Notices by Dual Number (endomain@hackers.town)

Yo: understand your need to conserve and to think environmentally. But:

It is okay to want things. Minimalism is bougie nonsense.

@bram I agree but... I feel like it's also the case that folks use this nature as an excuse to deflect systemic deficiencies in the Open Source community. Examples:

1. A contempt for even the most basic UX considerations for normal people.

2. A refusal to think about the interface needs of people with different UX needs (e.g., people with poor close range vision or the inability to hear). Even simple stuff like using a colorblind-friendly palette or making sure that blinking UI elements don't go into the danger zone for epilepsy.

3. An insistence on supporting collector hardware rather than real hardware. This is often coupled with a "not all of us can affor da modern computer so this is why I want to support my retro-designer Z80 dev board but not ARM linux that costs 10x what a RPi3 does."

If a nice feature is missing, we should be understandng and thankful. If someone decided red and green were good colors to use for critically differentiated UI, I think criticism and a bit of anger is fair.

@npisanti

Sure, but most if not all of our primary computing devices have some degree of closed source component. That's a dimension to be minimized, but if it's a deal breaker you can't even buy Olimex.

The net positive of having cheap, youth focused single board computers is big IMO, and if we start uniquely penalizing them when most of our hardware is full of things in the same condition, that's not very good for the community.

I already see folks in your mentions saying that having a closed source component currently owned by a big tech company that Slashdot hates is a deal breaker, and that's probably a bad meme.

Neural networks harness the power inherent in light to perform recognition on handwritten digit by embedding the framework in glass.

This is astounding.

https://hackaday.com/2019/07/16/neural-network-in-glass-requires-no-power-recognizes-numbers/

This admonition also extends to people who think developer and user accessibility (both cognitively and physically) is always less important than efficiency.

You're just wrong. Electron as an engine may be inefficient and poorly maintained, but as a developer experience it's a zillion times better than whatever C++ backed Qt environment you're pushing as somehow equivalent when it requires a huge amount more effort to learn and use safely and provide good accessibility with.

This is amazing an my friends in anarchist walkaway culture who haven't seen t yet may get excited. It's a low resolution 3d Printer for recycled plastic!

https://www.trashprinter.org/

Every time I look at my laptop I am torn between my love of cute stickers and my absolute contempt for the backs of Boomer's cars festooned with political and product advertisements.

My other worry is that people don't seem to get that by assuming the primary role of an integrator higher and higher up the stack, they're ceding their hardware and their freedom to folks making those tools. If you don't understand how the pieces below you fit together (at least roughly, if not at a line-by-line level) then you're pretty much doomed to always be at someone else's mercy, because you've convinced yourself you have to be subservient to them otherwise you won't have a computing platform.

I am worried to see Librem get in on the VPN business.

This seems like a chilling conversation for Americans:

Sometimes I think the reason that folks think Chrome leaks memory so much is because the said "yes" to push notifications once and now they're in a botnet.