self

the thrill of UB: you try to dereference a C reactionary but get a lambda calculus neoreactionary instead

I knew Wolfram was a massive asshole, but I didn’t know or forgot that Mathematica was based on appropriated publicly-owned work:

In the mid-1980s, Wolfram had a position at the University of Illinois-Urbana's Beckman Institute for complex systems. While there, he and collaborators developed the program Mathematica, a system for doing mathematics, particularly algebraic transformations and finding exact-form solutions, similar to a number of other products (Maple, Matlab, Macsyma, etc.), which began to appear around the same time. Mathematica was good at finding exact solutions, and also pretty good at graphics. Wolfram quit Illinois, took the program private, and entered into complicated lawsuits with both his former employee and his co-authors (all since settled).

and on that note, Symbolics did effectively the same thing with Macsyma (and a ton of other public software on top of that, all to drive sales of their proprietary Lisp machines), but a modernized direct descendent of the last publicly-owned version of Macsyma named Maxima is available and should run wherever Common Lisp does. it’s a pretty good replacement for a lot of what Mathematica does, and the underlying language is a lot less batshit too

the C reactionaries[*] I know definitely aren’t ok, but that’s not a new condition. the cognitive load of never, ever writing bugs takes its toll, you know?

[*] and I feel like I have to specify here: your average C dev probably isn’t a C reactionary, but the type of fuckhead who uses C to gatekeep systems development definitely is

we really shouldn’t have let Microsoft both fork an editor and buy GitHub, of course they were gonna turn one into a really shitty version of the other

anyway check this extremely valuable suggestion from Copilot in one of their screenshots:

The error message 'userld and score are required' is unclear. It should be more specific, such as 'Missing userld or score in the request body'.

aren’t you salivating for a Copilot subscription? it turns a lazy error message into… no that’s still lazy as shit actually, who is this for?

• a human reading this still needs to consult external documentation to know what userId and score are
• a machine can’t read this
• if you’re going for consistent error messages or you’re looking to match the docs (extremely likely in a project that’s in production), arbitrarily changing that error so it doesn’t match anything else in the project probably isn’t a great idea, and we know LLMs don’t do consistency

damn

I want that album

also, what’s a funny subdomain for this kind of thing?

oh this is almost definitely real, given that the regular PIP process was already designed to get you to quit

a quick interest check: I kind of want to use our deployment’s spare capacity to host an invite-only WriteFreely instance where our regulars can host longer form articles

…but WriteFreely’s UI is so sub-optimal the official instance (write.as) runs a proprietary fork with a lot of the jank removed, and I don’t really consider WF to be production ready out of the box.

we can point the WF backend at arbitrary directories for its templates, page definitions, and static assets though, so maybe I could host those on codeberg and do a CI job that’d pull main every time it updates so we could collaboratively improve WF’s frontend? it’s not a job I want to take on alone (our main instance needs to take priority), but a community-run WF instance would be pretty unique

the pros of doing this are that WriteFreely at least seems to have very slim resource requirements and it’ll at least reliably host long form Markdown on the web

the downsides are again, it’s janky as fuck (it only supports Mailgun of all things for email, but if you disable that the frontend will still claim it can send password reset emails… but it’ll check the config and display an error if you click the reset link??? but they could have just hidden the reset UI entirely with the same logic???? also I don’t like the editing experience), and it’s not really what I’d consider federated — it shoots an Article into ActivityPub whenever you post, but it’s one-way so replies, boosts, and favorites won’t show up from ActivityPub which makes it feel a bit pointless. there might be a frontend-only way to link a blog post to the Mastodon or Lemmy thread it’s associated with on another instance though, which would allow for a type of comment system? but I haven’t looked much into it. write.as just has a separate proprietary service for comments that nobody else can use.

this definitely won’t replace Wordpress but does it sound like an interesting project to take on?

this is what the cloud and its enshittification has taken from us

shared root on ad-hoc hardware doing fuck knows what (but it’s probably lemonparty)

and here’s hoping the American nationalist devs contributing on behalf of their military-industrial complex employer (hello Anduril) take a hint from this and also fuck off to their own communities where they can bully each other for no fucking reason

they won’t because the cruelty is the point for fascists regardless of nation, but here’s hoping

oh no, a bunch of nationalist pricks might stop fucking up our community spaces. I might never have a proud Russian gatekeep my contributions ever again! no please don’t go

oof, I’m sorry. it’s so hard to get capitalists to understand the nature of what they’re enabling, especially if it seems to be working in the short term. it’s the most frustrating thing during a bubble — it taints every decision the executive class makes, and enables grifters to get away with obvious shit even over objections from people who know better.