Notices by Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social), page 10

@adfeno I would still like to see a lisp'y / scheme'y language to replace autotools. civodul suggested at one point that we could have a scheme'y subset of a language /DSL that could run interpreted (and thus debuggability can be achieved) but which can also be compiled to shell, the way autoconf is, in the case where bootstrap-level portability is needed. I think that's a great idea.

Thanks to @dthompson for giving us the nice holiday gift of podcast (enclosure) support for atom feeds in Haunt. I did my own part for the patch-gift exchange for submitting a patch upstream that adds support for RSS feeds, too.

Happy patch-holidaze, everyone!

Peoples' treatment of others, peoples' talent are two independent variables... mostly:

- don't assume that if someone is sarcastic and a jerk, they're talented (the snarkist-is-smart antipattern)
- don't assume that if someone is talented, they must treat other people well... you'll be surprised how often this is untrue
- HOWEVER: it's important that talented people *SHOULD* be kind, treat their peers well, because many good things come from *communities*.

Dear voicemail service where I just sat through a person's long pre-record message: if the mailbox is full, why didn't you just tell me that up front

@doctorow direct link to the full story https://reason.com/archives/2018/11/17/sole-and-despotic-dominion

Everyone should read @doctorow's new short story, written as a helpdesk conversation https://boingboing.net/2018/11/17/property-rights-vs-copyrights.html

It really is short, it'll only take you 3-5 minutes, but it's worth it

wow, how did I miss the rollout of the Web Crypto API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Crypto_API

that's great

@craigmaloney @Greg Yeah I hear that. Though I don't mean to leave this as pessimism or fatalism. Let me reframe what message I wish to get across:

We aren't the sum of our previous generation's fuckups. We *all* have a debt to the next generation, even if the previous generations didn't, as a whole, succeed for us. We can't use that as an excuse to care for the generations to come... that would be unfair to them.

Excited about Guix integration with Software Heritage APIs https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-11/msg00285.html

gen-z followers: it'll happen to you soon too, sooner than ya think

unless civilization really does end and you get to be the last generation to reach that stage, in which case I guess not, you win that game (???)

Fellow millennials always complaining about how gen-x & baby boomers ruined everything now can look forward to gen-z complaining about us the same way. (happens sooner than you think; that's how time works)

Number one complaint, I anticipate, is not stopping the world from becoming uninhabitable. Which, true complaint.

setting up the shell of the librelounge.org website using Haunt

why wouldn't you want to define your website layout in sexps, just sayin'

Well the exploits start comin' and they don't stop comin' https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/spectre-meltdown-researchers-unveil-7-more-speculative-execution-attacks/

time to get off my computer, I have friends coming over for tabletop gaaaaaaames (and I gotta do a quick grocery run)

Good article: "Illuminating the Dark Web: It might sound scary, but the ‘dark web’ is not much different from the rest of the internet" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/illuminating-the-dark-web/

have I mentioned how much I hate the term "dark web"

And now that I participated in the imperfect democracy of which I'm a citizen, it's time to share the video "The Problems with First Past the Post Voting Explained" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

Explains clearly why a winner-take-all system is a badly designed voting system and why it always, always converges on a two party system

Oh yeah, if you'd like to see me speak on Tues Nov 06 in the Boston area, I'll be on a panel at this ocap conference hosted at the ACM's SPLASH conference https://2018.splashcon.org/track/ocap-2018-papers

Oh shit, IBM buys Red Hat https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-ibm-creating-leading-hybrid-cloud-provider

Gotta say I'm pretty nervous this will be pretty bad for free software

Wow the FOSDEM room lineup looks pretty great this year: https://fosdem.org/2019/news/2018-10-14-accepted-developer-rooms/

Decentralized Internet and Privacy?
RISC-V?
Microkernels and Component-based OS?
Minimalistic Languages?
CAD and Open Hardware?
Retrocomputing???

That's my kind of jam right there

Someone wrote to the GNU Guix mailing list asking to drop the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct in favor of the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines. I like Ludovic Courtès (Guix's founder/co-maintainer)'s response http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-10/msg00436.html