Speaking of AI tech (sorry!); Just came across this really cool tool built by some engineers at Google™ (currently completely free to use without any signup) called NotebookLM 👌 Looks really good for summarizing and talking to document 📃

Tectonic Surfing
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i’m over here thinking about how to get free internet to millions of people and keeping the system requirements as low as possible.

some day, you’ll be able to download nix-on-android from f-droid and nix run git+https://git.cyb.red/pkgs/free-internet.flake and join the no se vende mesh collective.. something like that

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, haven’t seeing the @yarn_police@twtxt.net for a while. I often wonder if we are, finally, crime free. :-D

Morphotrophic by Greg Egan is built around an idea for how life on Earth could have worked out differently. It gets increasingly strange and interesting as the story progresses. My partner and I finished it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. The beginning is free online: https://gregegan.net/MORPHOTROPHIC/00/MorphotrophicExcerpt.html #scifi #reading

first steps towards free internet for everyone https://git.ix.cyb.red/IX/No-Se-Vende-Mesh

If you want to talk about (self) hosting with #OpenBSD, fell free to join the mailing list I just made: https://si3t.ch/log/2024-05-10-ah-mailing-list.txt #selfhost

@dfaria@twtxt.net the difference is that these other servers does not post several times a day with content that are not informative/interesting to people outside your academic context, which can be perceived as noise.

What @prologic@twtxt.net have done is what I would call curation of the service he offers to the world for free (as in beer). It’s no one right to have their posts syndicated to the frontpage of twtxt.net, it’s simply a gift he gives to the world and he is free (as in speak) to wrap is anyway he sees fit.

@dfaria.eu@dfaria.eu I hope you stay around 🌞

@sorenpeter@darch.dk a poem about me giving Odo a free bucket:

A glint in his eye, a sly, Ferengi grin,
Quark crossed the promenade, a curious thing within.
No jeweled trinket, no weapon so grand,
But a simple pail held tight in his hand.

Odo, the Constable, with a brow raised high,
“A bucket, Quark? What trickery do you try?”
The Ferengi huckster, with a salesman’s flair,
“A gift, my friend, a constable’s rare!”

“For those late-night spills, a morphing mishap,
This bucket, dear Odo, will catch every scrap.
And should a suspect turn to goop and flee,
This pail’s the answer, a guarantor, you see!”

Odo’s lips twitched, a hint of a smile,
At Quark’s twisted logic, his mercantile style.
“Perhaps,” he conceded, the bucket held tight,
“A useful addition, in the pursuit of right.”

So Quark made his sale, with a wink and a nod,
A bucket for Odo, a Ferengi oddity, odd.
But on Deep Space Nine, where chaos takes hold,
Even a pail can be worth more than gold.

About the account, thanks, but I already have way too many. :-D

in the matter of political voice in the US money is speech and therefore companies use their “free speech” to donate and gain access to politicians. Therefore companies are people. Thanks a lot “citizens united”

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained?ref=foreverwars.ghost.io

@movq@www.uninformativ.de For syncing notes between computers and phones I’ve been very happy with Simple Text - w Dropbox sync for some year, but transitioned to Joplin around new year. Both sync via Dropbox and for Joplin there are also more free options. I guess you could even use something like Syncthing

I finally found the NASM assembler.

https://nasm.us/index.php

I had heard that name before, many times, but somehow never looked into it. Weird. 🤨🤔

This is the kind of program I was looking for.

1. It is free software. Especially in the DOS ecosystem, free/libre software is a very scarce resource.
   
2. It’s a small command line program, not a huge behemoth.
   
3. Documentation appears to be well written.
   
4. It can even cross-compile DOS binaries from Linux.

It’s awfully distracting trying to get distraction-free, sometimes.

Found a nicely-resonant wine glass in a free box on my way home.

