Not sarcastic, I genuinely like this sort of thing. To each their own.
I am not this artist, I just thought his work was worth sharing.
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Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@SethStorm666
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DeviantArt: https://www.deviantart.com/sethstorm666
Also every manic pixie dream girl
So much this.
Also, its not just Bart Simpson, it is Homer too.
- Homer: "We were talking about chocolate?" -- Boss: "That was ten minutes ago!"
- At a Stone Cutters meeting, he uses the Sacred Parchment as a napkin. When everyone starts yelling at him for that, he gets nervous out and starts using it as a napkin even more.
- "You have my undivided attention" (watches a cartoon in his head)
- "What would my life be like if I robbed the Quick-E-Mart?" (imagines himself living in a mansion, wearing a tuxedo, spinning his gun on his finger, Marge in a swimsuit doing a 60's dance beside him.) "I'll do it! I'll rob the Quick-E-Mart....D'oh!" (he has already walked out to his car and is driving home).
- When marge spends the whole day cleaning the house to host a party for friends, homer plays with a toy racecar track in his underwear. Marge says to him: "Homer! The only thing I asked you to do for this party is to put on pants and you didn't do it!"
I would go with Guile, because it is built-in to the Guix Package Manager which is a really good general-purpose package manager.
It ticks several of your boxes:
- has a CLI interpreter
- is a general purpose language, Scheme, amd compliant with revisions 5, 6, and 7 of the language standard
- allows writing in a functional style (it is one of the original functional programming languages)
- small disk footprint, but still large enough to be "batteries included"
- decent documentation, especially if you use Emacs
- simple setup: not so much, unless you are using Guix to begin with. The standard distribution ships with lots of pre-built bytecode files, you need an installer script to install everything.
It also has pretty good libraries for system maintenance and reporting:
I'm a communist but I suddenly realised that American conservatives should all be hardcore Linux enthusiasts. Why is this not already the stereotype?
Libertarians and conservatives in the US demand liberty only for the already wealthy and powerful upper class, the liberty to enslave and exploit whomever and whatever they choose. They believe the ultra-wealthy have somehow earned the right to do so. On the contrary, the socialists, especially the anarchists, are opposed to unjust hierarchies, and the hierarchy created by wealthy and politically powerful classes are the most unjust of all -- quite the opposite of the libertarians and conservatives.
Libertarian (Liberal) propaganda appropriates the more popular socialist ideologies while conflating liberty for only the wealthy/powerful versus liberty for all people. One can see appropriation done in the same way in the very name of the National Socialist (Nazi) party of Germany. These tactics that were used by the Nazis are still used by various American conservative and libertarian parties, who mostly align under the umbrella of the Republican Party. Just look at what the Trump cult weirdos are all saying nowadays. It is pure KKK and Nazi ideology resurrected, under a thin veil of euphemisms.
So if you take at face-value what libertarian and conservative politicians in the US say publicly about freedom, small government, civil liberties, etc., then they ought to be very enthusiastically in favor of Linux, but it is all just propaganda. They don't care about freedom, only freedom for the elite clique of their supposed "supermen," the wealthy elites, the freedom to exploit groups of people who they hate most --- take your pick: foreigners, black people, women, gay and trans, Jews, Muslims, the "woke," the "leftist," etc. The libertarians and conservatives hate things that benefit society at large, because what benefits society also benefits these people they hate.
Linux is pretty authentically a community project for the good of society, and it is truly subversive to the authority of the corporations and elites. So the various libertarians and conservatives of the US recognize Linux as a threat. Only that small group of privileged, middle-class libertarians stupid enough to be duped by the wealthy elite propaganda believe that free software is aligned with their ideology.
What I want to know is, how much energy was used to create these floors, install them, and how much energy will be required to service them (the electronics) if they break down over the useful life of the installation, including how much energy was spent on resource extraction and processing.
Then I want to see that number compared as a ratio to the amount of energy these floors can generate over their expected useful life span, say 15 years in high pedestrian traffic areas.
