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Cake day: March 30th, 2025

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  • In the old days, a few motivated nerds could write a browser. Now all you can realistically do is take a browser engine and build some user interface around it. That what most “alternative browsers” do - tweaking or repackaging.

    These days, a browser is like it’s own operating system with sandboxing, various Interfaces to periphery devices, hardware acceleration for GPU and all the bells and whistles taken for granted now.

    I’d say that imagining it to be on a scale similar to working on the Linux Kernel is more right than wrong.

    So we definitely very much want Firefox to survive, or it will be much worse than the Linux/Mac/Windows trilemma. Microsoft Edge is chromium under the hood too. Any many desktop “apps”.


  • I did that for 3 years. Funny how it seems to be a universal experience. Confirms to me how it’s pretty much the same, regardless of project, funding or scientific area.

    For me it was a bit heartbreaking to see, because I loved the idea of writing software for research. But the reality was that academia simply does not have the right structures to support serious and sustainable software development and until that changes, it feels more like a thankless “bullshit job”.

    You simply can’t run software development in such a opportunistic and chaotic way like scientists do their research and write papers.


  • Nice! That also needs some reasonably good management to see your skills and talents.

    Can totally see why you might not like roles “above”. There’s always some point where you stop solving the kind of problems you find interesting and have more bullshit to fight than it would be worth.

    Like my team lead wisely said, “never become a team lead”, and I’m absolutely not interested, seeing all the crap he has to out up with, manage and firefight (I’m happy he does it while I can stay pretty relaxed and keep doing all the fun stuff).



  • My last job was: PowerPoint presentation and poster designer, educator, communicator and mind reader.

    Tried to be software developer in science, turns out that I had to spend much more time promoting whatever little coding I do to interested parties, and creating software based on guesses what they could need and what the right thing probably should be.

    It was a mess, for many reasons.

    Now I’m an actual software architect and engineer.

    As a metaphor, somewhere between apprentice dark magician (when sprinkling in some fancy things not many others would be able to do), gardener (need to clean up a lot of weeds, tidy up and revitalize the decomposing codebase, trim some rotten code branches) and strategist (when conceptually working on the mid and long-term planning and high level goals).



  • Sounds like the teaser for “CommieNet: The Nerds Strike Back”, but on a serious note, I think you are right.

    In some sense, digital resources are non-scarce resources, they can be copied and multiplied. There is no capitalistic pressure innate to information, not in the way we consider other resources to be scarce.

    But such a digital utopia still would have costs for hosting the content and it would need to stay afloat in the profit-oriented world with finite resources and hard costs for running servers. So it would have to be donation based, or subscription based. Ironically, inside it would have to be strict about prohibiting anything that is effectively monetizing anything that happens inside.

    And someone would get the money earned from these subscriptions or fees and this would necessarily end up being some non-profit organization which would have to be somehow community driven, and would decide what is accepted in the space it has to take care of.

    But this sounds like a kind of internal governance, like a whole state, a body of rules, that exists within the community of everyone participating in that special network. This council would have responsibility to prevent corruption on the network and at the same time prevent it’s own corruption.

    I could go on, but I guess it’s pretty clear that creating a uncorruptible social space is exactly the same problem as creating an uncorruptible truly democratic society. If you figure this out for an internet platform, you have figured it out for the real world.

    So I guess it’s not gonna happen ever. It goes always like this - something nice grows, at some point it starts to rot, implodes, from the ashes something new can emerge, rinse and repeat. Just humans being humans.


  • Totally agree on the pre-2010 internet being more human. Now not only the platforms are centralized, half of the blogs you find are now AI generated incoherent garbage.

    There is still good stuff, but now you have to work really hard to find it among AI slop, Ads, paywalls etc.

    I hope the fediverse can establish a new form of the old internet. Lemmy instances are now the self hosted phpBB forums of this decade. And even on the corporate platforms there are some thriving niche communities.

    Maybe it was just that the pre-2010 internet was driven primarily by nerds of some form. With the smartphone it went fully mainstream, and that broke it. It got streamlined and commodified and monetized to turn any kind of “engagement” into profits, instead of, well, just being a place where many random quirky people are doing their thing and sharing cool stuff.

    Remember when “Homepage” was still a concept? Now I guess for most people it’s their Instagram profile, or something like that.



  • Congratulations!

    I also created a little AUR package or two or manually fixed some broken PKGBUILDs sporadically, and yeah it’s something you can figure out in a day when you have a little bit of understanding of the command line overall.

