Fabio Natali @fabionatali@mastodon.social

With the qualities that digital information has, you really need to treat it like toxic waste. When we say "Information wants to be free", it's not a rallying cry, it's a description of an (often dangerous) quality of digital data. It's like saying "U²³⁵ wants to be fissile."

@polymerwitch I think the main way to frustrate corporations is to move away from creating systems which are fixated upon scalability and to embrace the small tech approach. That way the source code can be out there, and they can ignore the licenses as much as they want, but the things we produce won't be highly useful to them without them needing to do a lot of re-engineering.

So we could keep copyleft, but also adopt other tactics to get to a better situation than today.

I wrote an article about the need for low-carbon and #sustainable #computing and the path towards zero-carbon computing.

tl;dr:

** The problem:
* By 2040 emissions from computing alone will be close to half the emissions level acceptable to keep global warming below 2°C. This growth in computing emissions is unsustainable: it would make it virtually impossible to meet the emissions warming limit.
* The emissions from production of computing devices far exceed the emissions from operating them, so even if devices are more energy efficient producing more of them will make the emissions problem worse. Therefore we must extend the useful life of our computing devices.
** The solution:
As a society we need to start treating computational resources as finite and precious, to be utilised only when necessary, and as effectively as possible. We need frugal computing: achieving the same results for less energy.
** The vision: please read the article, I'm out of characters.

https://wimvanderbauwhede.github.io/articles/frugal-computing/

The Prusik Knot
Excellent knot to climb up the mast, it uses no mechanical gizmos that might fail, it's easy to slip up and down the halyard, and it locks tightly under pressure. It's a useful one to know 🤘

Therapist: "So what's wrong?"

Me: "My last therapist made me use Zoom"

Therapist: "Oh... Oh my"

I will do a workshop on 17th July about reproducible wheels and dependency management for your #Python project. To join in, please comment in https://github.com/kushaldas/workshops/issues/3 The goal is to have better #security model in your #dependency management. Please RT for more reach.

Hi all! We're the folks behind Co-op Cloud (https://coopcloud.tech), a project which aims to build out a digital configuration commons for tech co-ops and democratic tech collectives. Our approach aims to maximise sharing, co-operation and reuse for setting up and maintaining libre software infrastructure. We have a public matrix room at `#coopcloud:autonomic.zone`, feel welcome! The project is currently in public alpha and super young ☁️ 🎩 💻
#introductions #tech #coops #coopcloud #commons

Github Copilot: initial thoughts from an English law perspective

https://decoded.legal/blog/2021/06/github-copilot-initial-thoughts-from-an-english-law-perspective

@orionholmes Matrix lets you choose which server you expose your metadata to, even one you host yourself.

Signal forces all metadata, including phone numbers, to be centralized on servers they control and could easily plaintext any time they want.

I'll take freedom over a walled garden any day.

Google and Microsoft have really ruined how people use email. Every other person use top posting. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

@codeberg I deleted my #GitHub account three years ago. I used it to contribute to Free Software projects that only use this proprietary platform. When I started using GitHub I constantly tried (and failed) to convince projects to self-host using Free Software instead. As more and more Free Software projects I care about moved to GitHub, I ended up using it daily and it made me sad.

I started the @fedeproxy project this year to federate projects out of GitHub.

Reading Emacs Literate DevOps made me want to return to using #Emacs #OrgMode after a break.

Turns out Org-Mode is great for documenting experiments. For example, I’m preparing for implementation of a client for an API provided to my employer. So I’ve set up an Org-Mode file to document my findings.

Right now I’m adding stuff like

#+NAME: token #+BEGIN_SRC shell :cache yes :var host=host-name cred=credentials curl -u $cred $host \ | jq '.path.to.token' \ | sed -e 's/^"//; s/"$//;' #+END_SRC

and reusing token in other snippets I collect along the way.

And this is awesome.

Next #Cryptoparty from #Berlin, online:
Tue, May 25th, 7pm CEST

- encrypt communication
- secure browsing
- encrypt harddisk or thumbdrives
- mobile security
- secure passwords
- free software

join here:
meet.systemli.org/CryptoPartyBerlin

https://cryptoparty.in/berlin/online

#privacy #security

My org is looking for an asciidoc or markdown toolchain consultant. We need templates and tooling that end up with PDF docs. It all needs to be FOSS, usable by people on Linux/Mac/Windows, and backed by git or svn. We're command line, emacs, vim types, but interested in guis too.

For reference, we have a Latex -> PDF repo: https://github.com/OpenTechStrategies/ots-doctools

If you're interested, hop into https://chat.opentechstrategies.com and say hi!

All leads appreciated. Feel free to circulate this notice. Thanks!

Looking for your friendly Guix hackers?

Search no more! They’re now on #guix (and #guix-hpc) on irc.libera.chat.

Both iOS and Desktop are nearing the major 1.20 "Delta Chat becomes a full-blown e-mail app" milestone ... curling it up-hill issue by issue like good old Sisyphos -- which you may imagine as a happy person ;)

#GNU #Guile 3.0.6 released! 🎉
https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news/gnu-guile-306-released.html

Among the highlights are the inclusion of a bundled mini-GMP, a new ‘read’ in #Scheme, and various optimizations.