Notices by Fabio Manganiello (blacklight@social.platypush.tech), page 2

All companies in 2023 be like "we'll start charging for every time the user unlocks their screen; we'll make a premium plan just to allow you to refresh your feed more than twice a day; we'll force developers to pay $1000's a month for an API that so far they could use for free; we'll drop all of our open-source licenses and abandon all of our open efforts; we'll kill all of the alternative clients without notice (after insulting as freeriders developers and moderators who have put in a lot of unpaid work); we'll ban you if we notice that you don't use our official client; we'll come up with more ways to bypass your ad-blockers; we'll expand the network of data brokers, advertisers and gossipers we share your data with, and share a generic "updated T&Cs" email with you that you can't refuse; we'll shovel more ads down your throat, while treating the usage of any tool that protects your privacy as a crime akin to piracy; we'll make an effort to change the Internet protocols themselves to account for surveillance patterns; and we'll make it impossible for you to copy your data out of our platform".

Enshittification, removal of features that people want and addition of features nobody asked have become the bedrock of how our industry works nowadays.

Then, when backlash, boycotts and a rush for alternatives obviously follow, these failures of our industry rush to put together ridiculous statements like these ("we have heard you, we work closely with our partners and customers to find the best solution, we care about our customers, bla bla").

No, you don't.

If you really cared about your customers, if you proactively listened to us, if you genuinely loved the product you build, you wouldn't be in this state.

The only thing that announcements like these say is "we are so deaf to our customers that we didn't even expect so many of them to go so mad; we spent too much time in meeting rooms listening to our own farts and those of our investors rather than getting in touch with those who use our product; we expected to be so big that people would have had no choice but to follow us, and the only reason why we are apologizing now is that we didn't know that there were so many open and free alternatives around comparable or better than our product that would threaten our existence at our first mistake".

You failed at listening to your customers, you overestimated your size and impact, you underestimated the free alternatives to your product, and you failed to predict the scale of the backlash - in other words, you failed at running a business that creates products and services.

When companies end up in this state, the damage is done. No further announcements can undo it. Everybody understands that these enshittified companies are desperate for money, and you can NEVER trust a business that is so desperate for money that it stops caring about its customers.

The unhealthy and unsustainable form of capitalism that has fueled the growth of our industry for years is dying. But, before it dies, it's trying to take everybody down with it. It's time for whoever said that this economic model is the most efficient way to create products and services aligned with the needs of the customers to publicly acknowledge their macroscopic failure.

The publicly funded IT industry gave us C, UNIX, the TCP/IP, the Web, and all the foundations we've built our things on.

The VC-funded IT industry only gave us a bunch of companies with unsustainable growth trajectories, unethical business models, pathologic short-termism, the future of technology being decided at quarterly earning calls, literally zero innovation besides the "cult of user engagement", literally zero business models besides "scoop up and resell as much personal data as possible", and a complete deafness towards the customers.

#Unity

https://twitter.com/unity/status/1703547752205218265?ref_src=twsrc%5etfw

$46.4B of fossil fuel subsudies in the Netherlands alone - mostly in the form of tax breaks and direct government investment.

Think of how many amazing green projects you could start with all that money.

$46.4B is >4% of the Dutch GDP. It's comparable to what we spend in education.

I hope that these folks are already thinking of what to tell their children or grandchildren when they'll ask "what did you do to prevent the climate crisis that threatened our survival?"

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2023/09/fossil-fuel-benefits-boost-industry-by-up-to-e46-billion/

It's #introduction time!

- 🇮🇹 geek in his mid-thirties, based in 🇳🇱

- 🎓 M.Sc in computer engineering.

- My current job is about fixing and automating global supply chains, one line of code at the time, but I have worked in a wide range of industries over the past (nearly) two decades.

- My hobbies often involve automating everything around me.

- :linux: #Linux user since 2001. My experience as a Linux admin started back in a time when I used run my IRC and Apache servers on a repurposed Pentium 1 under my bed, and it still took about 10 💾 to install a full Slackware system.

- :arch: #Arch Linux and rolling release enthusiast.

- 🛠 Creator and main developer of #Platypush (https://platypush.tech), an open-source (mainly :python: and :vue:), general-purpose platform/framework to automate everything - from smart devices, to cloud services, to robots, to DevOps operations, to everything in between. With hundreds of available integrations, you can think of it as IFTTT+Tasker+SmartThings on steroids, scriptable, and runnable on almost any device. Or maybe like HomeAssistant's lighter brother.

- Admin of https://social.platypush.tech, a Mastodon instance where I may talk a lot about Platypush, automation, programming, electronics and maths. I tend to write a lot, so if you're looking for an instance with a 10,000 characters per toot limit...