    Arch AUR is really a nice sweet spot between power and convenience.

    My boss at work is using Gentoo. I guess that’s why he’s my boss. No, but seriously, the Gentoo build system sounds much more complex. Yes, you can control compilation flags and tweak every package up to absurd details, but I’m willing to sacrifice the few percent of performance.

    Whereas, AUR is simple enough to be used by ADHD folks like us :D If it’s more work than a weekend project, I don’t care about it. I know I will most likely give up on it if I don’t need it to survive.



  • Nice, your “ratio” I also figured out as being a good baseline. Mixing down too THC-rich weed with pure CBD buds, and trying to grow hybrid / well balanced strains after I figured out that too much THC is the problem.

    Just still looking for nice upper/downer strains, according to common wisdom is seems that different terpene concentrations affect the high. I’m kind of looking for a chill/wind down/muscle relaxation strain and one motivation/productivity strain. But maybe it’s just bro science and it all does not matter to much, except for placebo effect, no idea.


  • That sucks, but you can put some isolation tape on LEDs.

    But I wish something horrible to those who thought it’s a great idea to make every goddamn electronic device make beeping noises.

    My water boiler, fan, washing machine. In my childhood I don’t remember everything beeping at every interaction. It makes me furious and you often cannot fully disable it.

    Once I tried to solder the beeper out but my soldering iron was probably not suitable so I failed :(


  • A truly free society maximizes relative freedom for as many as possible, not absolute freedom for some at the cost of freedom of others.

    And yes, this is exactly the line drawn by the paradox of tolerance.

    The difference between left and right wing, non - economically, is still about distribution of power. But not only monetary power, but also the power granted by the positive and negative freedoms we have in a social system. Only that in our societies, freedom and wealth are heavily entangled, and increasingly so.



  • How is that useful to OP who asked for something “without terminals”? Unless that was a joke.

    Because I’ve been using Arch Linux for 15 years and live in the terminal, but even though I like the idea of NixOS, it’s not only scary because it is alien and I have neither motivation nor enough free time to learn a parallel world and gain non-transferable skills for a niche solution. And that with being interested in what NixOS is doing.

    I would say it is horrible advice to a novice, unless you want to scare people away from learning terminals and configs and managing an operating system without GUI tools.


  • Yep 100% agree, and it’s not just the US. I don’t want to even say that this is necessarily some kind of capitalist-fascist conscious conspiracy (in the early stages), but in a capitalist society there always is the push to strip the state to the minimum, lower taxes, privatize infrastructure and well, stripping education to the minimum needed to produce workers that perform just well enough for “the market” so they are not too qualified and do not have to be paid too much and are quickly and cheaply available.

    Instead of focusing on developing well rounded human beings, education is reduced to a factory of cheap labor. With that comes the intellectual decline. German public schooling is facing a growing crisis as well and soon will get to the abysmal level of what one hears about the US.

    Well and if you do that for a generation or two, society is too dumb to vote in their own interests or see through bullshit (which requires a certain foundation with respect to natural and social sciences). And NOW you have opened the door to the really bad actors who abuse the shit out of the weakened society. Which is the point where we are now.

    And here we go, we got political from an initially non political discussion… Well, I guess there is some truth to the saying that everything is political, and right now it looks like most of the big problems have the same political cause.



  • Well I mostly never used any kind of social media for political things until very recently. Just read news on the respective newspaper websites. Maybe that did the trick.

    And just wow. Yeah well, some people are just always trying to pick up a useless tribal fight or stir up some drama, or just mess with others i.e. troll…

    That’s why good mods are worth their weight in gold.

    Just check a sub like /r/askhistorians, they might sometimes appear harsh but they managed to keep that place true to its vision and purpose (accepting only high quality responses by people who know what they are talking about). But sure, that is rather the exception.


  • Compared to say the Meta networks, reddit always felt to me like a platform where I can still control what I see. The feed is only filled by stuff I actively chose to subscribe to.

    Sure it is a part of the problem - it’s the reason I joined Lemmy. And I wonder how long it will take to become the same kind of wasteland of trash. Not sure that the “smaller community and less viral incentives” approach will be enough to keep it more civil than the “offers” by the commercial attention economy.

    Just as a reminder, before the internet was privatized, people were on self hosted forums. Some were good places and some were toxic shit holes. Really depends more on the moderation and community than anything else if you ask me.

    That said, surely I am distrusting any platform owned by some oligarch to have policy in the interest of the user base.