Feedback on why I didn’t choose Mattermost (lack of OIDC) · mattermost/mattermost · Discussion – My discussions/feedback on Mattermost’s decision to have certain useful and IMO should be standard features as paid-for features on a per-seat licensed basis. My primary argument is that if you offer a self-host(able) product and require additional features the free version does not have, you should not have to pay for a per-seat license for something you are footing the bill for in terms of Hardware/Compute and Maintenance/Support (havintg to operate it).

@slashdot@feeds.twtxt.net I feel like this is a bit of a common pattern? Company builds an awesome product, makes it free for a lot of users, then create additional features and paid plans, makes a tonne of money. But then later decide they need to make more money, so focus on converting the free users to paid users. Hmmm 🤔 Surely this can’t be the only viable business model? 🤔

Evernote Pushes Users To Upgrade
After making steep cuts to personnel earlier this year, Evernote’s Milan-based owner Bending Spoons is now experimenting with a new plan that would push more users to upgrade to paid versions of its service. From a report: The company confirmed to TechCrunch it’s been running a small test that placed limits on the number of notes free users could create, but said the new plan is not yet finalized. TechCrunch was al … ⌘ Read more

Someone at Philips Hue or Amazon Alexa screwed up something, as it seems. My lamps stopped responding to Alexa some days ago and I am not the only one experiencing issues. I guess we can say we enjoyed the (partial free) ride for as long as it lasted. https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Hue/dp/B01LWAGUG7

Date Line
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my thoughts are free

jellyfin is also a good alternative with free apps for your phone.

I’m telling ya guys 😅 plex.tv had way better shit™, Get it installed on your own server, get access to free content + your own + whatever and no stupid tracking and bullshit 🤣

Urban Planning Opinion Progression
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Abstract Pickup
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@adi@twtxt.net I think it is, and one benefit they have is that you can add third-party repositories to the F-Droid app as you discover them. So, for instance, if you know of a developer who pushes builds to an F-Droid compatible repository, you can add that to your F-Droid app and start tracking updates like you would for any other app in there. Can’t do that with Google Play!

F-Droid tends to focus on open source applications that can be built in a reproducible way, which limits the inventory (though of course tends to mean the apps are safer and don’t spy on you). There are non-free apps in there as well but they come with warnings so you’re informed about what you might be sacrificing by using them.

That said if you have a favorite app you get through Google Play, there’s a decent chance it won’t be in F-Droid. Many “big corporate” apps aren’t, and vendor-specific apps tend not to be either. But for most of the major functions you might want, like email clients, calendar apps, weather apps, etc etc, there are very good substitutes now in F-Droid. You’re definitely making a trade-off though.

What I did was go through the apps I had installed on my last phone, found as many substitutes in F-Droid as I could, started using those instead to see how they worked, and bit by bit replaced as much as I could from Google Play with a comparable app from F-Droid. I still have a few apps (mostly vendor-specific things that don’t have substitutes) that come from Google Play but I’m aiming to be rid of those before I need to replace this phone.

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah, it’s true. Thing is, Linux as a desktop operating system sucked in 1996 yet I adopted it then anyway because I wanted nothing to do with MS anymore 😆 I know it’s not for everyone but I’m pretty tolerant of a less-than-stellar experience if it means I can be free of big-company garbage.

I haven’t tried a Linux-based smartphone OS in a long time so I don’t have any idea how bad/good it might be. I figure when I finally break down and get a new phone I’ll experiment on my current phone.

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net F-droid. Getting APKs from developers you trust and side-loading them. Some flavor of Linux. Some distro of the open source parts of Android.

There are lots of options. Bit by bit I divest from anything that’s distributed from Google Play. With my latest phone I find and download APKs so that I could have the app without all the Google crap woven through it. By the time I need to replace this one I’ll be fully free of Google Play. Most of my apps come from F-droid now. You can a perfectly functional phone/pocket computer unless you’re addicted to installing dozens of corporate apps.

