D Dino @garbados@toot.cat

through the looking glass of all your terrors, the sorrow that drives you to cower reflects the will that drives you to fight.

for those wondering how to establish trade relations with crows:

- feed crows food A regularly
- when crows decide to bring you gifts, feed them food B
- when crows bring you different categories of gifts, feed them a food-per-category, ex: food C for jewelry, food D for paper money, etc
- crows will recognize these exchange patterns and opt to bring you things in order to acquire desired treats

good luck! 🐦

the internet depends on people like this

No one needs to starve. No one needs to freeze. No one needs to die. There is enough for everyone. More empty homes than all the people without them, more food than grocers can even sell. The labor and the materials to end scarcity exist now. It is not a far-off dream. We can end scarcity in this life.

the biggest section still missing from the essay is this: avoid software if you can, and instead invest time and knowledge and resources in the communities that sustain you. it’s well and good if you can afford to spend five years making a software platform with a novel protocol to do something slightly more efficiently, but if you can give your community the same outcome by strapping together physical trashware, i’d say go with trashware. we can’t all be sysadmins but there’s no architecture that doesn’t need them, so become if you can the sysadmin your community needs.

be the one who can say “need a seedbox? i can help you with that”

i drafted this essay because i often wonder about what i should be building or working on. i have severe mental issues that limit how much coherence i have available, and in strange times like this i feel like i need all of it just to survive. but sometimes i’ve got the energy to make a little difference, and i want to know where to make that difference. what to work on as a volunteer can be a daunting choice.

this essay is just the beginning of explaining and exploring architectural tradeoffs in distributed software. i’m not an expert, just an adamant hedge witch, but i’ve seen enough gilded towers gone up in smoke and built enough towers besides to have opinions. maybe they’re bad opinions — i’m always happy to be disabused of half-baked ideas — but nevertheless they’re opinions i forget. i want to remember what i think as counsel for what i do, but it’s hard when you only sometimes know what’s real.

anyway thanks for reading. i’ll post a final draft on my blog.

a “takes omnibus” if you will

ok nerds here is a draft of this essay

> # Comparative Considerations Regarding Distributed Software Architectures

> Together we are strong. Knowing this, how can we write good software?

https://gist.github.com/garbados/cd3d5b382834e73645513df24e08d5ec

Self-hosting makes a decent demo but in the production case an application must support many users, even when many users are one person or one user is many persons, for some of us are not sysadmins but inevitably some of us must be.

sorry these are all excerpts from an essay on comparative software architectures

These are strange times. The earth shifts beneath us. Can you taste the ash in the air, or the plastic in the water? The police are outside. The police are inside. The misery in your money and the meager choices it affords arrive from one spirit, our foe whose name is the kyriarchy, and it mutters of a wretched future. We will face it together. Together we are strong.

Do not build a browser.

This is an ominous time. Napster is long dead. Aaron Swartz, too. Software is bad, but it doesn't have to be. From BitTorrent to Mastodon, distributed systems leverage the power of many to astonishing effect. Among archivists, pirates reign.

Software is post-scarcity tooling. Strip the paywalls; underneath they have always been a new order of labor-saving device, one that can be infinitely copied and infinitely shared. Rich promises live in its possibility; promises the rich have betrayed, possibilities they have squandered.

Should you publish source? What if corpers steal it? Of course you should publish source. Property is theft.

the year is 2030 and major kusanagi is a scabware voice assistant with a gun and an egg chassis on wheels

amazed that software works in the world of gits:sac. what an optimistic future,,

major kusanagi is a... a cop?

and the humans and the wolves migrated together, for hunting and for headpats