Blogging on the Fediverse
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@[url=https://samthursfield.wordpress.com/@samthursfield.wordpress.com]samthursfield.wordpress.com@samthursfield.wordpress.com[/url].
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Reflections on GUADEC 2024
I was lucky enough to attend GNOME’s 2024 conference in Denver. I had a great time, saw many people I haven’t seen this decade, and it was also my first trip into the USA beyond the easternmost parts of the east coast.
It was a unique edition of the conference, we were about 50 people as you can see in the group photo, with another 30-40 people in Berlin. I posted a thread already on what we learned about hybrid conferences.
I have a more thoughts about this year’s event which are complex and contradictory and better discussed face to face. Sometimes you have to hold multiple conflicting thoughts in your head at once. I’ve written some of these thoughts down below.
The world is huge … like really big. Denver is a full EIGHT timezones away from Berlin, right? If you get up at 9AM in Denver then it’s already 5PM in Berlin, and it’ll be 6PM by the time you’ve brushed your teeth. How can you unite two groups of people across such a big time gap?
Having tried it, my feeling that a “federated” event split across different locations at the same time is not a replacement for a single, global in-person event. The community splits according to the geographical distribution of its members, roughly following Conway’s Law.
Travelling back from Denver to Santiago de Compostela took me about 50 hours in the end. It was supposed to be less but there was a 5 hour delay in Denver due to a shortage of air traffic controllers in Newark, which led to missing a connection to Madrid, the next day some bad weather added two more hours of delay, and then the trains from Madrid were largely full so I couldn’t get back home until early evening.
I kind of enjoy travel chaos (and my feeling is that as a society, we’ll only reduce our dependence on air travel if and when it becomes frustratingly inconvenient to use).
I feel lucky that I don’t have to do this kind of trip very frequently. I have more appreciation now for the significant effort people go through to get to events in Europe.
Multiple people in Denver told me they share the feeling I mentioned last month, that many Free Software communities are Euro-centric.
Some benefits to holding a GUADEC in the USA. Inspirational keynotes by local speakers, both Ryan Sipes’ story of Thunderbird, and Stephanie Taylor who is the force behind Google Summer of Code. Meeting contributors who don’t travel to Europe. Media coverage of the GNOME Foundation AGM, in a good way.
I think we missed an opportunity to make more of the event. Involving “the local community” in a summer event is always tricky, as during the summer holidays, “casual” attendees such as students and hobbyists are mostly on holiday. They aren’t usually looking for new software conferences they might attend. That said, GNOME would definitely would benefit from more hands focused on communication outside the project, what we often call “marketing” and “engagement”. It’s a difficult and often thankless task and we have to pay someone to do it. (With all the endless money we have, of course).
I did mention the thing about multiple conflicting ideas at once, right?
Let’s not pretend that a video conference or a hybrid BOF is the same as an in-person meetup. Once you’ve sung karaoke with someone, or explored Meow Wolf, or camped in the desert in Utah together, your relationship is richer than when you only interacted via Gitlab pull requests and BigBlueButton. You have more empathy and you can resolve conflicts better.
Let’s keep exploring new ways to collaborate. Regional events and hybrid events. And accept that these will form bubbles. If you live near members of the GNOME design team and meet in-person with them, you’re going to be able to influence GNOME’s design, more easily than if you live on a continent such as Africa where (to my knowledge) you can’t meet any existing design team members without leaving your continent. If you have a friend who maintains Nautilus it’s going to be easier to get up to speed with Nautilus development yourself, compared to if you’re starting from scratch and you live in a timezone that’s 10 hours offset from Europe.
We want to rethink technical governance in GNOME, which currently somewhat resembles the 15th century Feudal system. (See also, Tobi’s less flippant explanation of how decisions are made). Let’s keep geography in mind when we discuss this. And let’s also think how we can balance out the implicit advantage you get for being based in a certain place, and how we can grow local communities in places that don’t currently have them. I suspect this effort will need to be larger than just the GNOME project, and we can’t be the only community thinking about this stuff.
The USA is just as crazy as you imagine from its TV output. I was ready for beautiful scenery, long car journeys, no pavements, icy air conditioning, unhealthy food and franchises inside of franchises inside of franchises. I was genuinely surprised how hot it gets everywhere — even during my unwanted stopover in Newark the weather was 35° humid heat. And I wasn’t ready for disposable plates, cups and cutlery at every hotel breakfast. I’ve stayed in very cheap and very expensive hotels in many places, and all of them manage to wash and reuse the plates.
