Hail, traveller! The roads have been busy with everyone fleeing the Pit of the Demon King. So you're going South I see... Yes, everyone's going South to the Domain of the Shadow Lord. Well not 'everyone'. I'm going North, to the Holy Lands of Eternal Blessings, to live at the Bastion of Righteous Faith. Never heard of …

I see a standard story, repeated in FOSS spaces. It starts with an exchange. Open source projects are not actually as anarchic as people think. They work very much like a corporation, with a single person in charge, in a pyramid structure. I hear these repeated gripes that people do not understand open source …

Anglophone reporting on the current Serbian political situation has been a general failure of the ears and eyes. Every report I've seen only elucidates the strength of the reporters' political prescriptions. One of the worst distortions I've come across was listening to The Rest is Politics - a political podcast, by …

Chris on Mastodon broke the news that Meta censors #Democrat, but not #Republican. Hacker News starts the discussion a few hours later. Finally, news outlets are covering it. Andreas on Mastodon announces a security backdoor in xz. Hacker News covers it. ...then the news outlets. I'd bet my SSL certs that this will be …

Google's began by indexing massive portions of the internet, and rating sites according to which sites had the most links going towards them. You might state the general goal like this: We will write a program to rank the quality of writing on websites. This worked well for a while, but people with businesses saw how …

I regularly see indie artists posting some great images, and encouraging open-source-adjacent use, but messing up the latter completely. Just to clarify: Professional artists probably understand art licences well enough, and likely don't care about 'open source'. This isn't a post for them. Other artists don't care …

I've seen this question come up a few times, so here's my collection of reasons which makes sense to me: It's new Film has been around for a century, so those people have had plenty of time to unionise. Linux has only existed for 20 years, so 'Linux sysadmins' have only had 20 years of experience, and that's an example …

Once in a while I hear of someone who's decided to not have children because of bad ideas. I don't want to argue that anyone should or should not have children, but I do want to remove those bad ideas. The bad ideas usually go something like this: "I have this condition, and I don't think I should inflict that on …