@prologic@twtxt.net Horseshit hype:

• AI that we have today cannot think–there is no cognitive capacity
  
• AI that we have today cannot be interviewed–“inter” “viewing” is two minds interacting, but AI of today has no mind, which means this is a puppet show
  
• AI today is not free–it’s a tool, a machine, hardly different from a hammer. It does what a human directs it to do and has no drives, desires, or autonomy. What you’re seeing here is a fancy Mechnical Turk
  

This shit is probably paid for by AI companies who desperately want us to think of the AI as far more capable than it actually is, because that juices sales and gives them a way to argue they aren’t responsible for any harms it causes.

What do we make of this? Sky News Australia interviews ‘free-thinking’ artificial intelligence - YouTube #OpenAI #Amica

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t get your objection. dockerd is 96M and has to run all the time. You can’t use docker without it running, so you have to count both. docker + dockerd is 131M, which is over 3x the size of podman. Plus you have this daemon running all the time, which eats system resources podman doesn’t use, and docker fucks with your network configuration right on install, which podman doesn’t do unless you tell it to.

That’s way fat as far as I’m concerned.

As far as corporate goes, podman is free and open source software, the end. docker is a company with a pricing model. It was founded as a startup, which suggests to me that, like almost all startups, they are seeking an exit and if they ever face troubles in generating that exit they’ll throw out all niceties and abuse their users (see Reddit, the drama with spyware in Audacity, 10,000 other examples). Sure you can use it free for many purposes, and the container bits are open source, but that doesn’t change that it’s always been a corporate entity, that they can change their policies at any time, that they can spy on you if they want, etc etc etc.

That’s way too corporate as far as I’m concerned.

I mean, all of this might not matter to you, and that’s fine! Nothing wrong with that. But you can’t have an alternate reality–these things I said are just facts. You can find them on Wikipedia or docker.com for that matter.

Free Fallin’
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Free Public WiFi: https://computer.rip/2023-07-29-Free-Public-WiFi.html

GnuCOBOL 3.2 Released After 2+ Years In Development
For those fond of the COBOL programming language and continuing to make use of it in new development efforts, GnuCOBOL 3.2 was released on Friday as the latest feature update for this 21+ year old free software effort around being an open-source COBOL implementation… ⌘ Read more

Jordan Peterson likes to mansplain at women when he knows nothing about the subject. Probably because he thinks women should be property of men instead of free individuals.

Image

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Let’s be clear here. Daniel Penny allegedly choked a black man, Jordan Neely, to death on a subway car. Neely was being loud, but he was not physically threatening anybody and did not have a weapon. In any other context, this would be called “murder”, at the very least, “manslaughter” if one were being gracious. Because of the US’s history, a white man murdering a black man in sight of the public is oftentimes, and rightfully, called a “lynching”. It has a public, political purpose amounting to terrorism.

Daniel Penny was allowed to go free for awhile after this event. He is only now facing accountability, having been recently indicted (arrested and charged with a crime) as he should have been day of. And here is racist right-wing toadie Ben Shapiro saying that Daniel Penny–the white alleged killer–is the one being lynched. Not the black man who was allegedly murdered by Penny in view of the public, and who is now dead. Penny himself, who is still very much alive.

@prologic@twtxt.net, I don’t know how you go on defending Ben Shapiro, but in the context of US society, what Shapiro is saying is reprehensible and unacceptable. He’s a right-wing troll with disgusting, not to mention flat out stupid, opinions.

@xuu@txt.sour.is LOL omfg.

This is the absurd logical endpoint of free market fundamentalism. “The market will fix everything!” Including, apparently, encroaching floodwater.

I do have to say though, after spending awhile looking at houses, that there are a crapton of homes for sale for very high prices (>$1 million) in coastal areas NASA is more or less telling us will be underwater in the next few decades. I don’t get how a house that’s going to be underwater soon is worth $1 million, but then I’m never been a free market fundamentalist either so 🤷 Maybe they’re all watertight.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net yeesh, it’s a for-pay company I wouldn’t give them the output of your mind for free and train their AI for them.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m a bit of a GPU junkie (😳) and I have 3, 2019-era GPUs lying around. One of these days when I have Free Time™ I’ll put those together into some kind of cluster….

