Notices by Joshua Barretto (jsbarretto@social.coop)

Gave #FreeCAD a go last night. Given that I've not done any real CAD stuff for over a decade, I was expecting the confluence of 'CAD' and 'free software' to be a bizarre, arcane, and unintuitive experience. Very happy to report that it wasn't and, further, that FreeCAD is good.

@cwebber It is the middle of the night and I am worried that reading this post in my head is going to wake my dog

Proud of #bristol tonight. Easily 3-4 thousand people in attendance, all here to oppose the far right. Such a welcoming and tolerant atmosphere.

The far right did briefly show, but quickly realised they'd bitten off more than they could chew and vanished.

@ned Not like some bearded guy spent most of his life writing about why this happens 150 years ago or anything

A few days ago I suddenly had a desire to port Super Mario 64 to the Gameboy Advance.

I quickly realised that a straight port was going to be impossible given that the GBA:

- Is about an order of magnitude slower than the N64
- Lacks a GPU or any sort of hardware parallelism (you get about 10 cycles per pixel, per frame to rasterise everything in software, and *that's it*)
- Has no hardware support for floating point maths

So, I guess I'm rewriting the whole thing from scratch.

My city is soon to run a pilot scheme that's going to make many roads, particularly in residential areas, access-only for motor vehicles.

It's a great piece of #urbanism policy, but sadly it's riled up the usual conspiracy theorists complaining about '15-minute cities' and 'CCTV cameras' (there are no such plans).

I've noticed a lot of them putting up stickers with disinformation about the scheme so I've decided I'm fighting back with my own more colourful and (hopefully) eye-catching design.

(I am not very good at Inkscape, sorry. Ah well: amateurism makes it seem more local and relatable, I guess)

@oliver @lancehomer I admit I'm a little suspicious that they started with this rather than the other way around. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up doing a lot of can-kicking before making Mastodon visible via Threads.

@diazona @hosford42 The problem is that it's extremely difficult to measure the value of FOSS work. As an example, I maintain a variety of libraries in the Rust ecosystem. I had no idea who was using them, and still mostly don't. When I got my current job, I found to my surprise that several of them were already in their dependency tree. (1/2)

The number of boosts this is getting implies that a lot of folk feel similar, and that's sad.

@berlinfokus I think that's a fair criticism, although as mentioned: a lot of this is because the market is almost designed to make it difficult for competitors to enter. Regardless, I think we'll see a lot of non-profits (or non-profit-adjacent, with bylaws/goals that diverge significantly from your typical vendor, like Fairphone) entering the market.

@berlinfokus I think there's an inherent tension here though: a non-profit, user-oriented phone market that internalises externalities (such as labour rights, environmental cost, etc.) wouldn't look much like the setup we have today. Phones would be designed for longevity and repair. Their manufacture would not be lucrative and would happen at a lower frequency. It's just a different definition of 'success' to that which existing manufacturers, driven by the profit motive, operate upon.

I always find it funny when getting into arguments with libertarians and they're like "The profit motive is great. See? Look at my phone" and my response is "Dude... I've written some of the code that's running on your phone, and I did it for free. It's a device built on open standards and the unpaid labour of 100,000 unpaid nerds. You are not making the argument that you think you're making".

@mitsuhiko I'd like to see Mastodon take a new take at algorithmic timelines, allowing users to decide on the algorithm they use.

"Chronological" (as now)

"Popular" (most interactions since you last refreshed)

"Catchup" (prioritises showing you the most interacted with posts from every distinct user you follow)

"Conversations" (prioritises posts with a high replies vs likes ratio)

"News" (prioritises posts with a low replies vs likes ratio)

Me, a compiler developer, watching `gen` become a reserved keyword in the next Rust edition: oh no

I'm in two minds, to be honest. New features are good and generator syntax is good, writing iterators by hand today is annoyingly finickey.

Yet, I am really sad that Rust seems to be diving head-first into the function-colouring mistakes of old though. First `?`, then `.await`, and now `yield`.

These are all the same thing, but now we have a million different incompatible concepts to account for as API designers.

The most frustrating people are those that take the very suggestion that they might have offended someone as a personal attack and turn it on to the person making the suggestion.

It occurred to me today that the social value of the open-source work I do in my free time has probably been an order of magnitude more useful to the world than everything I've ever done as a paid employee. Needing to seek a wage almost certainly makes me a less productive member of society than I would otherwise be.

Taz does not like baths, it turns out. But that's what you get when you roll in your own piss for fun... #dogsofmastodon

@aral I think AGPL is at least one step forward, yes: although I don't think it's sufficient by itself.

My dream would be a whole all-in-one ecosystem for community organising, keeping track of who has borrowed/shared what, who has which services available, all with fediverse integration. Not simply a social media network, but a digital noticeboard intended to encourage people to collaborate and share.