Albin @albin@scholar.social

Me: "Oh no I'm really behind on the work on my thesis"
Also me:

I tried out booting @elementary yesterday. Surprised by how many things worked:

✅ HiDPI

✅ Hardware power off

✅ Networking

✅ Font rendering

✅ Scrolling

Things not working:

💀 Ugly grub/terminal boot in tiny font (probably fixable)

💀 Multitouch gestures (maybe fixable)

💀 Stuttering/tearing rendering and delays in menu pop-out etc

Of course I didn’t test many many things (palm rejection, high ram usage performance, suspend/resume, video playback, Bluetooth, external screens, ...).

In principle I really like what some libre OSes are doing (looking at you @elementary); building services and reusable components for common things like email etc, much like Apple does with iOS. I think having one language, one SDK, and components for all the cool stuff has enabled rapid development of apps on mobile and to some lesser extent on the Mac.

Highly recommend this talk from a conference I went to. Basically it discusses the numbers on how programming is moving (it’s very open source), and how the pipeline works (it’s a firehose, and it doesn’t). The focus is towards industry and education, but this has implications for FLOSS as well.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sGwf2xezk2c&list=PLyrlk8Xaylp6jB7XQ2Zjop6FK1xDumYbX&index=9&t=0s

The US is a third-world country with a very large GDP.

The other day I learnt why there is even a bathroom issue in US politics: apparently US bathrooms are absolute rubbish. This has always confused me.

I never understood how someone could “police” a bathroom even, but that’s of course possible if there is essentially one shared room with stalls separated by virtually no walls, sometimes with gaps around the doors. And they have these in...schools, workplaces, etc, and not just airports and train stations?

I met with my opponent to prepare our mutual thesis defence yesterday. His opening question was “you write ‘ca’ what does that mean?”, followed by a stern reminder that I must write out full abbreviations at first use when I explained (straining to hide my surprise) that it’s an abbreviation for “circa”.

Now worried about what will happen given that he could well start discussing literally anything.

In 2011 I went to my first IPL treatment to remove facial hair and was confronted with the question of whether I was trans.

The same day, I wrote to a friend in an email (paraphrased and abbreviated): "If I could only understand phenomenological time, then I would understand how repetition works in Butler's theory of gender, and I could figure out why gender identity is so hard for me".

Let's just say my problem wasn't too little theory on gender.

Why is the image rotated? Ok that’s a bug in my client.

I kind of like this new GOOD NIGHT sticker that just showed up in my home town.

The other day I realised my de facto 3rd person (singular) pronouns for myself in my native language are...the empty set. I don’t use any.

We do have a gender-neutral neopronoun but I don’t like using it.

I swear Cory Doctorow is getting *worse* on drugs. Fine, we can disagree about whether maximum drug liberalism is a good idea, but it’s starting to become an issue in his writing when he seems to literally be unable to imagine anyone having fun without being high.

Is there a solution to scrape your (instance's) feed for links?

Important exception: the new Watch, which is a real thing and looks like an incredible feat of engineering.

My bias against linear algebra saves me from almost all new tech hype. Exhibits A, B:

Apple: "we made a phone with a literally physics-defying computatinal camera"
Me: "...using linear algebra. *yawn*"

Apple: "...we also made this processor one gazillion times faster"
Me: "...at multiplying matrices."

Following the debates in non-proliferation research and international relations, I am very worried about war in the near future, and not just smaller proxy wars.

Also, the bloody morons of the US apparently figured building "small", easier-to-use nukes is a good idea, because of course $ADVERSARY will know they are only getting nuked with a small one and retaliate appropriately.

I am really worried about the uptick in "cyber war". Of course cyber war is discursive (you can't cyber-kill someone), but if states understand hacking, now at some kind of hybrid of intelligence operations and active war, as something "war-ish", it means kinetic war (bombing someone) might be an appropriate response.

Couple this with how hard attribution is, poor diplomatic relations, and the things like Russian misjudgement of 2006's impact, this is a powder keg.