Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a …

Recently, I wanted to split off a few files from a Git repository in which I keep notes to a repository of their own. Reason was that they served an entirely different purpose than the rest, so it made more sense to separate the two sets. However, they had quite …

Verse 1: In the land of the hackers, Where the code never sleeps, There's an editor that rules them all, The one they call Vim. Chorus: Vim, Vim, the editor of choice, For those who crave speed and power, With its shortcuts and commands, It will make you a coding …

Good piece on how a (hardware) supply chain is something completely different from the software stack what we tend to call a 'software supply chain', but which really is not. The problem is mostly that the providers of the moving parts that people (read: companies) are so dependent on and …

Canonical has a crush on snap. I don't. In Ubuntu 22.04 they replaced the native Firefox package with a snap package, making it slow and limited. It doesn't have to be that way. Mozilla's Firefox team has their own PPA for Firefox. As they use the same package name …

The easiest way to see how much you need a blog is to do this thought exercise. Imagine going back in time to a 21-year-old in 1952 and asking them what their opinions are, and where you could find a book of those opinions. Here’s what they would say …

Today I was hanging around in #nlhomeautomation on IRC as one does, and for some reason we started talking about alarm clocks. I wake up with a self-built wake-up light that is triggered by my Home Assistant instance and manifests as a nicely glowing bowl on my night stand that …

The belief that we could save endlessly online turned us all into information hoarders. What society needs instead is better systems for preserving public knowledge. One interesting find from this article: Perma which minimises link rot by converting hyperlinks in scholarly documents into “reliable, unbreakable link(s) to an unalterable …

This weekend we did a big migration of our stack at work to a new data centre and I am stoked about how our applications and their virtual machines are set up now. Quite a bunch is already automated and having a decent base image is such a nice thing …

I have things to say about our attention spans, about how they are getting influenced by certain things, but I can't currently focus on typing a blog post so I guess it will be done later. Adds to todo list

Today I cloned the dammit.nl repo on my phone, as apparently I hadn't done that just yet. I had wanted to post a short blurp on December 31th saying goodbye to 2021, but I was fresh out of laptop. I put it on my phone mostly to be able …

I stumbled upon this post by Vermyndax earlier today and felt the urge to type. His problem is one that I'm familiar with; I don't pretend to have a magic answer, but I learned some tricks to get myself started. First of all: I don't think it's weird to want …

You might be acquainted with the Celery Distributed Task Queue, which is a proven way to process vast amounts of messages. Messages containing tasks for your software stack to eventually finish doing, for example. However, Celery is slightly cumbersome to set up (no rocket surgery, but the RabbitMQ message broker …

Recently I installed a new, unofficial Nexus 7 2013 ROM on my trusty old handheld. It practically revived the device for me, as previously it was crashing in a repeated way and I thought it was finally done with its (notoriously iffy) flash storage. Now it runs the latest version …

If your target audience is a general population, you should not be using icons alone to convey anything meaningful. By doing so, you have made assumptions that are unlikely to be appropriate to a general audience. You should not assume icons or UI elements are known to your users, as …

When I described the Responsible AI team’s work to other experts on AI ethics and human rights, they noted the incongruity between the problems it was tackling and those, like misinformation, for which Facebook is most notorious. “This seems to be so oddly removed from Facebook as a product …

If you maintain an open-source project in the range of 10k-200k lines of code, I strongly encourage you to add an ARCHITECTURE document next to README and CONTRIBUTING. Before going into the details of why and how, I want to emphasize that this is not another “docs are good, write …

I do not endorse piracy and stealing. On the other hand, I always found it odd to have so much scientific results locked away behind paywalls, that are even prohibitive even for 'wealthy' western students/scientists, let alone people from third-world countries and such that could benefit greatly from, and …

3D printed, retro-futuristic looking computer terminals. Not all as practical as the other, but inspiring and great looking at the least. I now kind of want an ultrawidescreen terminal on our table now.

Commenting had been broken since the 19th of December because of the host having upgraded to Python 3.9 and isso breaking. I tried installing it anew from pip, but there is still a really old version on there; installing it as egg directly from its Git repository1 kind …