Notices by Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)

@giddygopher @remixtures I mean, let’s go whole hog (because it’s true): the Internet, the Web, APIs, apps, AI – they’re all fascist projects *under capitalism*.

It doesn’t mean that we couldn’t have versions of these technologies that don’t share their goals and success criteria and thus are fundamentally different in the ways that matter (ownership and control, environmental impact, etc.)

Hence our focus on Small Tech as the opposite of Big Tech and Small Web as the opposite of Big Web.

If we don’t envision and build alternatives that are funded differently, and with diametrically opposed success criteria, we’re just surrendering the future to these bastards.

And who knows, maybe we’ve already lost, but I’m going to keep trying because I really don’t know what else to do.

Oh, and if you’re using WezTerm on Golden Gate and your title bar appears fully transparent, you can get it back by adding the following to your WezTerm config:

window_background_opacity = 0.99

Solution courtesy of Todd Knutson (https://github.com/wezterm/wezterm/issues/8153#issuecomment-5699103833)

(The bug itself should be fixed in the nightly build soon. Related issue: https://github.com/wezterm/wezterm/issues/8153#issuecomment-5699103833)

#WezTerm #macOS #macOS27 #GoldenGate #terminal #bug #titleBar #transparent

So this is a niche one: If you use Moom on macOS (https://manytricks.com/moom/) and you’re on Golden Gate (yeah, I finally upgraded after skipping Tahoe and… I don’t hate it. Which is high praise considering Apple’s recent OS blunders) and you use the “Separate windows by” setting with “Apply to display edges” selected and your menu bar background is transparent and the top gutter appearing larger than the others bothers you (I told you it was niche), then you can use this workaround (courtesy of Rob Griffiths at Many Tricks, who replied to my feature request).

In terminal, to set per-edge gaps:

defaults write com.manytricks.Moom "Grid Spacing: Apply To Edges: Gaps" -string “{7,18,18,18}"

The order is top, right, bottom, left. So the above sets top to 7 and all others to 18, which is how I have it.

(Setting the top to seven leaves a gap of 18px between the top of a window and the baseline of the text on the menu bar, which, for me at least, is optically pleasing. It’s not perfect, not least of all because there doesn’t seem to be any enforced consistency in menu bar icon heights but hey, it’s good enough and definitely better than the default without the tweak. And, yes, welcome to my sad brain. Shit like this does actually bother me.)

And to delete the setting:

defaults delete com.manytricks.Moom "Grid Spacing: Apply to Edges: Gaps"

#Moom #ManyTricks #macOS #macOS27 #GoldenGate #windows #spacing #tiling

@celeduc “I’ve asked Henry Ford to donate to aid in the region.”

@dlakelan https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/117303844141737048

;)

Were Sheeran around in the 1940s, he’d be trying to build bridges between victims of the Holocaust and Nazis.

The anti-technology bias in leftist social media circles is getting too much on my nerves. AI is not destroying anything. LLMs are not stealing any content. Tools and technologies lack agency and autonomy. If there is any type of entity that is ruining the Web, that is the Corporation.

For-profit corporations are led by people who must cater to the appetites of the market at every single moment at the risk of being fired by the administration or of the company going bankrupt. Of course, even within the confines of a market society, corporations can be more or less evil. But that can never serve as an excuse for being anti-technology.

Specially because all technologies are a result of a hybridization process where markets, universities, public administrations, and users participate to a lesser or greater extent. That extent is always determined by the balance of power in a given society in each single historical moment.

Taking this into account should lead us to evaluate beforehand the intrinsic affordances provided by a new technology, as well as the risks and advantages these offer, before making any judgements about the "goodness" or "evilness" of that same technology.

Unfortunately, what mostly happens is that people try to impinge their worldviews on what a technology IS - which is absolutely non-sense, since per se all technologies lack a fixed essence - based on the prevailing uses for that same technology in a given epoch (which, again, only reflects the current balance of power in a given society), instead of what that technology COULD BE. Even worse, in other cases, people just want to have the last word about what a new technology SHOULD BE. In a very dogmatic way, this also excludes all other existing or potential alternative uses for that technology.