- Looking for relays with instances dedicated to similar topics. My dream would be to build an experience, when it comes to #Fediverse #relays, that is akin to curated #OPML lists, where admins can create curated federated experiences for the users on their platforms, rather than the open-to-everything overwhelming stream of toots on the federated timeline that most of the relays provide nowadays.

- 🤖 Machine-learning enthusiast. I have published a book on it https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6821-6, with simple computer vision exercises that can be run on a #RaspberryPi, and I did some academic research back in time where neural networks were still a green field https://fabiomanganiello.com/#research, and I never stop learning new stuff.

- 🧪️ Physics, chemistry, biology, maths and astronomy enthusiast.

- 🎵 Music addict, 🎸and 🎹 player, and occasional composer/producer You can find some of my music here https://open.spotify.com/artist/5H6BJfHec8qLnkm0S2HkxO and here https://soundcloud.com/blacklight01

- I may often write about random politics/economics/philosophy. I may sometimes be very passionate on topics such as open-source, open data, open protocols, tolerance and social inequalities. I mostly belong to the progressive/social-democratic field. You are welcome to try and change my mind, as long as you do it in a civilized and data-driven way.

- 🏄 and 🛹️ rider. And, as a good Dutch resident, 🚲 enthusiast.

- 👪 Full-time father.

@jose these are the ones my instance is currently subscribed to:

https://mastodon-relay.moew.science/inbox
https://relay.social.tigwali.fr/inbox
https://mastodon-relay.thedoodleproject.net/inbox

I'm eventually planning to run my own, but so far documentation on configuring and running relays is quite scarce.

@pernia is it fair to raise the price of milk for everyone just because a couple of weird folks like to buy all the supplies at the mall so they can bath in it every day?

In other words, is it fair to increase the price of something for everyone when you can easily cut the excesses and keep the prices fair?

Texas' government just spent $31.7M in the middle of a heat wave and energy shortage.

No, not to provide fresh shelter to the homeless. Neither to install booths with free fresh water. Neither to increase the number of public spaces (outside of shopping malls) where people can gather, instead of burning energy to keep their homes cool 24/7. Neither to boost its investments in renewables and pivot away from the oil that it keeps digging.

No, the government just gave that money away to Bitcoin miners to convince them to turn off their energy-hungry machines, so everybody else can also use energy to keep themselves cool.

Let that sink in. Even a life-threatening heatwave can't get miners to behave cooperatively and turn off their machines, whose only purpose is as pointless as randomly guessing a number whose SHA256 hash satisfies a certain arbitrary numeric constraint - and they skim some profits out of these pointless puzzles just because someone decided that putting up a system with such perverse financial incentives was a good idea. In order to get them to behave as someone who's not a complete selfish sociopath and evolutionary failure, the government had to compensate them for the losses that they would make by turning off their computers.

I guess that today's capitalism is that system where it's actually ok for the government to spend public money - as long as that money goes to those who need it the least.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-cryptocurrency-riot-texas-power-grid/

London 2016: "We want to exit the European Union without exiting the European common market"

London 2023: "We want to break encryption without really breaking encryption"

The British ruling class is either incompetent of dishonest. There's really no other explanation behind such a degree of State-sponsored imbecility.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/08/10/1453223/uk-defends-plan-to-demand-access-to-encrypted-messages-to-protect-children

@cybeej @Natanox @lorq good point there.

I've looked at some of the Assembly code that was written at NASA in the 1960s and 1970s (the one for the Apollo programs was also open-sourced a while ago).

I was impressed by how "embedded" it was, with literally zero room for abstractions. The code was tightly coupled to the hardware. Each single bit was crafted and optimized for its specific purpose on that specific hardware.

You can do amazing things once you remove all the abstractions. You can get very creative on how to optimize resources if you know that your code will only run on one specific piece of hardware, for a very specific purpose.

Let's not forget that until at least the early 1980s most of the computers didn't even agree on the "word size", and even on the byte as the minimum quantity of addressable information.

As we started seeking for compatibility, more general-purpose hardware and software, lower entry barriers for coding etc., we started introducing abstractions.

Those abstractions came with many advantages - namely lower barriers for coders and greater portability. Also, decoupling software from hardware meant that you no longer have to be a electronic engineer (or an engineer who deeply understands the architecture the software is running on) in order to code. But I also feel like there's an inflection point, and once we pass it those advantages start to fade.

It's obvious why a compiler that can digest the same piece of C/C++ code and produce an exe on different architectures is a useful abstraction. Same goes for a virtual machine that can run the code on any architecture without recompiling it from scratch.

