Notices by Orbital Owl (zuph@octodon.social)

I'm in Puerto Rico this week, and yesterday I visited the Arecibo Observatory, the biggest single-dish telescope humanity has constructed. Owing to failing science budgets, an administrative disdain for Puerto Rico, and hurricane damage, the visitors center is now their single biggest source of income. They'll let almost anyone observe if they're able to cut a check, starting at just $500.

So it turns out you can put custom boot images on Lenovo laptops

3D Printing is awesome for small-scale manufacturing. But plastic is VERY limiting.

Metal printing is a thing, but it's protected by so many trade secrets, patents, etc. that it's effectively out of reach for us.

Except, it doesn't have to be so hard! Plenty of metals can be suspended in a binder, printed, and fired at ceramics-kiln temperatures (although gas purge and better control may be required). But binder/material specifics are locked away from us.

looks like the hackaday prize has officially jumped the shark: https://hackaday.com/2019/04/03/2019-hackaday-prize-begins-right-now/

In years past, this was a prize for explicitly open source developments for the good of all humanity.

This year, it's for explicitly commercial "product development".

🙄 🙄 🙄 🙄

"Oh, you want any of the conveniences of modern smartphones? Cool, choose which of two global megacorps get access to all your most personal info."

We live in the worst cyberpunk future.

I think a lot about how essential, unfun labor is organized in The Dispossessed and Anarresti society.

I would really love to duck out of work for a week every month to dig ditches, irrigate fields, build railways, and generally improve society. There's so much work to be done! But of course, we don't value that.

Holy Crap, GNU now has basically the worst possible CoC that could be written: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2018-10/msg00001.html

It's just a giant pile of dog-whistles and put-downs of women, PoC, and other minority groups. JFC.

@mayel @tethre @uranther I really like this as a mantra for giving one's self permission to not be super productive, too.

In programming terms, it's okay to not have a prototype done in a weekend (built on gigabytes of libraries and spinning up 12 VMs and a browser), especially if you've got to hold down a full time job to survive.

Less Erlich Bachman, more Tarn Adams.

@mayel @tethre @uranther I really like "Move slowly and fix things" as a mantra!

I, for one, am really fucking tired of the monetization of everything.