I am highly skeptical that the ratio would even approach 1:1, I expect a net energy loss. But I could be convinced otherwise with some good data.
Adding Solar to More Devices
I never understood why this wasn’t more common already. ... Why not? Seems like an obvious solution…
Good question, with a simple engineering answer: often times the energy cost of creating these solar panels and installing them into devices is considerably higher than the amount of energy those devices could possibly except after many decades of constant use. The point in time at which the solar energy collected by the device matches the energy cost to create and install the device might actually be longer than the life of the solar panel or the device itself. So adding solar to every last little thing will actually cost a lot more money for consumers while causing more harm to the environment.
That is not to say that solar is always bad, in fact solar is incredibly good when used at industrial scales, especially in power stations, and on the rooftops of factories, parking lots, shopping centers, data centers, and warehouses.
We see too often on the news stories about how some amazing invention might help solve global warming, but this is often just propaganda. The oil and car companies want you to think buying more technology from these tech companies (which are often their own subsidiary companies) will solve the problem. But really it is just another way of profiting off of people, tricking them into buying their stuff rather than reducing consumption, reusing, and recycling, and without those companies doing any of the hard work on the energy transition themselves.
both can be installed side by side if you have enough disk space.
Yeah, this is exactly what I do using QEMU and Aarch64 Debian. I suppose I could try the Asahi Linux in QEMU but that actually might be more difficult since I don't think QEMU can emulate the MacBook hardware, as far as I know. And I can't do dual boot, I want to be able to switch back and forth between Mac OS and Linux without rebooting anything.
You can try asahi linux on the macbook :)
I could, but I still need Mac OS for work-related things.
I switched to Linux permanently in 2008. Last OS I used before Linux was Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger" (if I recall correctly) which is what came with the Macintosh PowerBook that I had bought roughly in the year 2004. I have never used Microsoft software unless someone was paying me to, but at the time, Windows XP was still all the rage even though Microsoft was trying to get everyone to switch to Windows Vista. (Vista got a lot of well-deserved hate too, sort of similar what we see with Windows 11 right now, actually.)
Anyway, I was a die-hard Apple fanboy, but getting more and more into free software and I kept on using Macports/Homebrew to build Linux stuff I found online, but back in those days a lot of apps I wanted to try did not have good support for the Darwin kernel build of GCC which was pretty old compared to what Linux was using at the time. Occasionally a build would fail, and I would try to port the software on my own, with the idea of maybe submitting a package to Macports. But after a while I realized, "if I want to use Linux software, why not just use Linux?"
So I bought a Netbook (Dell Inspiron Mini 10) with Ubuntu pre-installed. I really loved that little computer, I used it for a good 5 years until I needed a more powerful computer. I still have it, actually. I never went back to Apple until this year when I took a new job where they wanted me to use a MacBook Pro. (Again, not using proprietary software unless I am well paid.)
I can say with confidence that Linux is considerably better than Apple's operating systems. I use Aarch64 Debian 12.5 in a QEMU on that MacBook for most things, only switching over to Mac OS when I really need to.
How can you pirate Photoshop and Elements? They are WebAssembly binaries that phone home before you are allowed to use them.
Never tried it, but everyone I know who has tried it says its the most stable rolling release OS ever. That is pretty cool. Btrfs support is cool too, copy-on-write, deduplication, and whole-disk snapshot and rollback capability, its great for keeping your data safe.
I don't care about rolling releases, I get my stability from Debian, or sometimes Mint. If I want the latest software I'll install Guix packages or FlatPaks. And I can still use Btrfs on Debian.
I can explain the difference between X11 and Xorg with an analogy to the web and web browsers: X11 is like HTTP, Xorg is like the Chrome browser. X11 is the protocol, Xorg is software that implements that protocol.
