Notices by emily, blinkenlight witch (emily@sparkly.uni.horse)

@burnitdown you know what linux? fuck you

yes I am very good linux expert

*accidentally uninstalls her kernel*

defining ad hoc protocols for things is a wonderful vehicle for silliness

for example, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from declaring that all messages must be delimited by ~*{ ... }*~

There's an email thing called dovecot. (Details irrelevant, if you've never heard of it all you need to know is it's an email thing.)

TIL there's a physical thing called a dovecot, which is a cot (bed) for doves and pigeons.

Upon learning this, I was like "oh! like carrier pigeons! that is a clever pun!" but no it turns out they mostly just kept pigeons to eat their eggs and use their poop as fertilizer :( (I probably have vastly inflated ideas of how often pigeons were used to carry messages)

Also I realized just now while typing this that the word "cottage" comes from "cot". Language is fun!

we desperately need a better way to share modifications to an upstream software project (for the case where they won't be merged and the customization away from upstream is the point)

I have no idea what that looks like but "here's a fork I made two years ago and will not be regularly rebasing on upstream" isn't it

I stepped away for dinner after writing this and then remembered that patches are a thing

Bring back patches

@MekahimeAkari do you mean "decentralized" as in the people making it are, or as in the computer itself is?

I'm intrigued either way but also I do not know what a decentralized computer would look like

@MekahimeAkari I could be convinced to join this project if you actually do a thing (my skills range from the making-PCBs-with-existing-parts level of hardware all the way up the stack)

the silicon level is the hardest imo, since (that is the highest level I know essentially nothing about so it seems scary and intractable but also) we don't really currently have a good, accessible-to-individuals way to make any sort of nontrivial ICs afaik? but I would also like to see this change

@MekahimeAkari I'm trying to find if anyone has made open hardware FPGAs yet (because that seems like a good place to start with this sort of thing) and that is shockingly hard because everyone's like "I made an open hardware FPGA board! it has this xilinx FPGA on it"

it blows my mind how big fully-built source trees are for embedded stuff

I have several copies of the QMK source, at 2GB each, each of which produces at most tens of kilobytes of stuff to flash onto a microcontroller

there is probably a neat filesystem thing that'll let me share the data of all the copies of that and just overlay the minor changes I make to each one

but also I live in the future and we measure drives in terabytes now

somewhen in the past, child me is sitting there wondering how anyone could ever fill up a 3GB hard drive

things that would have blown child me's mind, an ongoing list:

- future them can not only afford to just waste 2GB of space building firmware for a trackball, but forget to clean it up for months without having constant "your machine is out of space" warnings

- future them wound up using a trackball that needs 2GB of space to build its firmware

- future them wound up using a trackball at all

- surprise, you're not a boy

- under the floor is just another solid surface that is less aesthetically pleasing and comfy to stand on. it is not an infinitely deep hole. you will not fall into an infinitely deep hole in the floor and die

@olivvybee wait what, I thought literally everyone but the US used km/h for car speeds

@olivvybee I was going to make a joke about metric miles but uhh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_mile

reality itself is the joke

self-care is deleting a long-abandoned project because it starts with the same several letters as a directory you cd into often and it breaks tab completion

"wtf why is my thing immediately hard faulting on boot"

"oh hm maybe it's because it's trying to execute code from somewhere that isn't even existent memory, and also my stack pointer is the bytes '\x7cELF'"

I applaud attempts to make open source things but I am begging people to come up with better names for them than just prefixing open/free/libre to a generic term

@ailurux @jacqueline I don't know what came over me

@foone I got halfway through doing this with my phone before realizing I had no way to photograph it

@foone sudden desire to get a bunch of people who are neither gamers nor computer people, and have them guess if things like "wireshark" or "fortnite" are the names of video games or nerd tools

throw "rust" in there as a trick question too