kfogel

Thank you for this informative comment, and I agree with the general idea in your Chesterton's Fence point.

When the HOLC provides wording, they do so in response to a request from an elected member or that member's staff, right? What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter whether provenance is found via the commit author or via some other change-associated metadata -- the key thing is making precise change provenance trackable and (perhaps after some predefined delay) public. This would mainly aid journalists.

Is the HOLC currently functioning as an anonymizing service for changes to in-progress legislation? And if so, is that by design, or more by gradual and organic evolution?

Fundamentally, if we can't get at that provenance information in a reliable way right now at all, then version-control-style tracking would be a pretty big qualitative change in how things are done: information that wasn't available, except through unofficial channels, would now be available (again, maybe with some time delay or whatever, but in the long run it would be available). On the other hand, if that information is currently obtainable but is just not easy to obtain, then this would be more of an incremental improvement: since journalists and others with the requisite know-how could get the information right now, but maybe have to jump through hoops to do so, this would just reduce the number or height of the hoops.

I don't know which of those two scenarios best describes reality, but maybe you do?

NYT, 2007:

"... Think of what version control software could mean for the Congress [...]. If bills were created under a system where strike-throughs and additions were carefully tracked, the public would know which legislator made which change to a proposed piece of legislation as it made its way through the Capitol.

At last, there would be transparency in the legislative process. Best-case scenario, it would shame legislators from inserting language against the public interest and only meant to reward political contributors; at worst, it would make such insertions public and allow the voters to punish the politicians who made them. ..."

(from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/business/media/23link.htm... )

I will be paying the new rate, and with pleasure. LWN is great.

Can't believe they didn't call it VouchDB.

We are happy to be providing this public service :-). I wish the term were better known outside tech; it's useful in so many contexts.

So many stories like this about Slack.

We use Zulip (https://zulip.org/) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.

Wow. This project was the cause of a very long and intense discussion about mis-use of the term "open source". See https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40#issuecomment-5397146... for details (lands mid-thread -- you might want to scroll back to see the start, and if you read the whole thing to the end then you deserve some sort of award!).

TL;DR: The author originally tried to call n8n "open source" but while using a non-open-source license. After much discussion, he kept the license but stopped using the label "open source", to the relief of many people.

That half-decade-old thread is still what I point to when I want to explain to someone why preserving the specificity of the term "open source" matters.

Xlife

I believe it implements Bill Gosper's hashlife quadtree algorithm (already mentioned elsewhere in the comments here).

Xlife is unbelievably fast.

Most of the comments so far are about the temperature and the closeness to the sun, and, hey, I get it: those are both amazing to think about. But to me even more amazing is... 0.16% of the speed of light?? Yikes.

That part about "...you wouldn’t want to wing it with the configuration, because allegedly you could break your monitor with a bad Monitor setting" -- strike the "allegedly"! Or at least, let me allege it from personal experience: I did that to one monitor, in the early 1990s. You could smell the fried electronics from across the room.

Just ordered. Thank you :-).

Got it -- I appreciate the explanation.

AHHHH, that's the key thing I didn't know (I have a Raspberry Pi sitting in a drawer and have played with it embarrassingly little -- I didn't realize how important having the SPI or other special interface is in this context). Thank you again.

Thank you. My idea was more the opposite: do it with a normal laptop or desktop computer driving the display, rather than a tiny microcontroller. I guess I'm assuming that either the display's USB input supplies enough voltage to run the display, or that the display has a separate power supply -- i.e., that there's nothing magical about a Raspberry Pi that makes it supply special bits or special voltages to these displays that can't be supplied by, say, my desktop computer.

Does anyone know why projects like this always seem to specify using a particular type of tiny, low-power computer (usually a Raspberry Pi or something similar) to drive the display?

I already have plenty of non-tiny computers that run Debian GNU/Linux. Suppose I wanted to run an e-paper display from one of those computers, using this code, just via a normal USB cable. I could do that, right? There's no reason I would have to use a Raspberry Pi or something similar?

The most important factor in my learning Emacs was doing it in a room with experienced Emacs users. I really strongly recommend doing this if you possibly can. A few minutes of an experienced user shoulder-surfing while I worked, and giving advice on better ways to do things, was worth hours of self-directed study.

Get together with experienced users in person and have them watch you edit. That's it.