But when building a basic website ends up creating a node_modules folder of 200 MB, requires the developer to be familiar with npm/yarn/gulp pipelines, transpiling etc., and maybe also with deploying their code to a Kubernetes cluster running on somebody's private cloud, I wonder if we've already passed that inflection point.

@Natanox @lorq @cybeej yes, this one 👆

The UNIX philosophy was born in the AT&T Bell labs in the first half of the 1970s - another example of good symbiosis between public funding and clever engineering that I often mention, probably on par with the Apollo and Voyager programs.

Founding fathers of our industry like Thompson, Kernighan and Ritchie were behind it, and they had the right level of "eagle view" on what they wanted achieve on a system level to be able to break it down into smaller and reusable components that communicated over simple messages (pipes and signals), and where everything was a file descriptor, so everything could leverage the same abstraction.

It's the textbook example of a good abstraction to me. It introduced something on top of the "bare metal", but it was lightweight enough to be conceptually easy to grasp, and easy to extend. And you could pick whichever component you needed, without being an all-or-none selection of a framework.

Do-it-all monolithic frameworks with dozens of abstractions like Spring, Django, React, Symfony or Blazor are exactly on the opposite side of the spectrum compared to the UNIX philosophy.

The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth (like someone did a couple of days ago).

And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.

50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, with only 69 KB of RAM, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use, while nowadays 4 GB of RAM aren't even enough to start VsCode or IntelliJ.

The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels or Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.

Have you folks tried #elk? I must say that I'm quite impressed from what I'm seeing so far, even though it's still in alpha stage.

Its PWA could become my daily driver for the Fediverse once it starts adding more features - the keyboard shortcuts are already a big plus that not many clients implement.

For those interested, I'm running a test instance at https://elk.platypush.tech.

For me this is the last nail in the coffin for #Go.

I've never bought much into the language. I've been impressed by its constructs to natively manage and synchronize asynchronous operations, but its rigidity when it comes to programming paradigms (no proper object-oriented and functional constructs in the 21st century, seriously?) means that I see it as a language that seriously limits expressivity, and doomed to generate a lot of boilerplate. It's a language very good at solving the types of problem that are usually solved at Google (build and scale large services that process a lot of stuff in a way that the code looks the same for all the employees), and little more than that.

After #Rust really took off, I didn't see a single reason why someone would pick Go.

And now here we go with the last straw: Google has proposed to embed telemetry collection *into the language toolchain itself*. And, according to Google, it should be enabled by default (opt-out rather than opt-in), because, of course, if they make it an opt-in then not many people will explicitly enable a toggle that shares their source code and their usage of the compiler with one of today's biggest stalkers.

Not only, but Google went a bit further: "I believe that open-source software projects need to explore new telemetry designs that help developers get the information they need to work efficiently and effectively, without collecting invasive traces of detailed user activity".

No. Open-source doesn't need telemetry. Telemetry introduces brittle dependencies on external systems with no functional net gain, and that's at odds with the whole idea of building and running things on your own.

Open-source software has already a very well-established way of collecting feedback: open an issue on the project, and if you want to change something submit a PR. You don't need remote probes whose purpose is to funnel data back home. Even when done with the best intentions, that breaches the trust between the developer and the user - because data gets scooped out, and the systems that store and use that data aren't open. But, of course, if you've only used hammers in your life then the whole world will look like nails.

This could even backfire for Google. There are many applications out there where secrecy (and minimizing the amount of data that leaks outside of the network) is a strong requirement. These applications may start considering alternatives to a language that enables telemetry data back to an external private company by default.

If you build open-source projects in Go, it's time to drop it and start considering alternatives. The market for modern compiled language is much more competitive now than it was a decade ago. Many of us knew already that we couldn't trust a programming language developed by the largest surveillance company on the planet.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/10/googles_go_programming_language_telemetry_debate/

I haven't had much time to invest in big hardware projects lately, but this guy is seriously inviting me to reconsider my time budget.

I built a #drone from scratch a while ago, running on a RPi + PWM controller, and Platypush to manage the communication bus.

It has lifted from the floor by 2 meters at most in all of its career. In the process of learning how to make it fly, it destroyed ~10 plastic propellers and damaged two pieces of furniture in my house.

That's because building a real-time control loop that keeps a device as aerodynamic as a brick hovering in the air is not easy. Even if you get all the physics right, the slightest unbalance in the propeller's thrust, or the slightest tenth-of-second-magnitude delay in the control loop line, will make the difference between a nice flying machine and an uncontrollable brick with killer blades ready to smash on the ground.

But what if it hadn't to be like that? What if you build a drone that is both aerodynamic and disturbance-tolerant by design?

