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skyfaller

1,043 karma · joined February 23, 2009

He/him. Fighting for climate justice
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skyfaller··on Thermoelectric heating stands at the brink of commercialization
To steelman your proposal, I should mention that Low-Tech Magazine thinks you're on to something, although they suggest putting the panels on the stove inside the cabin: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/05/thermoelectric-sto...

I disagree with that article for the simple reason that I do not consider burning wood to be sustainable, or healthy for anything with lungs. Wood should be used for long-lasting construction or left alone / carefully nurtured to aid our forests in rebuilding biodiversity.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/07/world/europe/...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/27/wood-b...

But if you're going to burn wood anyhow, perhaps thermoelectric stoves aren't a terrible way to generate electricity for yourself.

skyfaller··on The Ornate Bird Palaces of Ottoman-Era Turkey (2017)
Low-tech Magazine covered pigeon towers, as previously mentioned on HN:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/10/pigeon-towers-a-lo...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31885525

skyfaller··on Foot – A fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator
I was very impressed with Foot on my MNT Reform, where I was having trouble getting Alacritty to work (hardware issues too difficult to overcome, and I say that as someone who was able to apply a patch to make Alacritty run on my Pinebook Pro before the mainline version supported the hardware). Foot installed and ran like a breeze, and never felt slow even with pretty minimal hardware.
skyfaller··on The SEC cracks down on greenwashing
Cory Doctorow made a pretty good case that carbon offsets are a market for lemons, where good credits will inevitably be driven out of the market by bad credits. After all, it's always cheaper to do nothing than to do something (if you're not considering negative externalities, or the long term). https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#greenwash...
skyfaller··on Wet-bulb temperature
I hate speaking negatively about Ministry for the Future, because I admire KSR, and we need fiction that confronts the climate crisis and shows people taking positive action to change the world for the better. Still, I sadly cannot recommend this book. To quote from my spoileriffic review,

"This does not help us imagine realistic positive outcomes to the climate crisis. Robinson correctly diagnoses the threats we face and immerses the reader in a very plausible near future. Unfortunately, any happy ending feels unearned as the world is essentially saved through magic, as humans/society respond in vanishingly unlikely ways."

https://bookwyrm.social/user/skyfaller/review/381179/s/compe...

skyfaller··on New responsibilities
I use Gnome Web to test websites with the WebKit engine from Linux. I'd be curious if there any other good WebKit browser options: I wasn't able to find anything else that I could easily install. (Nyxt apparently supports WebKit, but installing it is a pain, and I actually don't understand how to use their browser.)

I will say that I wish they had stuck with the Epiphany name. It was much easier to search for, either in web search engines or in order to launch it in Gnome with whatever their Spotlight clone is called.

skyfaller··on Tired of Dating Apps, Some Turn to Google Docs
This sort of long-form writing is what attracted me to OkCupid once upon a time, before it was bought out by Match.com and gradually enshittified. I feel like there is a niche for dating people who like long-form reading and writing still, instead of the swipe left and right on one picture format popularized by Tinder.

Potential problems:

- Launching a dating app from scratch; where do you get your first users if you're ethical and refuse to fake users? (If you're not ethical, people could just use existing unethical dating sites with fake users.)

- Keeping the business from being bought out by Match.com and enshittified, just like its predecessors

- Developing a business model that doesn't incentivize unethical behavior, as OkCupid famously pointed out before it was bought out: https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpa...

I'm probably posting on the wrong forum, but I don't think VC-backed startups can solve this problem. You need maybe a worker-owned co-op, or an open source non-profit like Mastodon, to have any hope of resisting the pressures of capitalism that ultimately ruin all these sites.

skyfaller··on BlockSuite: An open-source Notion-like editor with multiplayer support
Any chance this might interact with Block Protocol in any way? https://blockprotocol.org/

The obvious immediate benefit to this would be native editing of Wordpress blocks for your website. But if this became standardized and usable both locally and on the web, it could open up all sorts of interesting use cases.

skyfaller··on Lemmy stats (users, posts, nodes, comments)
Yet another stats page, this one includes kbin too:

https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse

Lemmy and kbin are theoretically both compatible with each other, as well as with less-closely related projects like Mastodon, because they are all part of the Fediverse using the same ActivityPub standard protocol. (In practice, there are bugs because this is alpha software, and some aspects of running a link aggregator aren't in the ActivityPub standard and thus implementations differ, but it's really cool when federation works between different codebases.)

skyfaller··on How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century? (2021)
I think we can/should greatly reduce use of plastics by eliminating single-use plastic wherever possible. This mostly requires political will / habit changes. Although creating circular systems for e.g. food containers has its challenges, it's not moon shot difficult, we have these systems on small scales and we just need more people to use them.

