Notices by alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)

Addendum to something I tooted recently...

What do I call speech-synthesized ebooks? ebooks!

Any ebook can be speech-synthesized, so we shouldn't use a special term for them!

We should reserve the term "audiobook" for when a human is giving a proper performance!

(Incidentally there's a fuzzy line between audiobooks & my favorite medium of audioshows...)

I'm wondering whether @gerrymcgovern is getting a bit too cynical. He's been ranting against renewables on his blog.

And while I agree that they're not the entire solution (we need to be more radicle!), I am convinced that they're part of it. I'm not seeing it acknowledged that with renewables (apart from nuclear), the mining is no longer a consumable.
It gets to me when he off-handedly vilifies heatpumps at the same time!

@TechConnectify has pushed back on this narrative, & I agree with him.

A modern theme for cgit - Inane Observation:
https://yingtongli.me/blog/2025/05/16/cgit.html

Personally I prefer the old theme (my webdesign taste is to rely primarily on typography!), but I appreciate not everyone agrees. That's beautiful!

@fluffy If it helps: The default Anubis configs only challenges user agents that claim to be "like Mozilla".

Feedreaders will be fine!

O.K. I feel ready to delete my filter on "AI" chatter, please don't abuse it!

My position:
1. I despise the notions that "we'll be left behind" if we don't engage with AI, or that its wrong to get in the way of its technological progress. I believe these notions are actively harmful!

2. My understanding is that it barely even qualifies as new tech, from a compsci perspective.

3. I suspect I can blame my recent sys-admin difficulties on AI companies' crawlers... Others can!

Inspired by Erlang I've pondered the notion of building an OS which could be updated in place, without requiring anything to be restarted! That is once an update is downloaded, you're already using it!

If we're imagining rewriting all the software anyways...

The main requirements would be to split the OS into short-running programs that can be individually updated, & a culture of resilience in the face of unexpected errors from upgrades.

Networking code already needs that resilience...

I must remark: GRUB's a veritable computing museum!

A showcase of low-level code for a wide swath of machines from the 1990s (or earlier?) to the present!

Its a lot of code, but I'm enjoying reading through it all!

Why care about the no-JS experience? - Go Make Things:
https://gomakethings.com/why-care-about-the-no-js-experience/

@silverwizard They do have a good adversarial relationship, & they know it!

@silverwizard Yes, it was!

Black Jack Justice s4 was a fun one!

In e1 "A Midsummer's Night Noir" a woman heard her name used as a codename in a B-movie which had a mcguffin resembling something at her work. So she stole it & took it to a hotel like happened in the movie. A bunch of other ladies recognized what happened when they read of the robbery & tried being amateur detectives, just to get handcuffed & tied to furniture in that hotel room. Jack Justice had to rescue his actual lady detective, to her chagrin.

1/2!

CSS Naked Day 2025 - Eric Meyer:
https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2025/04/09/css-naked-day-2025/

@lanodan Wow, I'm surprised how straightforward that code is!

My upcoming threads:

On my Ink&Switch schedule (relating their writeups chronologically to my hardware-communicator hypothetical)... Tomorrow: schema versioning "Cambrian", next: exchanging crypto keys "BackChannel", then: richtext "PeriText", later: drawing dynamic models "CrossCut".

On my Linux From Scratch schedule.... Next couple days: Finish Groff (getting close), to be followed up with GRUB.

Between which I'll finish studying LibShumate, followed up with emulators for game consoles!

Talking of which... What's your favourite NES/Famicom emulator?

Which one should I study?

If I don't get an answer, I'll study the one @Le_bottin_des_jeux_linux recently promoted...

I recall reading Ian Hixie (major WHATWG editor) expressing a loss of faith in the web's vision & pushing to move everything into WebASM.

I haven't lost that faith but... Yes, please!

I don't like the web as an app platform, let alone The cross-platform platform. I like the web as a library, as The library!
A split could do it some good... Not that I can bring myself to care about the app-web...

The candid naivety of geeks - Ploum:
https://ploum.net/2025-03-28-geeks-naivety.html

I take it he doesn't us geeks, I don't see too much of this in my circles.

@irrlicht @wolf480pl @lanodan Btw: I'm aware of a fair few solid efforts like mine for when you don't demand JS support.

My perception is that things get exponentially harder with even higher expectations for compatibility when you do implement JS. I wish client-side scripting never became a part of the web!

Yet there's disagreement over whether these efforts count.

I've offered to speak on my hardware-browser hypothetical at Limits2025, it seemed like the sort of thing they were asking for. But we'll see if its accepted, I'll attend regardless!

https://computingwithinlimits.org/2025/

Btw I needed to give this hypothetical a proper noun to apply (I've been using pronouns to avoid the need to name it, & to emphasize that its not real), so guess which one I picked?

@smallcircles Hint: I've got a naming convention...