I want to see the single location, in-person GUADEC continuing while it’s still possible to do it. Count how many plane tickets were bought this year to attend GNOME events, and compare it to the number of flights taken just by Elon Musk’s private jet. It’s great that we avoided a few dozen plane tickets compared to last year but I’m yet to see a noticeable impact on the airline industry; while the impact on the GNOME project of splitting the community into two physical locations was very noticeable indeed.
We should alternate in-person GUADEC with more radically decentralized events, under a different name. We need to continue developing those as well. Like it or not there are big changes coming in society as the world gets increasingly hot. Tobi outlined all this very well in 2022. Nobody knows exactly what will happen of course, but you can expect that building resilience to change will be worthwhile, to put it very mildly. The key is for this to be something positive rather than a negative. The creation of something new rather than the loss of something we fondly remember. I mean, you can’t claim “GUADEC” is a particularly great name 🙂
It’s easy to write about this stuff in a blog post of course, harder to put into practice, and actually it wasn’t even easy to write…. this has taken me three hours.
Fairphone 5
I was going to write more stuff here but it turns out I had a lot to say about GNOME this month. At FOSDEM 2024, which I could easily attend in-person because I’m European, I saw a great talk by Luca from Fairphone, and decided my next phone would be a Fairphone 5. And I just got one. More on that next month, I guess.
Obstbauern am Bodensee dürfen Äpfel und Birnen mit dem Pilzmittel Folpet spritzen, um Schorf zu verhindern. Das BvL hat das per Notfallzulassung genehmigt. Die zulässige Rückstandsmenge bei Äpfeln wurde um das 20fache erhöht. Die Früchte dürfen nur in Deutschland verkauft werden, EU-weit gelten niedrigere Rückstandsgrenzen. Folpet kann vermutlich Krebs erzeugen und ist sehr giftig für Wasserorganismen. deutschlandfunk.de/apfel-und-b…
Mastering Markdown in Apple Notes: A Beginner’s Guide to Enhanced Productivity
Apple Notes allows you to add Markdown formatting to your notes. To do this, simply select the text you want to format and use common…James Wilson (Tooling Ant)
Just got me a #pixel3a - used, cheap and in surprisingly good condition. The updater of the stock rom tells me that the device is EOL - and indeed, according to endoflife.date/pixel it was EOLed over two years ago, despite being released only some 5/6 years ago. The kernel version starts with 4.x.
Well, tomorrow pre-build #postmarketos images should appear on postmarketos.org/install/, the next weekly should have it promoted from "testing" to "community" and the kernel is at 6.10.x.
liebe medienmenschen,
es ist halt auch nicht hilfreich, daß bei euch niemand rechnen kann und damit unreflektiert neoliberale kacke reproduziert. heute sind 60% vom jahr vorbei, wie passt das mit einem steuersatz von angeblich 47,x% zusammen?
Laut jährlichem Personeneinkommen 2022 der Statistik Austria
ist das Bruttojahreseinkommen Median (50%) der unselbstständig Erwerbstätigen 32.834 Euro, davon wurden 25% Steuern bezahlt, 2024-04-01.
und beim 3. Quartils (75%) der unselbstständig Erwerbstätigen ist es 49.607 Euro, davon wurden 29.4% Steuern bezahlt, 2024-04-17.
Bei 47.2% Steuern, 2024-06-21.
statistik.at/statistiken/bevoe…
Jährliche Personeneinkommen
Unabhängige Statistiken für faktenbasierte EntscheidungenStatistik Austria
Berechnung zur Prüfung:
unselbstständig Erwerbstätige Median (50%)
(let ((brutto 32834)(netto 24652))(- 100 (/ netto brutto 0.01)))24.9
(* 365 0.25)91.25
[2024-04-01 Mo]
unselbstständig Erwerbstätige 3. Quartil (75%)
(let ((brutto 49607)(netto 35037))(- 100 (/ netto brutto 0.01)))29.4
(* 365 0.294)107.31
[2024-04-17 Mi]
(* 365 0.472)172.28
[2024-06-21 Fr]
Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin
Solution: Firefox + uBlock Origin 😉🤟
tuta.com/blog/best-private-bro…
Here's the latest news: windowscentral.com/software-ap…
#Chrome #Google #Firefox #uBlock #Browsers
Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads
Google ramps up its campaign against ad blockers on Chrome.Kevin Okemwa (Windows Central)
Two questions:
Does Tuta have a spreadsheet function like Google sheets?
Can you create more than one email account?
