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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Kat Marchán 🐈

generally, it is not beneficial or desirable for either the owning company or the project’s contributors if there are outside contributors that have significant amounts of responsibility or influence.

Thus, in general, the proper situation for a corporate open source project is to only accept occasional outside work on a “scratch an itch” basis, only insofar as it benefits the project overall. Anything else is either too exploitative or weakens corporate interests too much.

This, of course, primarily applies to single-owner open source projects. Corporations understand the above pretty well for themselves, which is why things like foundations are desirable: if a project is expected to largely go in a beneficial direction for multiple corporate sponsors, then they place actual ownership in the hands of a third party that ends up acting as a bit of a trusted “escrow” for shared work. Influence in a project is then dictated by individual investment, pretty much.

When things get to this point, it’s much more reasonable to start bringing in individual community contributors, because there’s going to be a better shared understanding of project goals and direction, and it’s very difficult for a corporation to go rogue and tear everything down/“Business Source™️” all its community’s work just because their CEO had one too many conversations with ChatGPT about how to do their damn job and now they’re completely unhinged.

From: @DoctorBLLK
mastodon.gamedev.place/@Doctor

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Irenes (many)

there's this weird notion, which we've seen several op-eds attempting to explain, that supporting hatred, genocide, etc represents a change for silicon valley executives

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
The Mainichi 🤖

Japanese hospitals evolving to meet diverse needs of LGBTQ+ community mainichi.jp/english/articles/2

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Klaudia (aka jinxx)

TIL: Whatever #ebooks or documents you put on a #Kindle, they're being indexed & uploaded automatically to the #Amazon server if the device has an internet connection. Just found out with an unpublished #manuscript that someone wanted to read on their Kindle and it ended up on the Amazon server, although it was put onto the Kindle manually via cable. Whatever you do with Amazon devices, you're adding everything to Amazon's data collection. #Enshittification #AuthorRights #IntellectualProperty

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Keeper of the orb

i just learned this yesterday but: if you're trans and you were born in the state of New Jersey, there's a fastpass discounted system in place to ammend your birth documents.

nj.gov/health/vital/correcting

it costs 6$ if you're just doing gender marker, 8$ if you're doing name as well, 10$ total for an extra (second) copy of the new birth cert. they obliterate the old record through all state systems & replace it with the corrected one. this takes 8-10 weeks. and they have a badass name: Record Modification Unit.

it includes nb options
it includes options for parents w trans kids

someone in 2018 understood the need for this and absolutely nailed their assignment perfectly.

i think every state should model on this tbh

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Kint :verified:🤘💀

So that's what's going on down there.

#severance #doom #funny

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Jellyfriend :jellybin:

I made this and then lost the thread it was going to be a reply to, so the bit is ruined, but from its ashes, a new, yet more sureal bit arises. :ablobcatattention:

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Mx. Luna Corbden

1995: Hey, how is it there in 2025?

2025: uhh....

1995: How's technology? Did they make copy/pasting better?

2025: It's worse. That and everything else is worse.

1995: Worse? How did they make a simple feature like copy/paste WORSE?

2025, loading laser gun: No time to talk, "Paste without formatting" is haunted.

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Lady Lus, Inflate-a-Bou

So 3DMark, a graphics card benchmark, has achievements. Some of them are just for trying things, like running a test at night or at 4k, some are hardware based, like running a test with an iGPU or ≥12-thread CPU, while others are score based, like over 9k points or under 5fps in Fire Strike... and then there's three *temperature* based achievements, for completing benchmark runs with low hardware temps. I got the GPU ones by opening my case and pointing a box fan in, but no luck with the CPU.

...so I got thinking my i5-8500T mini-PC's CPU produces less heat, and what if I pointed the most unreasonable fan I could find at that?

Pretty sure this isn't how you're supposed to get this achievement.

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Srol

I feel like one of these articles is telling me not to read the other.

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Leeloo

@nixCraft
Not just software. Where my parents live, the city decided to build a bridge.

1. Decide that the bridge should be built.
2. Decide on the price.
3. Take the money from a different road project, so they had to make a kludge solution there that didn't solve anything.
4. Build the kludge.
5. Ask for bids for the price of the bridge.

The cheapest bid was 2.5 times what was decided in step 2. The bridge wasn't built and because the rest of the money had been spent on the kludge, it was too late to return the money to the original project and do that right.

The real kicker: The bridge was one mans dream. The original project was a road that has been planned at least since my dad was a child, so 60+ years.

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
nixCraft 🐧

😂 found it in my phone while cleaning up storage 😆

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Foone🏳️‍⚧️

WHAT IS THIS, A FONT FOR ANTS?