X11 is old, it was designed back in the 1980s and includes messages for drawing lines and circles and fonts on the screen. Also, back then there were a lot of "thin clients", computers that were basically nothing but a browser, since graphics were computationally expensive and could not be done on the client computer, graphics rendering was done server side. There are lots of messages in the protocol for handling screen updates over a computer network.
Nowadays, all personal computers are powerful enough to render their own graphics, and no one needs the display server to draw individual lines or circles on screen. Vector graphics and fonts are done at the application level, not over the network. So these these messages specified in the X11 protocol are hardly ever used. Really, most of X11 (let's say 90% of it) is not used at all, only the parts where the keyboard and mouse are defined, and how you can allocate memory to buffer a graphic and copy that buffer to the display. But you still need to maintain the Xorg software to handle everything that X11 specifies, and this is just a waste of code, and a waste of time for the code maintainers.
So basically, they decided about 10-15 years ago that since no one uses most of X11, let's just define a new protocol (called Wayland) that only has the parts of X11 that everyone still uses, and get rid of the 90% of it that no one ever uses. Also, the protocol design takes into account the fact that most modern computers do all of their own rendering rather than calling out to a server to render for them. Also the Wayland protocol design takes into account that a lot of computers have graphics cards for accelerated graphics rendering.
Since the Wayland protocol is much simpler, it is easier for anyone to write their own software which implements the protocol, these software are called "compositors." Finally, 10 years after some of the first implementations of Wayland, the protocol and compositors are becoming mature enough that they can be used in ordinary consumer PCs.
She had a history of horrible policies.
The idea that voters vote based on policy rather than loyalty is totally incomprehensible to the Democratic party.
No, it is because people in the Linux community are usually a bit more tech-savvy than average and are aware that OpenAI/Microsoft is very likely breaking the law in how they collect data for training their AI.
We have seen that companies like OpenAI completely disregard the rights of the people who created this data that they use in their for-profit LLMs (like what they did to Scarlett Johansson), their rights to control whether the code/documentation/artwork is used in for-profit ventures, especially when stealing Creative Commons "Share Alike" licensed documentation, or GPL licensed code which can only be used if the code that reuses it is made public, which OpenAI and Microsoft does not do.
So OpenAI has deliberately conflated LLM technology with general intelligence (AGI) in order to hype their products, and so now their possibly illegal actions are also being associated with all AI. The anger toward AI is not directed at the technology itself, it is directed at companies like OpenAI who have tried to make their shitty brand synonymous with the technology.
And I haven't even yet mentioned:
- how people are getting fired by companies who are replacing them with AI
- or how it has been used to target civilians in war zones
- or how deep fakes are being used to scam vulnerable people.
The technology could be used for good, especially in the Linux community, but lately there has been a surge of unethical (and sometimes outright criminal) uses of AI by some of the worlds wealthiest companies.
Users react to mangled SD3 generations and ask, "Is this release supposed to be a joke?"
If you get the government to simply declare everyone else "terrorists" then there is no need for rule of law anymore, you can do whatever you want! Because they are by definition worse than anything we do to them. How convenient for those states with plans for committing genocide, it doesn't count as genocide if you are mass-murdering terrorists.
This strategy of the government calling every troublesome minority ethnic group anywhere "terrorists" got kicked into high gear when the US government started using 9/11 as an excuse to commit war crimes and remove restrictions from police forces (like the right of habeas corpus), and it has been a constant slippery slope since then. Nowadays the Biden administration officially considers the "Anti Fascist" movement in the US "terrorism," although no one in government refers to fascist mass shooters as "terrorists." Gee, I wonder why they would do that?
Thanks! I just tried it out, it looks nice! I'll stick with it for a bit.
Screen shots of my new Cinnamon Desktop environment on #Aarch64 #Debian 12.5.
I am really digging the combination of the "High Contrast" widget theme with the ordinary (non-high-contrast) icon and window decoration themes. I am using the "Mojave Light" window decoration theme from the Cinnamon theme repository, and the Adwaita default icon theme for all applications programmed using the Gtk framework. Fonts are all set to DejaVu Sans Mono.