🔔 You heard the news: the @EU_Commission is planning to stop funding @EC_NGI in #HorizonEU 2025 ‼️
Our community reached the EU institutions its answer expresses vague support for #FreeSoftware.
Unfortunately it is failing to provide concrete examples on how to do so. The EC needs to come up with dedicated budget for Free Software solutions!
Keep the pressure on the EC on this topic by contacting them!
youtube.com/watch?v=RwAt36Xe3U…
If you wonder what iroh is. #deltachat uses it for second device setup and soon also for realtime #p2p connections in #webxdc
Introducing iroh
All these papers we've talking about? We put that research into open practice with https://iroh.computer.Come hang! https://iroh.computer/discordYouTube
youtube.com/watch?v=E-e758AYkm…
And here the presentation from @flub of the intergration of #iroh_net into #deltachat for the setup second device feature.
Delta Chat and Iroh - Floris Bruynooghe
Delta Chat is a messenger using email as transport and with no additional infrastructure. This talk will discuss how the minimalist Iroh is used by Delta Ch...YouTube
#Librem11 #pureOS
In September, Denise will share her expertise on regulatory compliance in decentralised environments at The Matrix Conference!
🎟️ Grab your tickets at 2024.matrix.org
🏆️ Secure a sponsorship package at 2024.matrix.org/sponsor
Matrix.org
The Matrix Conference is coming to Berlin, Germany on September 19–22, 2024.2024.matrix.org
It is official: #RIPE89 in Prague will be hosted by #CZNIC with #CESNET as the connectivity sponsor. 😎
Great to see local companies participating. Hopefully there will also be enough local participants - so far only 8 are registered.
ripe89.ripe.net/sponsors/ripe-…
RIPE 89 Sponsors – RIPE 89
A RIPE Meeting is a five-day event where Internet Service Providers (ISPs), network operators and other interested parties from all over the world gather.ripe89.ripe.net
Ich hatte hier vor einiger Zeit im Rahmen der letzten #TwitterExodus -Wellen auf andere Social Media Plattformen im Kontext des #Fediverse hingewiesen, u.a. auf Firefish.
Leider wurde da die Entwicklung eingestellt, aber der #Misskey -Fork #Sharkey (joinsharkey.org) ist dafür umso aktiver. (Wie alle anderen Projekte, die #ActivityPub nutzen, föderiert auch Sharkey problemlos mit #Pixelfed oder #Mastodon.)
Wer das mal austesten möchte: federation.network/ oder sharkey.world/ bieten einen einfachen Einstieg.
Was ich an der Software besonders interessant finde, sind die Funktionen "Antennen" und "Kanäle".
Je heterogener das Fediverse wird, was die verwendeten Plattformen angeht, desto weniger Sorgen muss man sich um das Erreichen einer kritischen Masse machen. Die lokale Timeline mag dünn aussehen, aber die föderierten oder globalen Timelines sind dafür aktiv.
Sharkey.World
A generic Sharkey instance for anyone to use. Sharkey.World's official theme song, as suggested by @qqmrichter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO1cr_97psgSharkey.World
wurde nicht eingestellt.
@dev@post.naskya.net kümmert sich derzeit vor allem um Bugfixes und Codecleaning.
Es gibt auch einen #Matrix Space
In the fresh report "Investing in #Rust" by Shane Miller yours truly is quoted several times.
lawfaremedia.org/article/inves…
Investing in Rust
U.S. public policy can help facilitate market adoption of a relatively new, efficient, and safe programming language called Rust.Default
@pro I can spot two such languages mentioned in the first paragraph.
But more importantly: I am in no way associated with this report. No need to tell me this.
#Pirates
I did the drums on this track using #AddictiveDrums2 on a keyboard. I'm nobody's idea of a real drummer, but I can fake it pretty good.
So Glad You’re Mine by Troy Mitchell:
youtu.be/Wnp44sWtZyY?si=yUVGwD…
So Glad You’re Mine
Provided to YouTube by CDBabySo Glad You’re Mine · Troy MitchellSo Glad You’re Mine℗ 2024 Troy MitchellReleased on: 2024-08-14Auto-generated by YouTube.YouTube
This Matrix story just keeps getting worse.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…
soatok.blog/2024/08/14/securit…
Security Issues in Matrix’s Olm Library - Dhole Moments
I don’t consider myself exceptional in any regard, but I stumbled upon a few cryptography vulnerabilities in Matrix’s Olm library with so little effort that it was nearly accidental. It…Dhole Moments
Hell, controls in general will test things beyond your imagination, and half the time lives are on the line.
A job I interviewed for on-site produces nuclear fuel rods. There is a river not far away. The nearby Hanford site alone threatens to leak 80 year old nuclear waste into the soil as its tanks threaten to fail.
No operation in that geographical area can go wrong. And if something does, it has to be resolved immediately. Soil can't be contaminated. Water cannot be polluted. If these sites fail, hundreds of thousands of people near the river & downriver could be hurt. That region hosts a ton of agriculture.
As stuff in this industry becomes increasingly connected to the outside world, protecting these systems from bad actors is even more critical. We rely on proven cryptography even more than ever now.
Yes Matrix is a chat system, but that fucking attitude pisses me off so much. I would get fired for letting that kind of thing happen. Who knows what someone could do if I let this happen.
"Nobody is obligated to buy from you. Nobody has to use your service. You can go out of business tomorrow if everyone just stopped buying from you."
I cannot in good conscience trust a company, a group, a project, that openly admits to ignoring something that they knew about years ago. What else do they know is a failure point that hasn't been found, that they maybe haven't addressed in years? How can anyone trust that they have their shit together after this? WHY should ANYBODY trust their claims now?
However neat I think Matrix is, this behavior alone is enough to convince me to never trust these people with anything. I know shit about crypto but I know a lot about critical infrastructure. If my former company fucked up hard, knew about the fuck up, and didn't do anything about it for years? I'd expect potential clients to never trust us again.
I will be taking my business elsewhere. I don't know where it might go, but it certainly won't be with anything involving Matrix or the team(s) behind it.
Your blog does not need frameworks built for SPAs.
Your e-commerce "experience" should be progressively enhanced (no, that does not mean "SSR+huge bundles")
Your news website is not "an app".
Part 3 of my series on how JavaScript fucked over US public benefits services is up, and includes a handy rubric for "should we React?"
infrequently.org/2024/08/capro…
Reckoning: Part 3 — Caprock
I have worked with dozens of teams surprised to have have found themselves in the JavaScript ditch. They all feel ashamed because they've been led to believe they're the first; that the technology is working fine for other folks. It isn't.Alex Russell
reshared this
A Very Hot Day youtu.be/Xf6MWeqIQxo?si=Ndl9vM…
A Very Hot Day (Ableton Note BGM)
This was started on the day that my portion of London hit 31°C, which is nothing for my US followers with your fancy AC units, but for me without any of that...YouTube
Nuclear power: no, yes, maybe, but not like this - Bert Hubert's writings
This is a story in three acts, where we go from “trying to procure more nuclear power plants in 2024 is nuts”, to “I could see why you’d want some nuclear”, to “but if so, not like this”.Bert Hubert's writings
Takže, v paralelnom vesmírne Erica Schmidta, môže za zaostávanie Googlu na poli AI rozhodnutie, že ľudia môžu pracovať z domu.
Takéto vyhlásenia sú zlé na tak veľa úrovniach, ako to je len možné a vedia ma dostať do vývrtky. Áno, než som toto napísal, musel som si napočítať do desať, opakovane, ináč by som sa znížil iba k jednoslovnému vulgarizmu.
Pracujem z domu viac než dekádu, coachoval som viacero kolegov a známych, ktorí behom toho obdobia (už aj pred pandémiou) postupne prechádzali na remote work. Sám som za tú dobu vystriedal množstvo interných pozícii smerom hore, či dokonca prešiel úžasným (externým) kariérnym skokom, takže smelo predpokladám, že som biznisu odovzdával nadpriemernú hodnotu.
Taktiež môžem povedať, že som týmto veľa získal v osobnom živote - týždenne ušetrené hodiny času, môcť vidieť, v priamom prenose, svoje deti vyrastať, flexibilita na starosti denného života... Je to na nezaplatenie a je to win-win.
Iste, nie je to pre každého, iste, sú aj ľudia, ktorí budú mať tendenciu takúto príležitosť zneužívať, alebo ju iba jednoducho a ľudsky nezvládnu. Adresovať tieto nástrahy je však úlohou managementu. A kto vedie management? Leadership!
Takže, ak Eric tvrdí niečo takéto, treba pozorne počúvať. Síce to znie ako, boli sme ňuňu dobrí na ľudí, a preto zaostávame, ale v skutočnosti tým hovorí - sme naprd leadri, s mizerným managementom, ktorí nezvládli svoju základnú úlohu - efektívne riadiť ľudí.
