Stephen LB @[email protected]

If there's one thing I could change about open-source culture (or maybe specifically JavaScript OSS culture), it's the prevalence of constant breaking changes. I understand that it reduces the maintainer's burden, but it pushes complexity downstream, and some of those downstream dependents are _themselves_ OSS maintainers. It just causes churn and chaos for the whole ecosystem.

And don't even get me started on data density.
You could fit so much data on a 1024x768 screen back in the day. Nowadays, with 2x higher resolution, you can't fit even half of the data, because everything has a larger font and 3em of padding.

Remember the GUIs of late 90s and 2000s? They had options, submenus, checkboxes. Lots of them. Maybe they weren't as flexible and versatile as some command line tools like FFmpeg, or xorriso, but they definitely did give users a lot to choose from, and they encouraged exploration.

Today's GUIs claim to have a better UX, but they're significantly dumbed down. They assume what the user wants, and discourage any sort of learning.

Is this what the next generation of hackers will grow up with?

Today in The Bookseller - the UK's trade magazine for the bookselling industry - I published "Inaudible," in which I unpack my reason for foregoing hundreds of thousands of dollars by refusing to allow Audible to put DRM on my audiobooks.

https://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/inaudible-1218859

1/

We are hopeful that the future of Tor will be free from DoS. We are looking for the resources and connections to make it happen. (8/8)
Read more on our blog post: https://blog.torproject.org/stop-the-onion-denial

Look, I get it: it's cool to have "open-source" on your project website, so you can't stop yourself from using it even if the project is not, in fact, open-source.

But that's just a (more or less) intentional attempt at confusing people. It's disingenuous at best, and outright fraudulent at worst.

When I see that, you can be sure I will keep far away from your project:
https://github.com/cyph/cyph/issues/67#issuecomment-688815777

good morning

"web apps" are

If I had to name a single person who had the most profound influence on how I understand the world today, it would be David Graeber. His works stand as a monument to Anarchism as something that constructs, reconstructs, and re-forms society from the shards of the cooperation and mutual aid which have been destroyed and subverted by hierarchy and sometimes even forced entirely underground. More than critique, Graeber had novel ideas for the formation of a society based on egalitarian values which is often absent from the popular left of the past 50 years who cannot move beyond respinning critiques of capitalism into books with trendier sets of jargon over and over. While working with the anti-globalization movement and similarly-oriented anarchist social movements in the so-called united states and elsewhere his politics were never confined to a university office or the presses of an academic publisher. He died two days ago on September 2nd in Venice. We need to channel his focus, this drive to move beyond being a counter to reactionaries and to move towards actively constructing a better world without constantly resorting to taking feedback from the monsters who are legitimizing deadly, racist state violence today more than ever. Rest in power, David

The anthropologist David Graeber just died. He is one of my primary intellectual influences, and his book DEBT changed my life back in 2011: https://bookshop.org/books/debt-updated-and-expanded-the-first-5-000-years-revised/9781612194196

Some articles of his that are also really important to me:

Using our mid-20th century projections of flying cars as a jumping-off point to think about what actually happened to material progress in the last 50 years: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit

On bullshit make-work that contributes to the above: https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

met up with friends yesterday and one of them gave me a flash drive as a birthday present. when I got homo and mounted it there was a highly obfuscated shell script, which when run printed flattering text, showed some nostalgic photos and then self-destructed. it also left a cache directory in ~/.cache/, and one of the scripts there contained an invitation to the friend's birthday later this year in comments. it was really sweet, but also only in russia friends gift you malware for your birthday lol

A friend of mine who teaches elementary school, taught her class, “don’t yuck my yum”

It was like a class mantra, all the kids knew and understood the phrase. So, if a kid brought a bean burrito for lunch, and another kid said “gross! I hate beans” burrito-kid could just say “don’t yuck my yum”

It became the perfect phrase when one student liked something another student hated it. Quickly, it moved from the tangible (food, smells, textures) to the intangible (music, religion, quality)

By the end of the year “don’t tuck my yum” was woven into the culture of the class. They actually used the phrase LESS by then, because yuckers would check themselves before tearing anyone down.

And that class of second graders moved to third, secure in the knowledge that it’s ok to love the things you love, even if other people don’t.

New blogpost: If you can't tell people anything, can you show them? https://dustycloud.org/blog/if-you-cant-tell-people-anything/

"Remote Code Execution in Slack desktop apps" https://hackerone.com/reports/783877

This is why I refuse to use Slack, Discord, etc. in their native app versions – only in the browser. Browsers have gotten pretty good at sandboxing and auto-updating. Historically, Electron apps have demonstrated themselves to be good at neither.

One thing I do enjoy about writing a PWA: I don't have to ask Google's or Apple's permission to publish my "app" to the "store"