Emacs is a religion, or an OS
Philosophy is a subset of religion, and there is a definitely an Emacs philosophy about making absolutely all software hackable, and controlling the computer using text.
App platforms are a subset of operating systems. People confuse the two because most app platforms are inseparable from the operating system on which they run. But some software, like the Web, or Java, or to some extent .NET/Mono, are app platforms that run the same apps across multiple operating systems. Emacs is an app platform.
How do you think one should get started with Emacs? Should they start start with regular GNU Emacs or should they install one of the “distros”?
I always recommend using the default setup for any software. The same goes for learning GIMP, Krita, Blender, FreeCAD, or whatever else, even though you can customize them all to your liking.
It is usually a good idea to try and learn the workflow that was intended by the people who developed this software, you could learn something from trying to use the computer in the same way that the professionals do. Same for Emacs: professional software developers have used it for almost 50 years, the default keyboard shortcuts are set the way they are partially for random historical reasons, but partially because they often make a lot of sense.
If you are interested, please check out my blog series on getting started with Emacs, called Emacs for Professionals
Of course people who pull the power plug to exit Vi would be the type of people to confuse app platforms with operating systems.
"Emacs Philosophy" is an Emacs-themed song that I created for a friend. I wrote the lyrics myself and created the audio using Suno and Udio.
A close friend of mine was "inspired" to write a song by my series of blog articles called "Emacs Fulfills the Unix Philosophy" (actually I think he is busting my chops a bit for being an annoying Emacs evangelist, but anyway...) I thought it was pretty funny and worth sharing here.
He wrote the lyrics and used one of those Large Language Models like Stable Diffusion (or something like it) to make the actual music, and settled on a few different renditions of the song. You can listen to them on his website: https://www.extrema.is/blog/2024/04/29/emacs-philosophy
(This is an extended version of one of the most widely re-shared post I have ever written on Mastodon.)
The new "Threads" app by Meta (Facebook) is just the old 4-E strategy strategy to destroy Mastodon:
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Embrace:
(what they are doing now) launch a competing but compatible service with that of Mastodon. The vast majority of users, most of whom don't care about the privacy and intimacy of the Mastodon network, will go with the brand with the most name recognition. The number of users already signed up for Threads shows this to be true.
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Extend:
make their service appear to be better with features like search, which they have the resources to do, but the rest of the Mastodon network does not. Also include features for tracking and advertising, sell this as a good thing, "a better place to grow your personal brand, your business." When people think about joining either Facebook Threads or some other Mastodon instance, which will they choose? "Oh, Threads users can also talk with Mastodon users so they are basically the same? Well, why not just use Threads then?" The one with the most name recognition will always win.
Then comes the blogs and YouTube videos about, "I tried Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed, each for 1 month, here is what I learned" type videos in which the author decides Threads or Bluesky is best because they have better features and you don't have to decide which instance to join.
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Extinguish:
after attracting a critical mass of users large enough to decimate the user base of the competing Mastodon network, and temporarily making appear to have better features like search, quietly remove compatibility with the Mastodon network.
This might effect only 10% of Mastodon users because the other 90% will be on Threads. Then people will think, "who cares if we lose contact with that tiny minority of old Mastodon users, they should have just joined Threads by now anyways, they still can. It has search, and more people voted for it with their patronage. And you don't have to think about what instance to join, its easier\!"
At this point, people begin to wonder what the point of Mastodon even is.
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Enshittification:
without any real competition to keep people from leaving for an alternative, start exploiting users for more and more content for ad revenue, while also exploiting advertisers with ever-increasing costs of ad revenue, while also cutting costs on the quality of their service until it becomes unusable. But at this point it is too late for Mastodon, the momentum it once had is now long gone and no longer a threat to the Meta corporation. Their investment paid off.
Meta is one of the worlds largest corporations that has made most of its money not just through advertising but from gathering and selling people's personal information. They are scared to death about losing control over the Internet that they had gained over the past 15 years or so, and they are fighting to take that control back for themselves.