For me, this is just another external sign that people are still very much locked into the proprietary and scarcity mindset that is so typical of capitalism.

@remixtures Yep, it’s corporations and capitalism that are the enemy and technology would look very different were it being developed in a different social system with different criteria for success.

That’s been the defining position of Small Tech from the start (see https://small-tech.org/about/#small-technology).

We can build tech differently. We can have the all the good stuff without all the bullshit.

And it all comes to down to ownership and control. Whether that’s in the hands of a few or whether it’s part of the commons.

And you’re entirely right: the type of mindset you describe – a reactive one instead of a proactive one – is exactly what enables Silicon Valley and sociopathic tech bros to continue to dictate the narrative and determine the vector of progress and the bounds of possibility.

RE: https://floss.social/@IzzyOnDroid/117303817862146016

Nice!

And also the same in Safari and Chrom(e/ium).

#textFragments #copy #link #web #dev

@joepie91 Good call. And if you were happy with pointing to that frozen place in time (e.g., for a bug report, etc.), that’s the way to go :)

https://codeberg.org/small-tech/jsdb/src/commit/4d9c6469b7d8c3b47fd5b9516875cce5d5d661d4/lib/QuerySanitiser.js#L264

(The text fragments method is more for documentation, etc., where you’d want to point to the latest version at any given time.)

Little tip when linking to source code in your docs, etc.

You can link directly to lines using anchors if the web view of your source control system supports it. e.g., for Codeberg:

https://codeberg.org/small-tech/jsdb/src/branch/main/lib/QuerySanitiser.js#L264

However, that’s brittle and will break as you add/remove code above it.

A more robust way is to use text fragments, which are newly available across major browsers¹. e.g.,

https://codeberg.org/small-tech/jsdb/src/branch/main/lib/QuerySanitiser.js#:~:text=static%20sanitiseAndExecuteQueryOnData

The latter links to the same place and will also break if, say, you remove the method or rename it, but it will survive code changes in the rest of the file.

#dev #tip #git #codeberg #textFragments #URLs #linking #code #sourceControl

¹ https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_a_text_fragments

Quoting a billionaire on social issues is like quoting a malignant tumour on cancer.

@magsamond Signed. Thanks for the heads up :)

@SMillerNL Congrats :)

“Irish singer-songwriter Aaron Rowe has said the members of the Ireland men’s international football squad who play against Israel ‘will be remembered’ for their actions.”

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/you-will-be-remembered-singer-songwriter-aaron-rowe-sends-message-to-irish-footballers-ahead-of-israel-fixtures/a/161661780.html

We’re about to find out who the Ed Sheerans of football are.

#israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #settlerColonialism #edSheeran #foorball #Ireland #Gaza #Palestine #StopIsrael #StopTheGenocide #BDS #FreePalestine

@angiebaby @skinnylatte Yep.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@skinnylatte/117292076738613718

Baron Watson of Wyre Forest joining Palantir, you say?

To think, this cunt was fashioning himself as a defender of human rights in technology.

@randahl @vees International criminal trials with whose army?

when i was in the uk last year a british publication asked if they could publish a speech i gave. i agreed.

when i looked onto their site, they added a little note below it saying that “Erik Uden and I have political differences on the trans question.”

i, right then and there, realized what it feels like for foreign activists to publish something in a german newspaper.

You might be seeing in “news outlets” that Robert Kraft will be donating to Gaza.

It’s what we used to call “a lie”.

Not sure what the cool kids call it today.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Macklemore/s/nQAsFAhFHO

#israel #edSheeran #robertKraft #genocide #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #settlerColonialism #Macklemore #Gaza #Palestine #StopIsrael #StopTheGenocide #BDS #FreePalestine