Lmst

Brit boosted:

@davidrevoy I wish I could get that "volatile infrastructure" article printed and put into every Free Software conference. The PDF already exists for that:

https://www.draketo.de/software/volatile-infrastructure.pdf

/cc @sovtechfund
#freesoftware #maintenance

First page of the PDF:

Volatile Infrastructure is worse than volatile applications

We cannot stand on the shoulders of giants if we constantly break old tools

In the past years, I’ve seen infrastructure getting broken again and again, with the damage rippling through all tools that used it. The next coming breakage will be from Wayland, a replacement for Xorg. It promises to be better suited for some uses and more secure and faster. And it may be, but it is yet another in a line of breaking infrastructure changes that expect existing programs to adapt to The New Way Of Doing Things™, and the ones that do not follow get semi-broken.

I stayed mostly silent on this for a long time, hoping that people would figure out how to get it right without disrupting other tools, because the ones writing wayland are actually those most competent in display servers, but I now see the same philosophy at work that already caused so much other breakage, so I decided to write.

That philosophy is: someone else has to clean up the mess I made.

With the expectation that if the work required is not too big, people will do so.

But that’s a false assumption, because many useful free software tools are mostly unmaintained. And this is no weakness: in Free Software we are able to create things that last and build upon the work of those before us, because it continues to last without constant maintenance work.

@clarity holy shit yes

Brit boosted:

Somehow I can find no mention on the Fediverse of https://roomy.chat, by @erlend or anyone else. Perhaps it's because it's Alpha software? Still super interesting. It provides a way for a group of people to chat in an open-ended manner, then pull out selected utterances over from chat into a thread with comments, then sculpt it further into a more timeless page of long-form writing that can be shared outside the group.

Talk from March: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp9jI6L2Tsg

https://blog.muni.town/roomy-chat-alpha

Brit boosted:

One of the reasons I program:

"It is inherently delightful to me to direct an infinitely reconfigurable machine towards any end I desire, given only a little thought and some time at a keyboard."

— Alexis King
https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2025/05/29/a-break-from-programming-languages/

Brit boosted:

from my link log —

Dissolving the Fermi paradox.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

saved 2025-04-18 https://dotat.at/:/U1H2Q.html

Brit boosted:

A visual garbage collector algorithm playground from @ekr ! https://gcexplorer.net/

The accompanying post on Ekr's blog¹ is the best thing you can read about GC short of working through the Garbage Collection Handbook.²

__
¹ https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/memory-management-6/
² https://gchandbook.org/

@pho4cexa I'm having one of my "Aww, I miss you and I hope you're doing good days" 🥰

Being separated by most of a continent is tricky but I always enjoy seeing your posts here friend. ❤️

@shapr Kinda wondering if we could rope in @honkfestival 😎 But it might not be his bag.

I wonder if my buddy James Dabbs would be into it. I think he'd dig it and y'all would get on great but he's PST and has a 1 year old so that part would be tricky. Anyway, I'll poke around.

@shapr This response heartens me. Let me think on it another day.

I know I'll have standing commitments on Thursday and Friday nights. I need to check with Max and figure out if we're looking to do Tuesdays or Wednesdays for the next month or two.

Could you do something like 6pm EST? I'll dig up my copy and check the chapter size. Maybe some other folks from BNOTW would be interested? Could check in general or random channels. 🤔

@shapr This is a lovely offer that I confess I'm scared to accept! Mostly because I feel that I'll make slow progress and/or that I'm already overcommitted on projects and activities.

Did you have a thought on how it would be organized? Sync or async meetings? Just you and me or a small group, etc?

Brit boosted:

"The 3 Ways JavaScript Frameworks Render the DOM" by Ryan Carniato https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C-y59betmY

Ryan is a treasure and this video is great. A nice beginner-friendly overview of how JavaScript frameworks work under the hood.

Brit boosted:

No, Your Honor, all of the torrented Blu-ray rips on my Plex server were being used to train AI.

Brit boosted:

After a year of silence, two new videos on the same day on my youtube channel about illiterate programming and rubber doc development in Common Lisp:
- Using the PAX live home page without Emacs (https://youtu.be/4bl8PS8OW94)
- Named comments and doc folding (https://youtu.be/eN7z0TChHMw)

Brit boosted:

I wrote a new thing about killing the metrics in your head, and how our inherent desire to know that we are being seen can be the thing that prevents us from caring as well and as much as we actually do. https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2025-05-30/metrics

Brit boosted:

To experiment is human
... and that's especially true for humans in CS.

https://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2025-05.html#e2025-05-30T13_54_24.htm

Brit boosted:

“Engaging with AI as a *technology* is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach.”

Mandy goddamned Brown, everyone: https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/toolmen

@shapr dang I have a copy and I haven't even gotten around to reading it. Sounds like I should get on that 🙂

Brit boosted:

We've just released an early access version of the C++ to Rust Phrasebook, a resource for helping devs translate C++ idioms into Rust. Check it out here:

https://cel.cs.brown.edu/crp/

Brit boosted:

They were surprised by this?!

After testing a service under extreme loads they were surprised that only Erlang stood up to the challenge.

Brit boosted:

from my link log —

Fast allocations in Ruby 3.5.

https://railsatscale.com/2025-05-21-fast-allocations-in-ruby-3-5/

saved 2025-05-22 https://dotat.at/:/DBXJW.html

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