We built this, but now a corporation like Meta/Facebook feels they have the right to exploit it for all its riches until it is destroyed. Don't let it happen. Join the Fediblock cause, it is the only way to protect our home-grown community from corporate take-over.
Eugene Rochko thinks Threads is good, he is wrong
Eugene Rochko who developed Mastodon as a Twitter-like app based on the ActivityPub protocol, has a blog post explaining why he thinks federating with Threads is good for Mastodon.
> We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.
No, Threads will get people to leave Mastodon in droves. Really all Facebook is doing here is leaching users away from Mastodon. The average user doesn't know or care about the “perks” of non-Facebook Mastodon instances that Eugene is talking about. They will go with the service with the most name recognition every time, rather than trust an independent, small-time instance operator.
Threads is just Facebook with ActivityPub compatibility and extended Facebook's ads and tracking. The goal is to pull people away from decentralized networks and back to being under their control. Then the network effects Eugene is talking about will kick in, but moving people away from Mastodon and toward Threads.
History repeats itself again
We have seen all this before. Google did something similar when they first embraced support for the open and federated XMPP protocol in their Google Talk (GChat) app, and exactly the situation I described above happened. Eventually Google shut it down, and started calling the original XMPP apps "unauthorized third-party apps," although in fact Google was itself originally a third-party to the existing XMPP services that existed before GChat was invented.
People can and do still use XMPP, and I would encourage you to use it as well for video/voice/text chat. But all that momentum and popularity was extinguished, and was never really regained, at least not in the 9 years since Google extinguished it. So Google was successful in destroying a community of federated services using a popular communication protocol that made it difficult for Google to track and control people on the Internet.
We know for sure what Facebooks goal is not: they do not want to do something good for the various communities of people that have organically sprung-up around Mastodon and the other ActivityPub-based federated social networks. Mastodon does not need to make this mistake with Facebook Thraeds.
Mastodon and ActivityPub are important
Mastodon became most popular in the wake of Elon Musk buying out the Twitter corporation. Calling himself a "free speech aboslutist," which sounds as though he believes everyone should have a voice online no matter how unsavory that voice might be, quickly proved to be anything but a proponent of free speech, quietly censoring his critics and the political groups he hated, while giving a voice to everyone else, including (seemingly enthusiastically) giving a voice to racists and hate speech.
This happens every so often, although not always with the amount of drama churning around a single central figure such as Elon Musk. People see how dangerous it is that the communities we form over the Internet can only actually exist at the whims of an impersonal corporation that might at any point go insane and destroy their communities. When an Elon Musk event happens, then the problem becomes clear to everyone: they had been putting their faith into a monarch and/or despot like Twitter, and now it has turned against them.
The solution to this is, and always has been, the democratic approach, which in this case is Mastodon. Do not allow any one authority to have aboslute control over the plane of existence. Allow people to opt-in, and give them a say in how their community is run. Trust that people are smart enough to understand what is in their own best interest, and allow them to make their own decisions and cast their own votes. This is how ActivityPub and Mastodon work. But if a democracy is not careful, it can easily be overwhelmed and elimitated by the well-equipped armies competing for their resources.
Here is my latest blog post on a method of using a laptop equipped with an X11 server as a KVM or graphical dumb terminal (not to be confused with "kernel virtual machine") to display an entire desktop environment on one of the virtual terminals of the laptop. You might be familiar with running an X11-compatible program over SSH, seeing a remote GUI app displayed on your local machine. You could also run a whole desktop environment such as "xfce4-session" over SSH and attach it to a virtual terminal (which you switch between using Ctrl-Alt-F1 through Ctrl-Alt-F7, usually, on Debian-based systems).
This is nice if you have a few always-on Raspberry Pis laying around, and you usually use SSH to remote login and control them, but you would like to have a full desktop environment, not just one app, show up on your local computer.