An ode to spreadsheets

[about the tech stack with k8s] the payoff feels abstract and are hard to quantify.

It's the same for OSS dependencies.

what if platforms like AWS or GitHub started splitting the check? By adding a line-item to the invoices of their customers to support Open Source finding.

For example, 3% ?

OSS projects have no governance and most of them are not ready to receive money though. How to distribute this tax too?

Another model is to pay depending of how many developer there are in the company.

The second step after recognizing the OSS funding issue is having a baseline funding amount.

mozilla's main problem right now appears to be they just do not recognise that they have pissed users' trust up a wall and now we are suspicious of everything they do.

you cannot, in a position like that, just do things which look dodgy as fuck and expect users to suck it up quietly, whether or not they are as they look.

Different definition of a UI component, from the minimalistic css one to the SSR full page.

Not owning things is a privilege.

It is a privilege to say: “I don’t need a spare in case of emergency.”

It is a privilege to say: “I know I won’t need this in the future.”

And it is a privilege to afford quality products that will last you close to a lifetime instead of having to re-buy stuff.

and the author lifestyle that is better (without the current minimalism "trend").

In my experience, less things also means less distractions, less need for space and less complications.

100% true from my experience.

It’s about contentment, sure. But I also think it’s about knowledge and culture — knowing what you don’t need and what you can get out of life for less.

We simply have to recognize 3 things:

1. First, if we do not continue to work to change the Internet, we really will have only two choices: the corporate salad or nothing.
2. Second, the control of the Internet is ultimately in our hands, [... corporations] do not have the power to lock down the Internet to prevent us from going wherever we like, unless we believe their lie that our only two options are to eat their salad or leave.
3. Third, each of us must banish the idea from his mind that he has failed if he creates a website and millions of people don't flock to it. That is corporate thinking, and it has no place on the small web.

Ideally, a personal website should be thought of as a gift to all Internet users.

Corporate search engines will almost never take you to a personal website unless you are either very lucky or you already know it exists. If you already know a website exists, you don't need a search engine to find it. This means only those who are motivated and know how to look will find what they are looking for on the small Internet.

It has a links to specific search engines.

For those who are not technically inclined, sites like these make starting your first blog easy: Bear Blog (free), Nekoweb (free), Mataroa (free or $9/yr for premium), and Write.as ($6/month).

The Open Source ideology is misused by companies: its ideology concerns production (similarly to FLOSS). You contribute to the software back.

Copyleft can force an absolute minimal “contribution” back to your project, but it can’t force a good-faith one. This makes it an inadequate tool towards building something with the kinds of values that many developers care about.

But I do think I’ve properly identified the problem: many developers conceive of software freedom as something larger than purely a license that kinds in on redistribution. This is the new frontier for those who are thinking about furthering the goals of the free software and open source movements. Our old tools are inadequate, and I’m not sure that the needed replacements work, or even exist.

About C and C++ standards; their evolution and the apparition of Rust as an online open-source collaboration and cross-platform language. How Rust features go from idea to stable. What is the reference documentation of Rust?

While for many users, a specification would just be “nice to have”, there are also Rust users for whom such a specification is absolutely necessary to be able to use Rust for the field they work in.

It’s good that we, the Rust project itself, own the language and the process for making changes to it. We just need to get better at documenting it, and could use some help.

I’ll point out that the training data requires the wholesale harvesting of creative works without compensation.

I’ll also point out the ludicrously profligate energy use required not just for the training, but for the subsequent queries.

but "these things will get better!"... first there is no evidence. Second what the hell kind of logic is that?

IP and names in URLs can change. They will over time.

Tout écrivain, Saint-Exupéry le premier, vous le dira : l’art de l’écriture, c’est de supprimer, de trancher, de raccourcir le texte pour lui donner de la puissance.

Dans mon entourage, les gens l’utilisent pour envoyer des dossiers administratifs. Alors, est-ce utile ? Non, c’est juste que ces dossiers sont complètement cons, que personne ne va les lire et qu’on utilise des outils cons pour gérer des problèmes à la con qu’on se crée soi-même.

Un outil et non une solution:

Comme le dit la linguiste Emily M. Bender, on ne demande pas aux étudiants de faire des rédactions parce que le monde a besoin de rédactions. Mais pour apprendre aux élèves à structurer leurs pensées, à être critiques. Utiliser ChatGPT c’est, selon les mots de Ted Chiang, prendre un chariot élévateur à la salle de musculation. Oui, les poids vont faire des va-et-vient, mais va-t-on se muscler pour autant ?

aphorisme: « tout le monde peut écrire, l’écrivain est celui qui ne sait pas s’empêcher d’écrire »

Bruno Leyval dessine tous les jours depuis qu’il est tout petit. Il dessine tout le temps. Il s’est transformé en machine à dessiner. Cette sensibilité de toute une vie ne pourra jamais se comparer à un algorithme générateur d’images.

À propos de l'IA qui génère du code: On cherche à optimiser la « création de logiciel » tout en oubliant la maintenance du logiciel et de l’infrastructure pour le faire tourner.

It's perfectly legal for people to take your writing, code, videos, music and other works into a 'dataset' that can be used to train an LLM model to forge your art or writing style -- for money.

But if a nonprofit decides to purchase hardcopy books, scan them in, and create a digital lending program providing works to anyone who asks -- for free, that's checks notes illegal. :D

For simple sites, keep things manual.

Automate when it hurts to do it manually.

"Joy in the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death" Carl Jung says.

Because death means the end of everything, knowing that death is the end allows me to use this idea as a source of strength and resilience.

Totally agree.

I keep my life simple because I know my time is limited. Time and health are my best proxies for happiness.

How?

Mostly by saying no.

No streaming subscriptions. No gym memberships. No Instagram and TikTok. 6 years old shoes and wardrobe. No meetings if possible. No commute; I work remotely. No property; I'm a happy tenant. No trips. No great home cinema setup. Limited tooling on the computer. No notion or Obsidian if a text file + git is enough.

On the other side, relying on reddit or HN for comments is exclusive.

Simple means focused.

Yes, there’s a creative process and they allow themselves to be creative, but they do so in a very constrained environment: their office. While others chase trends, they do the thing they’re always doing.

Rust is the first language in a long tome being able to compete with C or C++.

Rust also built a market around it. Orner languages of the same category did not.

At the beginning of the century, people played around and gave all kinds of things URIs like "http://example.com/foo.rdf#color".

for one reason or another people demanded the right to be able to use http://example.net/people/Pat to denote Pat rather than a web page about Pat.

The term Resource is indeed enough for REST, but other use cases such as RDF already reserved Resource for something different.

in fact in RDF the resource was allowed to be anything at all. A class, rdf:Resource even used the term as the universal class of all things.

A more general approach, more suitable for link blogs so inclined, would be to use word count with a note on writing style. Something like “850 words, fluffy, no long words” or “850 words, tech jargon, complex sentences” would be much more useful than the “3 minutes” that most default today

#empowerment