Life is Tetris @tetrislife@social.cleverlibre.org

The reasons we're changing our domain and the impact were a bit too big to fit in last week's post, but as promised, here's what's up:

https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-11-03-from-io-to-org

Just showed my wife how to add invented host names to the laptop's /etc/hosts file, how to create a new virtual host on our server, and how all of this works without the collaboration of name service providers and certificate providers. It's fascinating that those old, do-it-yourself layers still exist on all our machines. I love that.

Started fiddling around my 42nd birthday.

No previous musical experience, very little music listening even.

Spontaneously decided to learn to play Irish Trad, picked the fiddle as the instrument.

It’s been a tough three years, it’s a hard instrument. Was close to tone deaf.

Yesterday I learned a full tune by ear in one day.

Tomorrrow I turn 45.

I’m proud of my progress, even if I still have a lifetime to go.

#IrishTrad #fiddle

@qqmrichter @tetrislife

Depends on your definition of "user"… and evidently your definition of "never".

Microsoft did make great strides in the earlier part of this century, before they decided to take a wrecking ball with the combined efforts of the "Metro^WModern" UI, their "cloud first" push and most recently, their fascination with AI.

Apple's platform is good, but it requires buying their hardware (and its limited range of form-factors): go have a look at how Amazon do MacOS X instances to see where that's a problem. (spoiler: they've hacked off-the-shelf Mac Minis into 2U racks.)

You needed some functional knowledge of BASIC to do anything with an Apple computer years ago. Today, Microsoft and the KDE project are riffing off each-other UI-wise.

As for Linux audio… when I started out, OSS was the standard. Most applications dealt with audio directly, there was this new fangled daemon called the e-Sound-Daemon (esd) which came from the Enlightenment desktop (and often ran along side Gnome v1).

KDE had their own called aRTS. Basically only KDE applications supported it.

ALSA got merged into the kernel with Linux 2.6. It solved a lot of problems with OSS, but still it was one application at a time. (Unless you set up dmix/dsnoop plug-ins.)

Proprietary OSS-only applications like Skype needed all sorts of unholy hacks to make it work back in the day. Everyone celebrated when they implemented ALSA support.

JACK popped up, and did allow multi-application sound-card use and flow-graph processing… but it was finicky, and better suited to advanced users.

PulseAudio is the present day, and aimed at replacing esd (and aRTS). BlueZ started working their audio infrastructure to link into that instead of ALSA.

That said, architectural issues were hit with PA, and there were ideas in JACK that were useful for solving problems, so PipeWire does a bit of both. It has support for the newer BT CODECs, and as I say, I think will ultimately replace PulseAudio.

This is almost entirely volunteers. If it took 30 years for Microsoft to get where they are today with full-time employees, it does not surprise me that the Linux community is taking a little longer. You're comparing one group who are paid a typical 40-hour week to work on their thing, to another where volunteers might only spare 10 hours a week.

I've seen printer handbooks which described the format of the commands sent down the parallel port to make a printer change fonts, colours or print graphics… but that was many moons ago! We have to reverse-engineer this in many cases today.

The only thing in favour of OSS is shear numbers: there's no recruitment process to write patches or submit bug reports -- anyone can pitch in and help. (And yes, I have written a patch or two for ALSA! Probably nothing that matters in your bug.)

Sitting here moaning though isn't going to get the problem fixed. In the discussion so far, there's been no mention of distribution, kernel versions, BlueZ versions, what audio subsystem is being used (PulseAudio, PipeWire, pure ALSA, sndio…), what hardware is being used.

That doesn't give us a lot to go on. I'm not saying your problems are unimportant or non-existent… I also don't think they're unsolvable. But, we'll need detail to get to the bottom of it. 🙂

The essence of programming Erlang?

#actorModel #erlang #functionalProgramming

Palestinians are being slaughtered. Where are the sanctions on Israel? Where are the embargoes? Why are they giving them and selling them more weapons and bombs?

How is this invader so different from Russia, why is Israel authorized by the US and EU to slaughter at will?

Fucking hypocrites.

#FreePalestine #Gaza

@dalfen @jprestonian

Or in a sensible world, 20231231 or 2023365.

@dalfen
Or, in civilization, 311223.

TIL #erlang / otp comes with wxWidgets bindings. From what i've seen so far it actually fills in a lot of the annoying gaps that i've seen in other languages. Like the event system connects very well to the established actor model..!

Lost Forest Gardens of Europe
"In the hills above the Po river in N Italy, there are a handful of #farms that look almost the same today as they would have 3000 years ago.
There are rows of short pruned trees, with fruit-laden grape vines festooned between them. The trees are common natives that produce #fruit, firewood, #basketmaking materials, & #fodder for farm animals. The grapes are ancient cultivars that have been grown for millennia. Between rows of grapes & trees are diverse plots of cereals, hayfields, vegetables, & herbs. In a single field, one can find all of the staples needed to live & support the farmstead. This is a resilient system modeled on a #forest. Unlike monocultures of grapes or grain, diversity is the strength here. Disease outbreaks & unseasonable weather have a limited impact. If one crop has a bad year, there are a dozen others to pick up the slack. Designed to last millennia & that is what they have done." https://www.shelterwoodforestfarm.com/blog/the-lost-forest-gardens-of-europe#The-Continent-Wide-Orchard #permaculture #agroforestry

"The DMV’s order of suspension, which TechCrunch has viewed, states that Cruise withheld video footage from an ongoing investigation, prompting the agency to suspend its permit. "

Pretty crazy how "these self-driving cars are failing in all sorts of terrible ways" and "these people are deliberately working to deceive regulators" always seem to involve the same companies, that's so wild, what a weird bunch of coincidences.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/24/dmv-immediately-suspends-cruises-robotaxi-permit-in-california/

The Luddites were not anti-technology and their permanent cultural association with a reactionary anti-technological ideal is one of the great propaganda victories of the capital class.