Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

It seems that a few people are being misinformed about the deprecation of the X11 backend, usually because they read screeds from well-known bad faith actors.

The X11 backend being deprecated mainly means that we're not going to spend time implementing new features, like dmabuf, graphics offloading, or Vulkan support. X11 support will still exist until GTK4 is EOL, which will happen once GTK *6* is released. We're talking about a 20 years horizon, at this point…

#FOSDEM is over.
How many of you have seen Bad Apple running on an e-paper screen, smoothly?
Because I have, at a private presentation in one of the sitting areas, and, friends, it blew my socks off.
Let me tell you, it's funny to see something cast a shadow on a computer screen.

Apparently the driver is running a custom FPGA and plenty of it is open source.

Good luck @modos . I want to get one now. https://www.modos.tech/blog

#epaper #eink #freesoftware #fosdem2025 #wayland

Over at @WIRED, reporters like Vittoria Elliott are doing excellent work documenting Musk's takeover of the federal government

In this piece, she tracks down the names of the people Musk has installed at various agencies

these guys are all 19 to 24 year old engineers -- one is a Thiel fellow

Story here: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-government-young-engineers/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/L2C7d

@lightweight @thomasbeagle So happy that we got away from AWS. Never my choice, one of my tech friends who used it wound up hosting all our stuff on it. Worst set-up ever, and overpriced as well. Took two years to get us off it and we are still paying $80 a year for a client whose IT contractors left some stuff there. You can't trust Big Tech so you may as well be without it.

Apparently it is an enormous pain in the ass to set up #Signal on a laptop without using a smartphone. You have to go hunting around for potentially sketchy third-party tools that might or might not even work.

Is there any reason for this beyond the Signal dev team maybe believing everyone has a smartphone?

i’m begging open source maintainers to stop using stale bots

We must recognize the danger that age verification laws have beyond pornography. They could clear the way for politicians to deem harmful any content they disagree with, such as LGBTQ+ content or content about abortion. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/impact-age-verification-measures-goes-beyond-porn-sites

@leighelse

It was Gates' Letter to Hobbyists that made me realise I was dealing with the Forces of Evil. Before that Big Blue suffered the same consideration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

@lightweight

Had a nice chat with the kind people from @weblate at #FOSDEM, yesterday. Head over to the K building and visit their stand, if you're interested in localising your projects.

If your project is hosted on @Codeberg, you can make use of #codebergs's #weblate instance which is available at https://translate.codeberg.org/.

#FOSDEM2025

Thousands of #trees planted in #Devon to start creation of Celtic rainforest
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jan/29/thousands-of-trees-planted-in-devon-to-start-creation-of-celtic-rainforest

"They used to cover large parts of #Britain... The mature temperate #rainforest will take several decades to become established, but the gains for nature will be much swifter... #TemperateRainforests support an abundance of #wildlife including #birds while their damp conditions mean #mosses, #liverworts, #lichens, #ferns and #fungi thrive on the trees as well as the forest floor."

Here's the talk by the Software Freedom Conservancy in question:

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6153-the-growing-body-of-proprietary-infrastructure-for-foss-development-repeating-bad-history/

The majority of you that visited our booth at #FOSDEM2025 asked us about federation, especially after a talk by the @conservancy that gave Codeberg and Forgejo a shoutout.

As we were not always able to give in-depth answers in person (there were lots of people!), we would like to highlight the following talk by @meissa: "Show and Tell: Federation at Forgejo"

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5610-show-and-tell-federation-at-forgejo/

This kind of shit is why I stopped listening to NPR at the beginning of the GWB admin. Back then it was them running cover for W's unilateral cutting of overseas family planning aid. Now they're saying this and I, quite frankly, am not surprised. This is who they are. This is always who they've been.

https://fair.org/home/with-zero-evidence-npr-suggests-trump-may-work-for-the-working-class-in-second-term/

Watching people say about overt fascism "but that's illegal!" gives me such strong flashbacks to the billion times that disabled people talking about the patterns of discrimination we face have been met with similar shock and disbelief: surely "they" can't deny you jobs or an education or information in accessible formats, "that's illegal!"

The sooner you get past the shock, the sooner you can get to more useful reactions. Listening to your disabled comrades will make you harder to shock.

@lightweight

It isn't a new job (just think about all R&D 'invested' in programmed obsolescence), but I guess nowadays the job title would be 'enshitificator'...

I've often thought about that. There're people at Microsoft whose job it is to work out how to piss you off enough to kowtow to their demands to formalise your exploitation rather than get brassed off enough to reject that exploitation.

3/n

Thanks to someone in the Cooperative Development chatroom I just learned about a new co-op model I've never heard of before: a cooperative work pool!

TL;DR a bike shop and a ski shop could setup a work pool. In the winter when the bike shop doesn't have enough customers, the employees go work for the ski shop where it's the busy season (and during the summer they go back to the bike shop). This would be much better than getting fired every winter!

#cooperatives

Flashback: I remember standing in the pick-up department of a hardware vendor I used to frequent back when my business did a lot of system integration (helping Windows-dependent businesses take advantage of the capabilities Linux servers offered them). As I waited for someone to get my order together, I could hear a Microsoft rep pontificating to vendor staff about their latest version of Windows. 1/n

Anyway, on the topic of the old job hunt: trying my best with a general/non-custom tech "foot in the door" CV here: https://yvan.seth.id.au/CV/YvanSeth_CV.pdf

If anyone who's familiar with current successful tech hiring or jobseeking would like to offer feedback it will be highly welcome! I am a job-seeking novice here (I applied for about 3 jobs in my tech life and got all 3 of them, well, OK, if we don't include the Google job where we mutually aborted the hiring process due to their definition of software engineer being different to mine lol, and their requirements being weird 😂 )

I've been working on cutting it down, compressed to three pages now (by removing/compressing content not by making the font tiny, lol.)

I also welcome input from grammar pedants and the typo-vigilant. I've looked at this document so much in the last few weeks I'm a bit burnt out by it.

HTML version of the same: https://yvan.seth.id.au/CV/cv.html

The next #fluConf session is an article by ohio olarte (not on the Fediverse) titled "Neo-Luddism in a developing country can be odd"

https://fluconf.online/sessions/neo-luddism-in-a-developing-country-can-be-odd/

#fluConf2025 #Philippines