I agree that fertilizer is a very difficult problem, it's possibly the hardest problem related to fossil fuels. Low-Tech Mag has covered this to some degree, and I'm in awe of the scale of the issue, as well as the dire effects of not figuring it out (people starving). https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/03/urban-fish-ponds-l... To some degree, I figure we'll just have to accept fertilizer as the last legitimate use of fossil fuels until we completely rebuild our farms / food production and sewage systems to be circular.

skyfaller··on How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century? (2021)
Good news, 40% of all shipping is fossil fuels, so if we abandon fossil fuels, the shipping problem gets significantly smaller: https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-c...
skyfaller··on Paper map sales are booming
According to CNet, with Google Maps "Transit, bicycling and walking directions are also not available offline -- only driving directions." https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/why-you-shou...

So Google Maps offline may actually be useless for hiking? This would also explain why I had trouble using Google Maps offline on my last bike trip.

skyfaller··on Twitterrific has been discontinued
I use Fritter and love it, thank you for your efforts! It's a great way to open Twitter links when necessary, since I've deleted the official app from my phone and I'm trying not to log in to my account for now.

Could you say a little about how Fritter works without an API key? Is it just because it isn't designed for posting or interacting with Twitter, just reading/viewing it? Why/how does Fritter still work when Twitterrific etc. are dead? Are you just, like, scraping the website? Isn't Twitter making it harder to read tweets from the open web when you're not logged in?

skyfaller··on Open Source in Environmental Sustainability
Is the fact that Shell is a member of the Green Software Foundation a bad sign?

I also see the Green Web Foundation is a member of the GSF, and I do trust that organization, so this is a genuine question. https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/

skyfaller··on Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists
I don't remember direct links to Twitter being so prevalent until recently. Is it... time to reconsider this? Twitter no longer seems like a reliable source for anything except Elon Musk himself, since he presumably won't suddenly suspend himself, or block links to things he wants to link to.
skyfaller··on Atom was archived today
Or another way to phrase it is that the experience sucks equally on all platforms, so you might as well switch to Linux.
skyfaller··on PeerTube v5: the result of 5 years’ handcrafting
Thanks for mentioning tilvids.com! You got me to subscribe to like my second Peertube channel: https://tilvids.com/c/veronicaexplains_channel

I'll say that the depth and breadth of topics still seems lacking (lots of meta content about FOSS and the fediverse, which is only interesting to early adopters), but if it becomes easier to start, join, and use Peertube instances, I feel confident this will change over time.

skyfaller··on Mozilla launches venture fund to fuel responsible tech companies
I guess "directly related" is more controversial than I thought. I would call these indirectly supporting Firefox, and in line with Mozilla's mission.

Building public documentation for free doesn't directly help Firefox's market share, improve the browser, fix bugs, or financially get them out from under Google's thumb. Nor does building an experimental browser engine that they do not intend to use. They may help with these things, but it requires a few steps to explain how.

skyfaller··on Mozilla launches venture fund to fuel responsible tech companies
Although I understand your sentiment, there was a big uproar (rightly so) when Mozilla cut a lot of stuff that wasn't directly related to Firefox, such as MDN web docs or the experimental Servo browser engine. Building a healthy and innovative ecosystem requires not developing tunnel vision. Having a future requires investing in the future as well as the present.

Some would no doubt consider incubating their own programming language, Rust, to be a distraction, but it's a clear benefit to programming / computer safety that they did, and presumably makes Firefox more fun to work on since programmers famously enjoy Rust.

Focus is good, but like most good things it's best in moderation, otherwise you reach diminishing returns while sacrificing everything else that matters.

skyfaller··on Rewind: The Search Engine for Your Life
It appears to no longer be open source: https://community.memex.garden/t/is-memex-going-closed-sourc...
skyfaller··on Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet (2021)
I think that something people often forget in "free speech" discussions about hateful and dangerous people like Kiwi Farms is that while deplatforming someone can be seen as an evil, killing or imprisoning them certainly would be worse. When you have an organization that promotes violence like the Christchurch shooter, when they begin to use violence in the real world, you will have to (a) kill or imprison them to stop them from hurting others, and/or (b) allow them to kill and injure others.

