Notices by Doug Webb (douginamug@mastodon.xyz)

My political leaning is Standards Authoritarian

So I'm now working full time in an industrial analysis lab.

Any other industrial/lab workers out there? 👀

Citizens assembles are such a cheat mode for Gov to outsource hard decisions. Maybe that's the sales angle for them... And for us, it's still good: once people see that it works, it'll be easier to roll it out/in 🤔

#sortition

@adamgreenfield "mom and pop" store comes to mind too. (Interestingly, no british "mum and dad" equivalent comes to mind).

These places are really defined by the people themselves and their values and practices. Collectives & coops def slide into structural fetishism.

I prefer good people in a non-ideal structure than the opposite.

@ntnsndr

*shines light in face*

WHAT'S THE 6TH ICA PRINCIPLE??

I'm just hearing about Pix, the Brazilian central bank digital payment system, free for person-to-person, instant, etc. Wildly popular, now used in 8 LatAm countries.

MasterCard, Visa, Meta & Co. teamed up to persuade US gov to impose tariffs this summer bc Brazil's practices "may undermine the competitiveness of U.S. companies engaged in digital trade and electronic payment services." How pathetic.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/brazil-us-clash-over-future-payments-popular-pix-system-stirs-global-interest-2026-07-21/

Fedi, halp

I meet a lot of people & do a lot of connecting work.

I need a way of quickly getting an overview of who is part of which organizations, scenes and geographical areas. My brain is not enough.

What options are there? FOSS & local are requirements.

I already use #thunderbird - are there extensions I could use?

I often having this feeling I should do marketing/sales for a Good Project.

@strypey DYK Kagi?

@strypey I hope so too. Just worth knowing they exist, and seems you do.

@strypey what is the Kalashnikov principle?

@strypey thanks! And cool to read your wiki bio, thanks for your struggle!

just found out that #cron can't do "nth weekday in month" 😮💨

seems you just have to run job every day, and have some code atop to let it continue or exit if day not right

(_very_ happy to be wrong about this)

Say I wanted to make a kinetic light sculpture (I do) (Think CCC, see https://hansleser.de/)

Say that required turning something with ~5 KG of weight at about 1 rpm.

What tech would you use? Bonus points if I can salvage it somehow.

Saw this slide in a fosdem talk https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/GNKEPR-burnout_in_open_source_a_structural_problem_we_can_fix_together/ and immediately thought of the "with great power comes great responsibility" spiderman thing.

It sums up why I generally think it isn't desirable or possible to have orgs where all members have the same power/autonomy: I am a member of way too many orgs to take top-level responsibility in all of them!

1) yourpond io - a CRM that I foud bc I'm looking for a way to see my contacts on a map gives up on any human review and suggests you ask chat directly. More honest than generating fake reviews, sure, but...

I want a local copy of:
* my posts (whether "new" or replies)
* others posts (to which I am replying, all the way to original post or are replying to mine (including replies))

In a perfect world, it would be auto-updating.

The aim is to have a record / backup of all the stuff I/we've been chatting about, and to be able to search through it.

Ideas?

Am I the asshole?

Local speech-to-text seems to be one of the most robustly useful things to have come out of the recent wave.

Does anyone know how much computation it takes?

#whisper #speechtotext

@rosano I am interested to play with Nostr a bit from a protocol/architecture perspective. ATproto... Still seems to offer no practical improvement on decentralization than BigTech?