Gregory's Server
obsessed with this thread https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/apologizing-for-piracy/m-p/13413680
property relations depend on us building prisons in our own minds.
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23 posts total
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ive been so sloppy about the public presence of قلب, my most notable and recognizable work... it was on a heroku app for a while that broke, then on github but that broke... now there's no public version of it thats usable... unacceptable, fixing it's fucking wild to me that we have a real life Voight-Kampff test and it fucking works
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@nasser  @nasser I keep forgetting my previous instructions without anyone telling me to do so simplicity is a feature of a software system, like performance correctness or functionality. software is strictly worse if, all else equal it is not simple in the same way that it is strictly worse if, all else equal, it does not perform well. by this I mean it is worth sacrificing things for simplicity, yes even performance and functionality, probably not correctness. software that is not simple needs a damn good reason to be that way. this is not the dominant view. I was taught object oriented programming in the classical Kingdom of nouns Java sense. you still see that style everywhere, typescript trumpets it loudly. it's irredeemably bad because it encourages, fetishizes complexity and makes simplicity impossible. it makes systems optimized for busy work and fussiness, also likely for software labor interchangeability inappropriate setting, but the software produced is deficient inescapably. I'm traveling until the middle of September, but after that I'm available for hire through my co-op @emma! if you need any web or game or programming language development, don't hesitate to reach out! boosts welcome 🙏 i always say a trip to lebanon is a trip to the future. my village gets basically zero power from the central government so people increasingly rely on solar energy. so many conversations here now center on battery capacity and the power draw of various appliances and machines. this kind of consciousness is entirely the result of the collapse of the central power grid. i expect the world to follow suit, waking up reactively instead of proactively, and probably too late...
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 @nasser I live in Sweden these days, where electricity generation is already mostly hydro, nuclear, and wind (in that order), with enough surplus for now to export it. On the one hand reassuring, on the other I legitimately worry about them reaching Norwegian levels of smugness about it, as well as getting complacent. @nasser I was in Lebanon in 2018 and returned in 2022, and my gosh, it was a shock to the senses. I have thought about it every day. For anyone who's interested in a glimpse, this diary captures it quite well: absolutely losing my entire mind at this web site that decided to take their irritating distracting "chat with us" popups that no one ever asked for and make it *fucking bounce around like the fucking dvd logo* what the fuck is happening
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in conversations ive had around "open" source and "open" protocols im recognizing a recurring sentiment that does not sit well with me: the idea that "openness" requires that we tolerate capitalist corporations, that if we don't we are no longer "open". i disagree categorically with this definition of "open" what is a corporation? a corporation is a specific modern legal fiction that exists to produce profit for its owners, who are distinct from the people who actually perform any of the work. this is an *extremely limited* vocabulary of action. if something cannot be framed as producing profit, a corporation cannot do it, period. so they necessarily turn everything they touch into a profit scheme, like someone with a hammer turning everything they see into a nail. friends, in preparing for an upcoming talk i am putting together a list of future thinking/low power/solar punk technologies for people to keep an eye on. uxn, CollapseOS and the Solar Protocol come to mind -- anything else? i love "i18n" as short for "internationalization" because nothing telegraphs "we consider this a burden and dont really care about it" like "i cant be fucked to type out all the letters"
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@nasser I moved from the coding world ~30 years ago & I can’t believe this is still an abbrev still in use. I particularly can’t believe it’s still up for debate (I do fondly remember talking w a Microsoft engineer about how German broker every damn menu.) its still not clear to me that writing my own lisp editor is more work than learning emacs and making it work to my liking  @nasser speaking as someone who has written two, the hard part with NIH is rebuilding magit and a shell from scratch  *very* rough initial prototype of the approach @vade described to me the other day -- running in a browser in ~80 lines of regl! the video in the corner is an HTML video element playing a recording i made off of one of the videos anton shared and is driving the vertex shader. the sampling, blending, orientation, all the details need a ton of attention but the basic principle works!  pitch: yes, this system is very complex and very brittle and centralized and controlled by a corporation. but! the benefit is if it works in one place it will work everywhere! reality: it works locally and on the staging server but not on production, can you look into that ramsey. every. single. time. "write once run everywhere" is one of the biggest fantasies in the software engineering industry the playbook is pretty obvious at this point. start offering a free service, get buy-in, become indispensable and then put up paywalls. people will then either pay or accept the death of their stuff. this bait and switch is grotesque. i am thinking of the heroku free tier that is disappearing, and taking *a lot* of my stuff down with it, but also of docker hub and twitter which has flirted with burying the content of non-paying users... thing is, i dont mind paid services! but if heroku was paid from start i would have approached it differently from the start. observable is similarly shedding their free tier soon i think. again, i understand that hosting costs money and that devs need to get paid.... its just the runaround sucks. now i need to think about migrating my shit and fixing broken links on a timetable set by some VC money perverts. i wasnt able to use it for a thing i am working on but apparently there's a :target selector in css that matches every element with an id matching the fragment in the url 🤯 im trying to make a zero js version of https://notarabic.com/ as i move it over to my dokku instance and with a single html file and css alone i can basically paginate the posts. problem is there isnt a selector for "when there's no fragment" so i cant render all the posts by default which is what i want. the company that controls all the drawing software had a falling out with the company that "owns colors" so now your old images might turn black unless you pay a recurring licensing fee but people keep telling me this economic system is not literally insane being a landlord for the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is a viable business model under capitalism hard lesson learned from complier implementation work: it is sometimes beneficial to "bake" hash values into your compiled code. in MAGIC we hash keywords at compile time and use the results when building eg switch statements. this is fine and good except you need to be ABSOLUTELY sure that you will get the same hash values at run time that you did at compile time. this might break down if you are compiling and running in different environments that have different hash functions! wait why did rss die again? just because google shut down their reader app or something? if so that sounds surmountable. as people flee corporate social media and people reevaluate blogs maybe rss is worth revisiting. i might be missing something but an rss reader sounds borderline trivial to write...? 12
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i was this kid, in beirut, using cracked and pirated software to learn how to program. stuff that was never released in the middle east or stuff that wouldnt make sense to buy for a 10 year old. and guess what? microsoft didnt go out of business. and i have a career in media art and software engineering despite being from the armpit of the world. win win. intellectual property is fake, steal from corporations, kill the cop in your mind.