Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

As someone in software for a while that has been the most surprising thing that Open Source did: It massively increased complexity even for small projects because "that's how Google/Amazon/etc do it".

Yes Amazon does Microservice architectures. They also have a few people for every service that knows the ins and outs. You have a team of 5 that now not only has to understand the problem but juggle dependency chains from here around the moon and back so your React App that should have been plain HTML doesn't fail while showing a basically static page.

You won't grow to Google/Amazon scale. It's fine. Just build a simple solution you can maintain.

Working on React/K8s or whatever is mostly you training yourself on your own dime and time to be a potential hire for some Big tech company that will fire you to juice the numbers at he end of the next quarter.

The price of Huggies diapers went up 6% between April- June 2023.

Inflation, right? Wrong.

Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Huggies, reported that the cost to make its products fell by $75 million.They took the money and ran, banking $168 million in operating profits in Q3 2023.

Now, new research shows that corporate profits drove 53% of inflation during the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2023. During the 40 years prior to the pandemic, profits drove just 11% of price growth.

Has anyone invented HTTP basic auth again yet, or are we still in the "every site has their own implementation of it with forms and cookies" part of that cycle?

If our civilization collapses, extraterrestrial archeologists can look at this and be impressed. Three satellites following the Earth in an equilateral triangle, each 2.5 million kilometers from the other two. Each contains two gold cubes in free-fall. The satellites accelerate just enough so they don't get blown off course by the solar wind. The gold cubes inside feel nothing but gravity.

Lasers bounce between each cube and its partner in another satellite, measuring the distance between them to an accuracy of 20 picometers: less than the diameter of a helium atom! This lets the satellites detect gravitational waves — ripples in the curvature of spacetime — with very long wavelengths, and correspondingly low frequencies.

It should see so many binary white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes in the Milky Way that these will be nothing but foreground noise. More excitingly, it should see mergers of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies as far as... the dawn of time, or whenever such black holes were first formed. (The farther you look, the older things you see.)

It may even be able to see the "gravitational background radiation": the thrumming vibrations in the fabric of spacetime left over from the Big Bang. These gravitational waves were created before the hot gas in the Universe cooled down enough to become transparent to light. So they're older than the microwave background radiation, which is the oldest thing we see now.

It's called LISA - the Laser Interferometric Satellite Antenna. And we're in luck: ESA has just decided to launch it in 2035.

Dear #Fediverse

We are funding accessibility infrastructure on Linux.

We are focusing on issues and regressions related to Wayland and Flatpak.

Please share your feedback and ideas, even if you're not sure if it's in scope.

#Linux #desktop #accessibility #Wayland #Flatpak #FOSS #GNOME #KDE #freedesktop #a11y

whether it’s true or not that “90% of everything is crap”, the tech giants are investing heavily in a hot new technology that promises to boost that figure up to an impressively reliable “five-nines” percentage