Source: Game Music Festival 2020 – THE SYMPHONY OF FOUR WORLDS (live stream) – YouTube
As an avid player of all Supergiant Games productions hearing new arrangements of the game soundtracks is amazing.
See you in The Country Read More »
Stephen Milton, who helped to design and build the Gigabit Now service in Sea Ranch, California explained that his company had to obtain permission from 23 separate local, county, and federal granting agencies to get the new project up and running. Broadband provider Sacred Wind out of New Mexico wrote in a filing to the FCC that an application involving one landowner and one authorizing jurisdiction commonly takes 2–4 years to complete, while something more complex, that involves more than one piece of land spanning multiple authorizing jurisdictions, can take anywhere from 4–8 years to complete. Slow response times translate into delays and adoption lags.
Source: The curious case of Romanian broadband | by Will Rinehart | The Benchmark | Oct, 2020 | Medium
Here in the US most of these bumps are by design by way of from redlining, NIMBYism, and plain old lack of foresight from local governments. This in turn gave more power to state governments who in turn receive most of their regulatory guidelines from the companies they’re supposed to be regulating. A lot of states now explicily forbid cities, counties, and municipalities from even trying to enact their own regulations when it comes to broadband, specially publicly owned infrastructure.
Wealthy neighborhoods will always see at least two companies deal with the regulatory gauntlet as they know the profits to be made will be worth it, which in turn helps attract more wealthy people to the neighborhood. Poor neighborhoods have not seen that kind of investment in decades, and will likely never see it in the foreseeable future. Here in Minneapolis one company is rolling out fiber throughout the city and North Minneapolis isn’t even in the plan for them. This has been a historical goal of racist and classist local governments.
Should government at any level try to change the rules, companies involved in last-mile telecom duopolies will scream bloody murder and call up their wholly owned GOP subsidiary in Congress to keep the status quo.
Oh, you want to setup a neighborhood network? They’ll throw the cops at you for that Read More »
Source: Chapter 1: The Ancients’ Bucket List – The Analog Antiquarian
This blog is so, so good, should you like to read about ancient history.
Travel around the world in a lifetime Read More »
Pirate Care is a research process – primarily based in the transnational European space – that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of “care” and “piracy”, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the ‘crisis of care’ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.
Source: Pirate Care – Pirate Care
This is a worthy goal. Piracy not for the sake of avoiding to pay for things, but rather as a way to learn about the world and its processes when the entities in power would prefer you not to— whether they be people, corporations, or governments. For these entities any form of non-compliance is to be crushed and its practitioners made customers of the carceral industry.
The Mississippi Park Connection says the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will lower the water level on the river immediately below St. Anthony Falls so it can inspect the infrastructure that’s normally underwater.
This looks to be special! I’m going to be right there freezing my ass off to see this.
Got me a new hoodie too! Read More »
Schools often run deficits in normal times; in 2019, nearly 1,000 private colleges were already borderline insolvent. Covid will cause many to shutter for good. It is accounting, not epidemiology, that drives university administrators to push for a rapid return to business as usual, effectively demanding that faculty and staff sacrifice their lives for the financial health of their employer.
Source: The End of the University | The New Republic
You can attend college, the price is death.
Or you could not attend college, in which case the price is poverty.
JK you’ll be poor even if you attend Read More »
As the historian Barry A. Crouch recounts in The Dance of Freedom, Ruby warned that the formerly enslaved were beset by the “fiendish lawlessness of the whites who murder and outrage the free people with the same indifference as displayed in the killing of snakes or other venomous reptiles,” and that “terrorism engendered by the brutal and murderous acts of the inhabitants, mostly rebels,” was preventing the freedmen from so much as building schools.
Source: What Black Lives Matter Has Accomplished – The Atlantic
The Orange Maggaot calls people who support BLM “thugs”, “criminals”, “terrorists”, saying he’ll impose Law and Order however necessary.
White people have always been the one to terrorize their communities, and those of people they don’t deem acceptable.
The cold cultural war heats up.
No change, no peace Read More »
Social networks are universally more restrictive than web pages but also more fun in significant ways, chief amongst them being that more people can participate. What if the rest of the web have that simplicity and immediacy, but without the centralization? What if we could start over?
Source: A clean start for the web – macwright.com
Mozilla is knowingly walking away from any of these options because they’re bitter they could not come to dominate the Web after Firefox helped bring about the downfall of Internet Explorer. Big Tech will not support a reimagining of what the web could be since it will mean less profits. Can’t have that in a capitalist society, now can we?
There’s hope now that the Servo engine is cut loose, but the time window to avoid having a technological cycle (about 30 years or so) be dominated by corporations is closing.
Closing quickly, for that matter. Read More »
This article suggests a few techniques for finding personal websites on the Internet.
Source: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website
I’m here and I’m not being that quiet either.
It’s not that I’m invisible. It’s that we don’t even figure into the Peasant Internet anymore(1) even though there’s a lot of activity on the twitters, facebooks, and instagrams of this here planet.
(1) Peasant Internet: Those who surf the waves thinking they’re safe in the embrace of social media or corporate firewalls.