If you see deplatforming people as a preventative measure to keep from having to kill and imprison them (not to mention the harm they will do before you can stop them), then it seems like the morally best thing you can do for these haters.

Sadly our culture loves cleaning up things after the fact instead of deploying an ounce of prevention. This is how you end up trying to "harden" every possible target, like schools, installing metal detectors and buying children bulletproof backpacks, instead of just limiting guns. Not only is this expensive, impossible and ineffective, it makes everyone's life worse in innumerable ways.

Even before a killer is radicalized by KF, or a SWAT team is sent to someone's house, allowing this harassment to spread just makes the world a worse place to live. Everyone believes in some moderation, otherwise they would be fighting for the right of spammers to spam, and burying any platform they control under mountains of junk. Once we've established that everyone allows moderation in order for communications to function at all, we're just haggling over how many people we're willing to kill with lax moderation, and how nightmarish we're willing to let our "public squares" get before doing something.

skyfaller··on RIPE meetings: IP addresses as spoils of war
It may not directly help that ISP, but increasing numbers of the people living in that territory will be Russian invaders, as the Ukrainians living there are murdered or deported. And helping the invaders is problematic.

It may indirectly help that ISP or other ISPs in the future if the world makes a general policy of not supporting looting of IP addresses or anything else. If profits from looting are reduced, it may make invasions less likely, as both the rank & file and the leaders/oligarchs have less to gain. And people working at ISPs would generally benefit from their country not being invaded.

skyfaller··on Wiby.me: curated search engine for content-first suckless sites
This is apparently FOSS under the GPLv2: https://github.com/wibyweb/wiby/

FWIW I don't see any mention of suckless on Wiby itself, so the headline may be misleading. As someone who has a negative impression of the suckless community, despite agreeing with their goals of "keeping things simple, minimal and usable", this matters.

skyfaller··on Old tech is haunted
Medium has https://scribe.rip/
skyfaller··on The AT Protocol
Consider how worried people are about Google Chrome's browser market share, and how Google is increasingly able to dictate details of the web unilaterally. The Web is made of standardized protocols, but Google has significant control over it.

Consider the state of email, a standardized protocol, where Gmail is dominant, and anything that can't deliver to Gmail is practically irrelevant, no matter whether it follows the protocol.

Now consider Bluesky. If Twitter supports the AT protocol early, it would be by far the largest implementation, meaning that Twitter practically controls it. It would be like Gmail for email, except there are no other options to begin with. If Twitter does not support AT protocol early, then AT protocol will be irrelevant, and other networks like the ActivityPub Fediverse will continue to outpace it.

skyfaller··on The AT Protocol
Can anyone explain why Bluesky is making a new protocol instead of using ActivityPub like Mastodon? What advantages would it have over ActivityPub? https://activitypub.rocks/ Worth noting that ActivityPub is an official W3C recommended standard.

Is it just Not Invented Here syndrome? This could lead to https://xkcd.com/927/

skyfaller··on A gentler, better way to change minds
This is a "trick" that Socrates was famous for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_questioning

Many of his contemporaries hated his guts and ultimately they condemned him to death. It may be a good way to keep an open mind, but it may also be a terrible way to make friends and influence people.

skyfaller··on How to build a personal webpage from scratch
There's also a ... newer version? at https://validator.w3.org/nu/

I'm not 100% sure what the difference is, but you can see the source code at https://github.com/validator/validator and report any issues.

skyfaller··on How to build a personal webpage from scratch
I think it's still worth knowing how to host the website locally, even if it is only available on your local machine / LAN. Having to go through the deploy step and wait a couple minutes every time to view the tiniest changes is not very good, especially in the early stages of writing a website from scratch when you may be making a lot of mistakes.

Since I use Hugo to build personal sites, running `hugo server` locally produces a local version of my website that I can view in my browser at localhost:1313/ and which auto-reloads with every change. Hugo builds incremental changes almost instantly.

skyfaller··on How to build a personal webpage from scratch
Another source explaining optional HTML in depth: https://meiert.com/en/blog/optional-html/
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