👋 Q: How do we feel about forking the Twtxt spec into what we love and use today in Yarn.social in yarnd, tt, jenny, twtr and other clients? 🤔 Thinking about (and talking with @xuu@txt.sour.is on IRC) about the possibility of rewriting a completely new spec (no extensions). Proposed name yarn.txt or “Yarn”. Compatibility would remain with Twtxt in the sense that we wouldn’t break anything per se, but we’d divorce ourselves from Twtxt and be free to improve based on the needs of the community and not the ideals of those that don’t use, contribute in the first place or fixate on nostalgia (which doesn’t really help anyone).

The EU’s Proposed CRA Law May Have Unintended Consequences for the Python Ecosystem (as well as the entire free software movement).

probably some now that the free COVID loans that required staffing numbers are over the staffing is no longer needed.

@xuu@txt.sour.is that doesn’t seem to fit the spirit of the spec, at least by my read (I could be wrong obv). The example on Wikipedia’s webfinger page,

{
	"subject": "acct:bob@example.com",
	"aliases": [
		"https://www.example.com/~bob/"
	],
	"properties": {
		"http://example.com/ns/role": "employee"
	},
	"links": [{
			"rel": "http://webfinger.example/rel/profile-page",
			"href": "https://www.example.com/~bob/"
		},
		{
			"rel": "http://webfinger.example/rel/businesscard",
			"href": "https://www.example.com/~bob/bob.vcf"
		}
	]
}

and then the comparison with how mastodon uses webfinger,

{
    "subject": "acct:Mastodon@mastodon.social",
    "aliases": [
        "https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon",
        "https://mastodon.social/users/Mastodon"
    ],
    "links": [
        {
            "rel": "http://webfinger.net/rel/profile-page",
            "type": "text/html",
            "href": "https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon"
        },
        {
            "rel": "self",
            "type": "application/activity+json",
            "href": "https://mastodon.social/users/Mastodon"
        },
        {
            "rel": "http://ostatus.org/schema/1.0/subscribe",
            "template": "https://mastodon.social/authorize_interaction?uri={uri}"
        }
    ]
}

suggests to me you want to leave the subject/acct bit as is (don’t add prefixes) and put extra information you care to include in the links section, where you’re free to define the rel URIs however you see fit. The notion here is that webfinger is offering a mapping from an account name to additional information about that account, so if anything you’d use a "subject": "acct:SALTY ACCOUNT_REPRESENTATION" line in the JSON to achieve what you’re saying if you don’t want to do that via links.

@prologic@twtxt.net, business is slow (I also just got off that hyoo-män illness that is going around named COVID), so that leaves me some free time on my entrepreneurial hands. 😂 I have always lurked every couple of weeks or so. I see yarn has regressed on the UI! 😬😩

Good weekend for random tech projects: this rackmount server I got free boots Plan 9 without issue, and my ttl adapters and wii nunchucks just arrived. Now where can I find a serial modem?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Me when I find myself crossing an international border, close to midnight, using free bus WiFi, spammed by messages from people, telling me that the server hosting my web-apps is down. 😂
*Only happened once so far

• [x] Lawn mowed, edged, trimmed, and blown.
  
• [x] Driveway and sidewalks pressured washed.
  
• [x] Weed killer sprayed.
  

Mission accomplished. I feel like watching “The Hijacker Guide to the Galaxy”. Let’s see which streaming service is offering it for free, or for rent.

@darch@twtxt.net Yes, nothing much to it. Full source code is free to use :-) I will probably add some analytics and sorting options later.

in the land of the free, i can only buy tequila at the state liquor store.