There are algorithms where I think "Sure, with enough time and attention given to the problem, I might have thought of that." And then there are algorithms where I think "Oh, wow. That came from another planet. I would never have come up with that myself."

This one is definitely in the latter category.

Very happy user of a System76 Lemur Pro laptop (i7, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD) for the past year, FWIW. I'm running stock Debian on it, not System76's Pop!_OS.

I get the kind of battery life the review mentions if I put the laptop into "Power Saver" mode. In "Balanced" or especially in "Performance" mode the battery doesn't last as long, of course. So when I can't be plugged in, I put it into Power Saver mode (this is super easy via the Gnome upper-right settings popup panel; I assume it would be just as easy in other window managers).

I got great customer service from System76 when I ran into a hitch at the start of my Debian installation process (TL;DR: see Debian bugs #1024346 and #1024720 -- the file ".disk/info" existed on the pre-installed Pop!_OS partition; getting rid of that enabled the installation to continue). System76 support went above and beyond the call of duty in tracking this down and solving it, considering that I was installing an OS that wasn't even officially supported by them.

Happy customer; would buy again; I get no commission for any of this -- I just want to see the company flourish so they're still there when it's time for me to upgrade my laptop!

The linked page is on signalusers.org, but Signal's regular home site is https://signal.org/.

I'm looking all over signal.org for some link from there to signalusers.org, as that would make me more relaxed about the authenticity of the latter -- i.e., that it really is run by the same people who run signal.org.

Yes, maybe I'm being paranoid. But we're talking about an app whose whole purpose is secure communications :-).

Please consider editing the original question's headline to specify "HTML" too :-).

Otherwise a reader might think (as I did) that you're asking a question the answer to which could be LibreOffice Writer or other things like that.

If you liked this article, you might also like the book "The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World" by Patrick Nunn (Bloomsbury, 2018).

https://patricknunn.org/writing/books/the-edge-of-memory-anc...

The book gives many more examples, along with a lot of corroborating geological evidence.

Just following up to say thank you, @Daeraxa and @jjgreen, for the examples.

@mdwalters, good luck with the text editor, and @wmf we may not personally agree on the AGPL but we do agree on the usefulness of the OSI doing this research!

Not mixed feelings here: I wish they wouldn't do that. No doubt it was meant as respectful homage, but the effect is to flatten and obscure his particular qualities, because they have no specific connection to this product.

Po Lu's port of GNU Emacs to Android has been approved, pending a couple of minor checks, to be merged into the main Emacs tree and thereafter maintained in-project like any other supported architecture.

(Editorial commentary: This is an amazing piece of work by Po Lu. Yes, it works on LineageOS. Users / testers / contributors welcome, as always!)

I was also confused by the lack of mention of the author's name -- it's a very odd omission.

Did they say which Creative Commons license? I missed it if they did. Oh wait, if you click through to the repository you can see it: CC-BY-SA.

Good! That's a relief. CC-BY and CC-BY-SA are effectively like open source licenses, as is the quasi-license CC0, whereas the other CC licenses are not due to restrictions on derivative works or on certain kinds of use.

WANT. Marcin Wichary has been researching everything about keyboards, everything adjacent to everything about keyboards, and everything adjacent to everything adjacent to everything about keyboards for over a year now. I've been looking forward to this book ever since I first heard that he was working on it.

Warning -- fan comment follows:

This is a terrific article. She makes a solid & important point, she gives plenty of examples, and she brings in some related research that you may not have heard about (I hadn't) and which makes you realize that's there's more out there to learn.

There's a whole book about this, FWIW:

"Screenwise", by Devorah Heitner (see https://devorahheitner.com/screenwise/).

"Citation needed" :-).

There have been occasional examples of misbehavior and ignoring the license terms of certain FOSS licenses, but by and large almost everyone -- including corporations -- does abide by them. The common licenses are well-written, legally solid, and most lawyers (again, and most importantly, including corporate lawyers) agree they would be enforceable in court.

I don't know if you've had a bad experience with releasing free / open source software, and I'm sorry if you have. Many people have seen good results from doing it, and furthermore there's a baseline level of digital freedom now available that is entirely due to people producing such software. The most obvious example, of course, is that you can run a free operating system on your computer and thus not be at the mercy of gigantic tech companies when it comes to privacy, advertising nuisance, non-configurable user interfaces, etc.