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
josef

so 'the kind of user it attracts' is the wrong term, maybe. perhaps 'cultivates' or even 'creates' is better? using a tool to change something in the world necessarily changes you in some way too. the handle of a chisel or the strings of a guitar might give you a callus or something. but they don't wear away your ability to care, quite the opposite

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
josef

i think good tools help you care about the thing you're doing. they're owned and used by communities who care about what they make, and help each other learn and share their results. all tools are, ultimately, communication tools, that connect you to others in some way. recently though, i see more and more things which seem designed to forego that. to allow you to accomplish without caring, and without connection. i don't think these can ever really be 'good tools'

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
josef

the telltale sign of AI art i find most prevalent isn't that smooth, saccharine, glossy sheen, the purposeless and incoherent detail, or the inadvertent polydactyly, but the uniformly uninspired subject matter. the problem originates not in the computer program, but the kind of user it attracts

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Kitsune Games

Kitsune Tails is a finalist in two categories of the Dope Indie Games of the Year (DIGY) Awards! It's nominated for the "Cultural Impact" and "Best Retro" categories

Tune in Thursday, March 13th on YouTube or Twitch to see the winners: digyawards.com

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Foone🏳️‍⚧️

COMPUTERS WERE A MISTAKE
SMALL COMPUTERS DOUBLY SO

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Mr Horngus

I've had a hobby for ten years (long, self-indulgent) 

I've now had a hobby for ten years. Unlike other people, it's not woodworking or drawing.
I'm a special kind of nerd and so I work on nerd software: The Fish shell.
Today is the ten year anniversary of my first pull request being merged.

This isn't even the kind of software that you can explain to most people. I don't think my wife ever really got what I was doing.
(she saw a cute ascii art fish in pride flag colors on my computer and liked it)

But it's a special kind of nerd software. Others focus on performance, or on being able to do the absolute maximum number of things, giving you the most knobs to fiddle with.
We try to make it nice (some call this "user experience", but tbh that always sounds so full of itself).

In working on that for a decade, I've learned a bunch of things. I've learned programming languages - my first contributions were all to the scripts and documentation,
but I picked up C++ and now I'm learning Rust. I'm still a pretty mediocre programmer, but I manage to add useful things.

I've also learned things about how free/open source software works. Contributors come and go. Often people will announce they're doing a thing and then just... not.
This is fine and normal - these are people announcing their intention to do something in their free time, and sometimes it just doesn't work out for a whole host of reasons.

I've learned that sometimes people are jerks. Sometimes they're entitled, sometimes they feel hostility towards a project they don't use and nobody is asking them to use.
(my suspicion here is that a bunch of this is caused by the same sort of thinking that makes a contingent of Dark Souls fans jerks - the "git gud" folks, who've mastered one thing and therefore anyone who didn't is a "scrub")

I've learned that design work is hard, especially when you're something open-ended like fish, which can't just point to a standard and go "that's what we're doing".

I've learned that interactive responsiveness is hugely important in making things feel fast. It turns out people don't really care about script execution speed,
what they want is to type a thing and then it reacts to what you typed. We often hear people say that fish is "snappy", and when you try to benchmark script speed it really really isn't. But since a lot of fish's features are implemented as slow plugins in other shells, it feels much nicer in fish.

I learned that terminfo is useless in our current reality and wrote 3500 words on it. I learned a lot of other cursed unix knowledge (you never want to know about process groups or terminal modes).

Some of the bigger things I've done, in no particular order:

  • I've rewritten the documentation theme. No small feat for someone with the artistic sense of a sloth
  • I wrote the "fish for bash users" document
  • I've added the math and path builtins
  • I've made it self-installable, and I'm in the process of making it work as a single file you can move wherever
  • I've made it beat both bash and zsh in some glob benchmarks (this is the only case we're faster in pure script speed)
  • I added a CLI version of the fish_config theme and prompt pickers
  • I eliminated an entire FAQ by making bind work in config.fish
  • I made the test suite diff the expected and received output - which featured the most cursed python I've ever written
  • I made the homepage hotpink
  • I helped with a lot of transitions: the documentation switched to sphinx from doxygen, the build system to cmake, the CI to Github Actions from Travis, we swapped the test suite to a new system, migrated the logging to a new system, ported the entire thing to rust
  • I enabled mercurial prompt support by default - which required writing shellscript to figure out if something is a potential hg repo, because hg is pretty slow to start
  • I invented the "config snippets" mechanism so you can split your config up into separate files, and external tools have a place to drop-in config.

I'm proud of these things and also of fish's reception. I like when fish appears on stage at a conference. I enjoy when people I've heard of use it (I know for a fact at least one fish user has been on TV!). It is preinstalled on Steam Deck, apparently.

Also a few of my friends have started using it, and I never told anyone to. I don't, as a rule, "recommend" it. It would feel weird to me to do that. I guess that means I'm bad at marketing? Anyway, some of them use it, and so far none of them have told me it's terrible, so I'm counting that as a win.

Overall, Fish has been pretty successful. The statistics we do have come from voluntary package manager statistics, and range from roughly 2% of Debian systems to 20% of Archlinux systems. It's fairly safe to say it is the most popular "alternative", non-POSIX shell. In the last ten years it has roughly tripled in install share on Arch, and quadrupled on Debian.

And this success has had some cool effects! Because not only do tools like python ship fish integration (for venv), but also once they do that, they start figuring out that shells don't all have to be bash-compatible. So it becomes easier for other shells to be added as well. It helps lift us out of the POSIX-or-bust hole that we dug ourselves into for like twenty years there.

I haven't made a single cent from this. Which is fair, I never asked for money and haven't given people any way to give it to me either.
I suspect if I tried and asked for money, I would get about $10 a month. Maybe a bit more, but certainly not nearly enough to make it a feasible job.
Which would also change the entire dynamic, and so I'm fine with that not being the case.

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FoxQuirk 🦊 boosted
Mac84 🍏

I had a silly idea months ago and finally made a design. Enjoy! 🌈🤣 #WokeOnLAN

shop.mac84.net/products/woke-o

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