Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

A phrase I heard and loved when I was in a committee room in the UK Parliament this evening, for an Open Source event - “Open Source is the Right to Repair, for software.” 👏🏻 such a perfect way of describing it, I wish I'd been the one to say it!

One thing that annoys me about the Agile discourse is that no one acknowledges that time estimates are based on the maximum amount of time you think your managers will accept as a timeframe and not how long you think something is actually going to take.

More than ever, we need networking protocols which are resilient, privacy preserving, bandwidth conserving, able to run on low-spec hardware, and not quite as preoccupied with being the global network for everyone ever.

We’re delighted to present Willow, a new family of peer-to-peer protocols that cater to just that niche. https://willowprotocol.org is a guide to those protocols, with full specifications, ~50 hand-drawn diagrams, illustrations, and comics, and much more besides.

Our thanks to @NGIZero for supporting this project!

“Again we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.”

MLK
—The Three Evils speech, 1967

This is backwards. Indexing in a search engine is implicitly valuable by making it possible to find content and drive traffic.

Feeding ML is parasitic where the result is less traffic to your content.

The only appropriate structure for this is an explicit opt-in.

Are there unions for programmers or software engineers? I googled it just now and only found articles saying "programmers don't unionize because they're satisfied with their working conditions "

so I'm like, what do?

#union #unions #unionize

I'm severely colourblind - my eyes can hardly detect red light at all.
So, working in web development, picking colour schemes is hard.
There are tools around to help you pick accessible colour schemes, but they assume that you can tell by looking that a colour is the one you want, and the only information you need the computer to calculate is the contrast ratio.
I realised I need a tool that will take the name of a colour and find a shade that gives a target contrast ratio.

Here it is: https://colourblind-palette-maker.glitch.me/

It uses the new APCA perceptual contrast algorithm and the Oklab colour space to help me find colours that people with better colour vision will interpret correctly, while ensuring there's good contrast for as many people as possible.

#accessibility #a11y #WebDev

Me: <minding my own business, winding down for bed>

Me: <exhausted from lack of sleep>

My brain, unprompted:

"Okay, but what if we actually model RDF graphs in datalog? Can we do that? What does it look like? If we do that, what kind of properties fall out?"

All engineering is reverse engineering if you document things poorly enough.

"OpenAI this week quietly deleted language expressly prohibiting the use of its technology for military purposes from its usage policy."
https://theintercept.com/2024/01/12/open-ai-military-ban-chatgpt/

It took years for Google to change their vision from "Don't Be Evil" to "Be Evil."

As with everything tech, the pace of moral innovation is relentless.

OpenAI took only months to openly embrace evil. Well done, tech bros, we always knew we could count on you to do the wrong thing

Fedi users, is your favorite #Linux distribution…

#Firefox has a new hidden setting auto-rejecting #cookie banners (not just hiding them eg Brave). Piloting in 🇩🇪 in Private Browsing but anyone can enable:
Go to the URL about:config
Set cookiebanners.ui.desktop.enabled ->True
Go to Settings->Privacy, turn on Cookie Banner Blocker.

My million dollar idea I want someone to steal and do, so I can be a customer.

"Dumb Stuff" we sell electronic appliances that aren't Internet connected. That's all.

That's it. That's the pitch. I would buy the <bleep> out of this company if their electronic gadgets were even half way decent, and repairable.

Electronic, no wifi, regular screws to open it up. That's it. Do those three things, and you can be sold by this store.

I will pay this business to curate and find these devices for me.