This guy definitely got this right. He built a drone with three propellers placed at 120 degrees from each other. The drone's shape is aerodynamic, the weight is carefully balanced, and even if 2/3 propellers are off the drone can still hover - it will spin a lot, but its y rotation axis won't change.

If the drone's mechanics and aerodynamics are carefully designed, and the drone tends to inertially retain its hovering state, then we can easily relax some other constraints. We don't need complex real-time control loop logic on dedicated (often expensive) flight controllers, a tenth-of-a-second delay won't make the drone crash, and even a Python script on a RPi can handle that.

And we can actually save A LOT on battery consumption, since a lot of the energy from the battery actually goes in keeping a brick hovering instead of actually moving it. That translates either in smaller battery requirements, or much longer flight times.

It looks like I'll have a nice outdoor project to work on this spring.

https://hackaday.com/2022/11/09/clever-control-loop-makes-this-spinning-drone-fault-tolerant/

The only question I have after a shallow read of the #ATProtocol (the "specs" behind #Bluesky) is: why?

Why an entirely different protocol? Why not just an extension on top of #ActivityPub?

They wanted a bit more centralized control on top of a decentralized network - not a bunch of geeks running their own servers in the bedroom, but a "marketplace of companies", whatever that means, in charge of distribution and moderation? Fair enough, they are businesses that needs to make money after all.

But then why didn't they go for an extension that simply supports self-certifying data (signed using whatever centralized chain of certificates they want) on top of ActivityPub? The Fediverse and Twitter (or whatever they are going to call whatever they're trying to build now) could have immediately tapped into one another. They could have simply shown posts not certified by their chain as "unauthenticated", and we would have had almost 100% compatibility from day one.

Why a whole new protocol? Why build a new ActivityPub that does the same things as ActivityPub, but just with a layer of self-certification on top? Why call things differently and break compatibility, instead of extending the open standards?

It takes time and resources to build a new protocol, validate it, get developers to adopt it and build stuff on top of it, and add yet more layers of bridges and mappers to/from what exists already. And yes, I know that the alternative approach that I am promoting is exactly that "embrace+extend" that we all know how it ends up. And I'm also aware that are valid arguments to keep the streams separate. But I'm not sure if the best alternative is to let the rest of the world build their own brand of our open protocols (R&D these two balls: these guys are simply repackaging a decade of work on open standards and they are trying to profit from it), while we either keep digging our niches or play a catch-up game with bridges and mappers to the outside world.

https://atproto.com/docs

You don't need to stick to #Spotify, #Tidal or any other #music cloud just to get new music suggestions and new releases delivered to your doorstep.

Spotify's discover weekly and release radar playlists are definitely a useful feature for those who want to discover new music, but replicating such features isn't rocket science.

In this article I show how to generate your own discover weekly and release radar playlists (as well as keep a local record of your listening history) using #Platypush, #RSS feeds, the last.fm APIs, some #Python scripting and a pinch of SQL.

https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Automate-your-music-collection

My #Matrix server at matrix.platypush.tech is now stable enough to be used for day-to-day activities, and I'm proud to open it up to a wider audience.

The official #Platypush channel (#platypush:matrix.platypush.tech) is open to anyone who wants to talk about self-hosted automation - it now includes a bi-directional IRC bridge to #platypush:irc.platypush.tech.

On top of that, I have added a bunch of integrations and bridges, so now you can use it as your main driver and drop other messaging apps - or, at least, that's what I've done for a a couple of months by now, and I don't feel like I'm missing Messenger or Whatsapp on my phone.

Available bridges (typing `login` on them is usually sufficient to set up a messaging bridge):

- Facebook Messenger: @facebookbot:matrix.platypush.tech

- Whatsapp: @whatsappbot:matrix.platypush.tech

- Instagram: @instagrambot:matrix.platypush.tech

- LinkedIn: @linkedinbot:matrix.platypush.tech

- Twitter: @twitterbot:matrix.platypush.tech

- Telegram: @telegrambot:matrix.platypush.tech

- Signal: @signalbot:matrix.platypush.tech

- Google Chat/Hangouts: @googlechatbot:matrix.platypush.tech

After setting everything up, I have removed all those apps from my devices, and yet I'm still able to communicate with all of my contacts. If this isn't a compelling case for joining the Matrix, I'm not sure of what can make a compelling case :)

This isn't something completely new btw. I have been using for years a self-hosted #Bitlbee instance with several bridges that could get me all the messaging apps bridged to IRC. But IRC is notoriously a not very mobile-friendly protocol, even sending images or other media can be a pain in the ass, not to mention incompatibility issues among different clients. Matrix solved all these issues, and I don't think I'm going to look back.