I’m not a predator looking for them either Read More »
Anyone who knows me knows that I was among the biggest Apple Evangelists to ever live. Apple was in my DNA. I believed in Apple’s products, Apple’s services, and Apple’s mission (or at least what …
Source: Dear Apple: Your Services Are No Longer Required. | Low End Mac
I agree with everything they say but this entire fucken thing could have been avoided if someone hadn’t been a nosy person.
I thought of using stronger language but hopefully she knows what her stupidity begat.
Mind your own business Read More »
I love NYC. When I first moved to NYC, it was a dream come true. Every corner was like a theater production happening right in front of me. So much personality, so many stories. Every subculture I loved was in NYC. I could play chess all day and night. I could go to comedy clubs. […]
Source: NYC Is Dead Forever… Here’s Why – James Altucher
Is NYC truly over? For the longest time it was the place to be in this entire planet but now it certainly feels like it’s spiraling downwards, and we say this from my relatively comfortable perch in the Midwest, which does have problems of its own.
City government is still throwing billions into its police department even though nobody living in the city wants that anymore. Nobody likes De Blasio, who keeps thinking salvation will come from somewhere even though Trump has repeatedly said he’s more than willing to let NYC die. NY state government have their own issues, which depend a lot on the economic might of the city. Landlords are about to start throwing themselves off roofs—let them, no one stop them!
It reminds us of Tijuana when I arrived there so long ago. I was told Avenida Revolucion would be teeming with people, people who would be drinking, laughing, partying; usually loud boisterus Americans, yes, but they’d bring along people from all over the world. It all came crashing down on 9/11 and the economy of the city took a big hit when the border closed entirely. After that, there would only be light crowds and those usually on the weekends.
We worked on La Revo for years. We remember. It took nearly a decade for the city to recover, and then that stopped with the cartel drug wars.
Reading this article about NYC reminds me of all of that. It also takes into account the availability of broadband for most everyone, which changes things when you can do your job from anywhere on the planet that has the bandwidth to let you.
Other cities are suffering from the same issues. London is seeing this compounded by Brexit. Hong Kong, compounded by the hostile takeover by PRC. San Francisco, compounded by sky-high rents. With broadband you don’t have to deal with any of these issues; You can now have your dream house in the country and have good wifi.
NYC will recover first but it will take decades.
Shadow cities, rising Read More »
I find I Love MDN demeaning to technical writers. It reminds me of breaking into spontaneous applause for our courageous health workers instead of funding them properly so they can do their jobs.
Source: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action – QuirksBlog
Another article related to the fall of Mozilla. Back in the day we relied heavily on quirksmode.org and doing that sort of data mining, collating, writing and publishing is not easy. For a while myself helped out writing documentation for WordPress during the <.09 era and we found out for myself exactly how hard technical writing is. It’s something we’re good at and, more importantly, enjoy. We appreciate the skill, nuance, talent and even luck that goes into writing good documentation.
It is something that we complain about often on teh twitter derp corn; often using ultraviolent language cos most developers are assholes. We’ve mentioned on this here blargh of using vimwiki. Their documentation looks like… actually, not even going to bother with a screenshot because they don’t have anything on their github or wiki that actually says “Documentation”. They take the easy way out and tell you “oh run :h vimwiki in vim”.
No, fuck you, lazy assholes.
Another few great examples of technical writing gone wrong:
:h for, except without hyperlinking.
I just had to use a gif for Apple. It’s that bad. Most Android apps don’t have any documentation of any kind whatsoever. Windows applications used to have documentation built-in but now they just direct you to their website, where documentation changes and disappears depending on the A-level goals for the quarter.
There are many more examples out there but these are some of the ones I can think of right now. The gist of it is this kind of thing is hard and people who do it should be paid for it, and if they’re good at it they should be paid well. If a developer doesn’t want to write proper documentation then… they should either have someone do it for them and listen to that feedback, or get their ass handed to them so they get on writing it themselves.
Going to go eat something now before the hunger makes me angrier.
Never write documentation hangry, e.g. this post Read More »
FOSS is dead. what now?
Source: Post-Open Source | boringcactus
the gods fucken damnit, Mozilla. This is but one article out of so, so, so many out there that are talking about the death, dearth, and zombification of open source projects. And that’s before we even bring in the tweets.
But sure, those Mozilla Corporation executives deserve millions of dollars so they can look preen themselves when they have to prostate themselves before their capitalist gods making hundreds of times their salaries.
All for a fistful of dollars Read More »
What actions has Oatly taken that would make us trust them? They’ve built an incredible marketing engine and raised 100s of millions of dollars convincing you that you should put sugar and vegetable oil into your coffee each morning, while hand-waving away evidence that they’re harming you.
Source: Oatly: The New Coke – Divinations
I personally prefer my coffee without oil but if other people want to do that to theirs, sure, go for it.
I’ll stick to regular cow’s milk, thanks Read More »
Source: How would I improve RSS? Three ideas (Interconnected)
We rely heavily on RSS to find things to read and keep up with The Noise on the Internet. We also tend to shun newsletters cos RSS is a much better tool for them and en’t nobody got time for yet more email.
We’re aware of other initiatives like JSON Feed but they require re-implementing RSS into something else. Maybe the solution is an evolution of what the protocol currently is?
Start with a proper name for the protocol though. Bonus points if someone figures it out how to make it recursive.
dafuq does RSS even mean, seriously Read More »