintings