Notices by Hugo Mills (darkling@mstdn.social)

@256 And they say irony is dead.

@whitequark @zkat I really don't like the idea that arbitrary arseholes can take the stuff that I release and use it for Bad Things, so in that sense I don't like freedom zero.

However, I don't see that there's much traction in using the nominal powers of copyright licensing against those particular arseholes, because they've got much larger weapons than I have.

So I'll keep licensing most of my stuff under BSD, and try to support other ways of limiting the powers of the arseholes.

@whitequark At my last job, back in the dim days when they actually had time to run weekly training sessions for the devs, I ran a 2-hour session (with discussions) on how and why to write git commit messages.

That said, we didn't tend to go back into git history much anyway, so I'm not sure how much benefit it offered anyway, but it felt good to get at least the ideas into the team.

@whitequark SOAP itself was... OK, I guess? for a rehash of all the previous attempts at RPC protocols.

The thing that got me was all the "extensibility" stuff it: the security layers that couldn't work (because XML), the attempts at registries, the belief that you only needed the WSDL to access an arbitrary service...

(I did once write a vnc-over-soap service. It was slooooow.)

@futurebird I'm sure you wouldn't be the first person to do so, nor the last.

@whitequark Have you tried drinks and dinner?

@whitequark Is that to go with Corporal Parts, Sergeant Punishment, General Panic, and Field Marshal Protection Fault?

@whitequark Does VS Code require a kernel anti-cheat module for doing shared development, though?

@futurebird I just went to look up Galois, expecting to find nothing (since he died aged 20), but there is indeed a portrait (aged 15) that looks like exactly the kind of troublemaker I expected him to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois#/media/File:Evariste_galois.jpg

@cstross Spectacular bullshit from Redmond? Did I just accidentally wake up in 1999 again?

MS is fighting hard to regain its rep as The Great Satan. It's just got stiffer competition this time round.

@nazokiyoubinbou @thomasfuchs The hardware aged fast... up to about 20 years ago. The tech industry just hasn't caught up to the consequences of that fact yet.

@nazokiyoubinbou @thomasfuchs That was the spirit in which I made my first post -- up to about 2005, you could get *massively* more capable hardware with a 2- or 3-year refresh cycle. The whole industry, including OSes and software, was *entirely* designed to work with this fact.

Now that there's only a comparatively small change in hardware capability over the same time period, and software basically does what people want it to (so there's no compelling new features),

1/2

@nazokiyoubinbou @thomasfuchs the wheels have fallen off the business model, and they've been flailing around with ever-more horrible variations to try to keep the dead business model of continual *desirable* change going, by making change and pretending it's desirable.

The idea of change has become so internalised that we're now getting change even though it's massively *not* desirable, and being made to use it, because that's how it's always been, and what the markets expect.

2/2

@0xabad1dea Belgians: I like what you did there. Do you want to collaborate on a piece together?

@mcc At least his wife has an explanation up front for the strange noises from under the house, and why she hasn't seen her husband for several days.

@georgetakei I guess it's a start...

@mcc I quite like the term "mechanically recovered text".

In her retirement, my mum has been learning to play the cello, having played it when she was at school.

She went to the Oxfam music shop at the weekend to get a book of studies, to practice with.

She found one, opened it up, and... saw her name written inside the cover, in her own handwriting from 60-odd years ago.

#music #cello #coincidence

@vaurora I also have background (postdoc research and industrial expreience) in metadata and data management -- mostly RDF/SemWeb, but a lot of the principles apply elsewhere, too.

@vaurora I spent a lot of time helping people out on IRC and the mailing list. I wrote a reasonable chunk of documentation on the wiki. I did write the first draft of the balance filters, but that got rewritten by someone else for the accepted version.

I'm not going to be at FOSDEM this year -- haven't been to that since about 2008.

I'm also currently completely burned out, and won't be in the job market again until at least mid-June.