Ono, je tu však ešte tretia, najpravdepodobnejšie (uvidíme) možnosť: nedarí sa, spálilo sa mrte prachov bez adekvátneho vysledku, treba nájsť vinníka a ideálne zmienku ako zoštíhliť firmu, teda vyhodiť pár ľudí... ale keďže sme už ňuňu dobrí, my nikoho vyhadzovať nebudeme, my iba všetkým prikážeme návrat do office a oni odídu dobrovoľne... Rád by som sa mýlil, ale za posledný rok som takýchto pribehov videl už niekoľko.
Je tu však háčik - takýmto spôsobom sa firma zbaví predovšetkým tých šikovnejších, tých ktorí sú si vedomí svojich schopností aj pridanej hodnoty, bez toho aby strávili život v openspace... A viete čo - dobre im tak!
#ustrelilomidekel #somsaopustil #homeoffice #ericschmidt #google #alphabet
From: @zachklipp
androiddev.social/@zachklipp/1…
Zach Klipp (he/him) 🥥🌻🇵🇸 (@zachklipp@androiddev.social)
Eric Schmidt can go fuck himself https://techhub.social/@Techmeme/112962014640033767Android Dev Social
"It didn’t matter what Joe Biden did – pull the country out of a pandemic ... tame inflation, grow jobs, grow wages, enforce anti-monopoly laws, revive every single one of the so-called 'left behind' counties that voted for Trump in 2016 because of 'economic anxiety' ... The press corps decided nothing was more important than his age, and lo! 2024 became an election about vibes and vibes ended his candidacy.
"Vibes are this press corps’ forte, not fact and substance."
editorialboard.com/kamala-harr…
Kamala Harris is taking power back from the press corps
She learned from Biden’s fatal error.John Stoehr (The Editorial Board)
Membership Committee elections: Townhall sessions with the candidates - The Document Foundation Blog
The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit home of LibreOffice, and its Membership Committee (MC) administers membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s Statutes.Mike Saunders (The Document Foundation)
Self-driving Waymo cars keep SF residents awake all night by honking at each other
Self-driving Waymo cars keep SF residents awake all night by honking at each other
Haunted by glitching algorithms, self-driving cars disturb the peace in San Francisco.Ars Technica
#phishing
Picker is a simple app; give it a list of items and let it pick one out for you! It can help make decisions, picking from tasks you haven't started but really should, or it can help you decide what you want for lunch, picking from ingredients in your fridge! Once the app has selected an item, Picker gives you the option to copy it or even to remove it from the list entirely!
You can get the app on Flathub here: flathub.org/apps/io.github.mez…
I thought that Chats (GNOME Chatty) is an SMS app, but it actually supports Matrix and XMPP too. So I can join discussions on the postmarketOS Matrix server from postmarketOS devices. Cool.
#linuxmobile #postmarketOS #matrix #chat #gnome
Fortunately I hear that one of the big benefits of distributed version control is that it does not rely on a central server and works even when some participants are offline, therefore I’m confident that this outage will have minimal practical impact on developers’ work today.
[touches earpiece]
Wait…
From @ryanrandall:
hcommons.social/@ryanrandall/1…
Ryan for a permanent ceasefire (@ryanrandall@hcommons.social)
Nope, it's not just you. #GitHub is indeed down for lots of people.hcommons.social
Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP, hire lawyers to “clean up the mess”
“But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content,” former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said during a talk at Stanford that has been pulled offline.Alex Heath (The Verge)
Reminder that you can use AccessibilityAttributes on your AttributedStrings to have more fine-grained control over how assistive technologies interact with your Text, such as modulating the pitch or pronunciation #VoiceOver uses! #accessibility #iOS
developer.apple.com/documentat…
AttributeScopes.AccessibilityAttributes | Apple Developer Documentation
There's never been a better time to develop for Apple platforms.Apple Developer Documentation
This is my favorite coconut water product. Just coconut water and coconut flesh, frozen in a bag. The next best thing is getting a young coconut on a Thai beach.
Keeps me going, what with all the terrible coconut water products here
On an especially hot day, taking this out of the freezer = having coconut ice slushy instead of water, which is also excellent
sayweee.com/en/product/Coconut…
Robert Mader
in reply to Robert Mader • • •Important for me: the front camera should already work and for the back one there are WIP patches that work, meaning this device will probably be the first Android device with both cameras being supported (and most other thing as well!).
Sure, we're still very far away from what even a super outdated Android can offer. I for one am super eager and motivated to see if we can make #linuxmobile (upstream!) a somewhat reasonably alternative though - and make #postmarketos live up to its name :)