Software #keyboards

I have successfully removed #BigTech and trackers from every corner of my digital life with one exception: Android keyboards.

I have been an enthusiastic user of SwiftKey long before Microsoft purchased it. To this date, I couldn't find any real alternatives. I have tried basically all the keyboard apps in F-Droid, and I say that all of them, with no exception, are way too primitive compared to the experience in used to.

What I need:

- Multi-language support. As someone who regularly types in English, Italian and Dutch (often mixing up words in different language in the same text), I don't want an app where I have to manually toggle the language whenever I need another language.

- Auto-correction, or at least suggestions, and support for custom words. It shouldn't be that hard to download a dictionary locally, finding if a typed word isn't on the list, suggest the word(s) with the nearest Levenshtein distance, and supporting addition of custom words to that dictionary.

- Memorization/prediction of commonly typed sentences (either locally or synchronized over Syncthing/Nextcloud) throw simple Markov models.

It doesn't sound like rocket science to implement, nor something that needs to be privacy-compromising. So why none of the open-source keyboards I know support these features? Shall I invest some time in a PR to one of them if there's really nothing like this out there?

#email #self_hosted

I was about to write an article on the surreal experience of hosting your own mail server in 2022, but this guy has already written all the things that I wanted to write.

I find it surreal that email is one of the oldest protocols on the Internet, one of the most openly documented, and yet a very small group of actors (with Google and Microsoft on the front line) have managed to make it impossible to self-host. I've also bounced through a lot of the holes mentioned by the author of the article, and I've also got the same impression: everything in the world of email services is designed to only benefit a small subset of actors and discard emails from anybody else. Spam checks are very robust and effective nowadays, but why bother to run them when you can just blacklist the whole IP subnet of a VPS provider with no explanation, and make sure that your friends in your illegal cartel do the same?

My current solution is to use ProtonMail with my own domains linked to it, run the bridge on my VPS, tunnel the IMAP and SMTP ports over SSH on my VPN, and use that as my private mail server. But it's a workaround, and I'm not entirely happy with it. I wish I could just run my Postfix server to manage my domains and send emails like it's 2005. Unfortunately, that's not possible: if you want to use email today either you pay someone for the service, or you accept that your private communications are stored on Google's or Microsoft's servers. Even if you have the skills to run your own server, you no longer have that choice. And it's time for @FRA to break this mafia.

https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html

Yes please!

There's no point of boasting green credentials when we allow #bigtech to force users into buying a new phone or tablet every 1-2 years.

Planned obsolescence is the negation of sustainability. Devices that are hard to repair should never ever touch the European soil again.

Tossing away a device made of metals, glass, silicon and rare earths and buy a new one just because the producer won't provide us with spare parts (or even allow us to remove the back cover) is immoral on so many levels. And it doesn't benefit anyone except the profits of the producer (so much for the myth of capitalist profits aligned with the majority's interests and priorities).

Make devices that can easily be repaired, provide repair instruction and spare parts, or don't even sell your shit on my continent.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/09/02/2119252/eu-wants-smartphones-tablets-to-be-repairable-for-at-least-5-years?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

@koherecoWatchdog this is a trade-off that I'm very happy to discuss.

I've thought of dropping DDG (and maybe Brave) results entirely. I'm a big fan of Mojeek, but there's a trade-off between privacy purism and relevance of the results that I'm still trying to strike here.

As an example: a search of my name on Mojeek won't return any links to my content on LinkedIn, Medium, or CF-powered websites like Hackernoon, dev.to, IoT4All, BetterProgramming. Nor any links to my books (because they are sold on the likes of Amazon, eBay, ebooks.com or springer.com), nor any links to my music (because, outside of Bandcamp, it's on the likes of Spotify, Tidal etc.), nor any links to my past talks (because they are mostly on YouTube).

Yes, it reports the links to my self-hosted websites and my apps on F-Droid, but those are only a small fraction on the content about me on the web. And the same considerations that apply to searching my name apply to any other search that a user may want to perform. Even the most privacy-aware user wouldn't want to use a search engine that shows to them only a fraction of the web. It should probably be their choice if they want to click on a result hosted on Amazon or Medium. The search engine can ensure that their privacy is protected and that it doesn't collect any private data about users (or that could associate users to queries), but IMHO it shouldn't omit results that may be relevant for what the user actually needs to do.

If users can't find what they're looking for, they'll just fall back on another search engine, which defeats the whole purpose of running an alternative engine. And, if users fall back on another search engine too often, they'll eventually just stop using yours - a point that @thelinuxEXP made quite well in a recent video.