Notices by Isaac Lyman (isaaclyman@toot.cafe)

Happy #50forFOSS day.

This time around I donated to GIMP, an image editing tool I've used since high school. It's a fantastic piece of software, and even though I don't work in design or photography, I've used it more times than I can count—converting and resizing images, creating visual aids, making memes, it does everything.

Big shoutout to @GIMP for being my go-to for well over a decade.

https://50forFOSS.org

#opensource #freesoftware

Vegan egg substitutes should be having a moment right now. It should be wall-to-wall Just Egg ads on the TV. If chicken egg prices go up just a little bit more, it will literally be cheaper to go vegan.

Why are they being so chill about it? If I were in the marketing department for any vegan brand I would be screaming myself hoarse on street corners

#vegan

@mhoye @mekkaokereke
I can vouch for a multi-day cold ferment, it makes an incredible dough. But, one dad to another, you can get 75% of the payoff in about an hour if you have a bottle of Grolsch handy: https://recipes.isaaclyman.com/recipes/1-hour-beer-pizza

I am once again calling for a public university to develop an open-source, publicly-accessible internet search index.

Search is a public good.

#opensource

Building, hosting, and maintaining a performant search index is expensive. We likely will not ever see a nonprofit come up with the resources to do this. But the internet is an indispensable pillar of infrastructure, and is extraordinarily difficult to use without search.

Economically speaking, the right solution is to treat search as a public good and pay for it with our taxes.

#opensource

To be clear, I’m calling for an open source *index*, not another search engine.

Practically all search engines (whether for-profit or nonprofit) are renting results from Google and/or Microsoft. The indexes maintained by both companies are driven by anti-consumer motives.

If there were a stable, financially independent index available to the public, we’d have our choice of for-profit, nonprofit, and FOSS engines built on top of it.

#opensource

I’m excited to hear that opensearchfoundation.org is working on this exact problem, though they’re focusing their efforts on Europe exclusively. Worth a read of their website; they’re funded by a grant from the EU and are technologically competent. They’ve crawled 2 billion URLs so far and are well on their way to a 2025 delivery date.

My guess is the index files will go somewhat viral and OSF-based search will be available in North America as well.

https://openwebsearch.eu/the-project/

#opensource

The university that does this will have an unending treasure trove of capstone and thesis projects for students in technical majors. Search is a thousand hard CS/DS/IT problems and cat-and-mouse games combined into one. Is it enough to justify the cost? No. But with a subsidy, it certainly wouldn’t be a chore.

#opensource

@KevinMarks @mekkaokereke The sudden popularity of cargo e-bikes in my neighborhood (lots of families with young kids) has been surprising. We got one for fun and exercise, but now we can hardly convince the kids to get in the car for anything. They want to ride on back of the e-bike.

That’s okay though. I did the math. Mile for mile, e-bike is cheaper by far.

@mhoye @anthrocypher Code has no inherent value. Text has no inherent value. Digital paintings have no inherent value. Maybe some of us thought they did, once. An avalanche of form without substance is one hell of a way to correct us.