Jeremiah Lee @jeremiahlee@librem.one

“But the most amazing thing Daunt did at Waterstones was this: He refused to take any promotional money from publishers.”

Ted Gioia there writing about the the turn around at bookstore B&N, and previously Waterstones in Britain.

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and

Now tell me social media needs ad-tech and algorithms and VC funding. What social needs is people who love grassroots social and people, and the social that serves those people.

Thanks to @carnage4life and @rysiek for boosting this article.

<slow clap>

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/jpeg

Do you ever just stop to think about how much better frontend would be if a few privileged nerds at FB hadn't misunderstood Moore's Law?

Why do the rich get richer?💰💰💰 Our latest project with Alvin Chang uses simulations and interactivity to guide us through one answer from the field of econophysics.

https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/

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As new federated systems go mainstream, we need to ensure we're supporting the humans and organizations behind them. I'm not just talking about Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, and BookWyrm

This update from The #Matrix Foundation is concerning:
https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022

We are on notice. The success of the tech we rely on isn't guaranteed just by merit of our use. We need to invest in these projects and communities.

#ProtocolsNotPlatforms #OpenSource #FLOSS #Foundations #IndieWeb

Considering an alternative future where, instead of relying on more-or-less poorly-implemented search/keyword functionality, more retail websites looked and worked like McMaster-Carr. https://www.mcmaster.com

When you're talking about Linux, it's okay to say that it's "open source".

It's okay to say that it's "free software".

It's okay to call it "GNU/Linux", "Linux", or to mess up its name.

It's okay to refer to it as "the one with the friendly penguin".

Part of RMS' legacy has been an incessant obsession with terminology and pedantry, overshadowing far more important shared objectives which are fundamentally emancipatory in nature.

Pedantry is not activism; it is alienating, not emancipatory.

I'm delighted to report that MIT and the W3C have reached an agreement and that the W3C will kick off 2023 with funds and assets.

Many thanks for all your support and to all those who worked towards reaching an agreement. Enjoy the holidays!
https://mastodon.social/@robin/109524929231432913

I like how many instances are bothered by the prospect of the defederation.

They often make the erroneous claim that it will create an isolated experience for instances that do this, which is ridiculous because this assumes more instances will not be created.

What they are really worried about is their instances being isolated, and they are protecting that fear to the rest of the fedi.

They are terrified of the prospect of there being consequences for bad behavior. Choosing to give bigotry and hate space will be relegated to its corner of the fedi where all they have is access to each other.

And this is what bigots fear the most—lack of access to us.

@davetron5000 I have noticed a pattern more and more often the past several years: programmers routinely overestimate how complicated someone else's code seems and underestimate how complicated their code seems. From this, I have concluded that many programmers say "complicated" when they truly mean "unfamiliar".

A well-designed and unfamiliar code base looks complicated because it is unfamiliar.

Actual conversation I had…

Me: Billionaire philanthropy is nothing more than PR. Tax billionaires.
Troll: Lol you trust the Govt to spend our money?
Me: Yes, the Govt is elected by We the People, and therefore is accountable to us and can be voted out.
Troll: Govt is bought.
Me: Bought by who?
Troll: By billionai—...😳
Me: ...🤔
Troll: Ok, Tax billionaires.

For the holiday, a thread on how to befriend crows.

--

Befriending crows is a wonderful thing.

I have many crow friends at home and at work. They bring joy at unexpected moments and can rescue a miserable day even without shaking down the dust of snow that Robert Frost described.

This thread is an updated version of one I posted at the bird site in July 2019.

#birding #birdwatching #birds #urbanbirding #crows #corvids #crow #corvid #crowfriends

The copyright lobby likes to use emotive comparisons, to compare copying to theft, but the reality is that copying is self-evidently not theft, no-one is deprived of ownership when something is copied.

On the other hand, copyright itself is a mechanism which deprives us of our history, our culture, even our childhood memories, and it's copyright itself, the very concept of intellectual property, which should be described as theft.