Notices by Daphne Preston-Kendal (dpk@chaos.social)

I’ll take ‘unexpected turns taken by Wikipedia articles’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_tunnel#Obstacles

I once heard an astrophysicist on Radio 4 opine that if alien species did exist and had interstellar travel, like in science fiction, then Earth would be famous throughout the galaxy for its solar eclipses; beings would come as tourists to Earth to behold this marvellous cosmic coincidence: a single moon which is exactly the right size in the sky to cover the solar system’s sun, leaving just a tiny ring of light while all around, the sky goes dark

@aral By the way, if you do want to leave the membership of Codeberg e.V., the place to do that is not here, but in a clear, unambiguous email to codeberg@codeberg.org.

@aral @Codeberg You were warned concerning your membership of the association, not your ability to use the site. Linux-is-Best is not a member of the association, they just have an account on the site. They were informed of the action we took in removing their content and the reason for it.

@aral @Codeberg We could not accept the situation where you claimed you had got the moderation team to remove content by public shaming, while as an association member you have other options to raise the issue within the membership, even besides the usual moderation report channels which are open to everyone (and which you cannot deny that you knew of, since you linked to an issue thread explicitly pointing to them). Unfortunately this lesson seems to be hard for you to learn.

really makes u think

many such cases

RE: https://mastodon.online/@mullvadnet/116957571811403553

When one of the owners of the German restaurant chain Hans im Glück was revealed to have been at a meeting of right-wing extremists discussing how to deport all migrants from Germany, he sold all of his shares in the company (likely under pressure from his co-owners)

Just a point of comparison

can’t believe I am on rms’s side re emacs patch acceptance policy https://xlii.space/eng/honesty-gets-emacs-patch-rejected/

Detecting when you’re looking at slop is both

1. a vital media literacy skill in 2026

2. completely impossible and slowly drives you insane to the point of inevitably making false accusations

This is a perfectly fine thing to be expecting of reasonable, intelligent people and doesn’t at all forebode a general crisis of trust in society

Everyone talks about not having senior devs in the future because we’re replacing the juniors with LLMs, but nobody’s talking about losing senior devs now because people who are competent and care about the quality of their work are leaving this LLM-infested hellscape of a career path to go into carpentry, hostelry, or subsistence farming

Did you know that more or less every strap-on dildo fits every strap-on harness?

I’ve often thought this says a lot about the priorities of humanity and people who create standards.

Next time you encounter two things that should be able to connect together but can’t because of incompatible connectors, think, ‘well, this is obviously of less importance to an engineer than getting pegged’.

Scheme projects it would be really useful for someone to work on – a thread (likely to be occasionally extended)!

I was once mildly mocked by someone in an online chat because I use https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/. The criticism was that this ‘simple window manager feature’ costs $5.

I would like to sit that person down in front of a Linux box and ask them to get themselves this feature there. I will inform them, xkcd 951-style, when the amount of time they spent on it vs paying $5 for an app to do it means they are working for less than minimum wage.

And sure, maybe the point was that if standard window managers did support it, it would be gratis.

But the fact is they don’t. This is a pretty niche feature request, bringing back behaviour that was roundly mocked in the original Mac OS where it comes from. (e.g. Joel Spolsky https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-design-for-programmers/#:~:text=Sit%20down%20at%20a%20Macintosh – Front and Center at least fixes the bug where clicking a window brought its application forward, but not the window itself)

This behaviour is weird enough that Apple *completely* dropped it with Mac OS X, not even providing an option for the old way, despite a significant user base that was used to it.

If there’s anything weird here, it’s that the market for this feature is even large enough that selling it for $5 is even a vaguely viable business model. By the time it came out in 2020, the functionality had been gone for nearly 20 years already.

So it’s an obscure feature that probably very few people want. My options:

1. spend the time to implement it myself
2. file a bug an hope somebody thinks it worth their time; wait in the meanwhile, and expect that someone will probably close it as ‘not planned’ because it’s so weird
3. live without it
4. pay someone to develop it for me

When the cost is only $5, I’ll take number 4 thanks

The tendency is to assume that software freedom is meaningful in the sense that you can actually do anything you want with your computer, when the reality is more like you *could* do anything with it – if you had the time, the skill, and the inclination

(This is connected to why I think taking Unix and C as the basis of our free OSes has actually been counterproductive to users’ ability to meaningfully make use of software freedom)

We are much more excited by the idea of creating an ecosystem of forges (and different forge software) than in becoming the new one place where absolutely everything is hosted.

I am, for example, very pleased that even while switching to Forgejo, Fedora decided to keep on self-hosting rather than jumping to us.

To be clear, we’re open for everyone who needs us, especially individuals working on their own smaller projects. But other forges are our friends, not our competition

Forge federation is something we’re actively pushing for because of this. Full federation support is still a few years ahead of us, probably, but you can already set up your own forge in a way that minimizes inconvenience to users by using Codeberg as a single sign-on provider for a self-hosted forge.

https://git.madhouse-project.org/, which hosts the Iocaine project, is a great example of this. If you set up Codeberg as SSO for your own site, almost all of our content rules are irrelevant to you.