too tired to be touching bad computer rn

many such cases

not all implementations are as enlightened as honk

Volume 15 of my small attempt to keep track of… motions to everything

https://roiskinda.cool/2025/06/weekly-tidbits-vol-15.html

i fucking hate angular

uspol, trans

“transgender for everybody” “open borders” “socialist cities” damn dude why threaten me with a good time

#VibeCoding your MFA

that feeling of regret when you forget to bring a book to the comfy breezy chill spot :/

@astraleureka MORE LIKE TOKIN' RING (BONG NOISES)

orb v0.1.0 - tiny metasearch | https://nilfm.cc/orb.html

the programs i want to like but always break all the damn time are invariably written in python

making progress on orb, parsing ddg results and got a results page that looks ok. next is parsing another engine (marginalia probably) and aggregating results

2025-06-13

#theStudio #bespokeSynth

External Attachment:

dz: ec, selfie

happy pride! this (lightly color corrected) pic is from last month, ~2 years after starting transition, 19 months after starting HRT at 30. never be afraid to be true to yourself and live your best life

#pride #trans

free software, anarchism

not to pontificate too much but: the ethos that people should be empowered to solve their own problems together by freely associating into short- or long-lived collaborations is the foundation of free software. it also works. modern computing does not happen without self-directed volunteers working together to make it happen. we have 30+ years of evidence at this point.

the roc package was broken in the AUR. i didn't need anyone's permission to fix it. the original maintainer made me co-maintainer. i merged my changes into the original package. i do not know this person, we'll probably never meet, but we collaborated and Arch Linux is better for it. computing is kept afloat by a million interactions like this.

and like... this is anarchism. if anyone asks or is confused as to what it is, this is it. with 200+ years of theory about how to think about it and manage problems and scale etc but this is The Thing as far as i can tell. people solving problems together without coercion or central coordination.

committed anarchists make the leap of observing the effectiveness and morality of this kind of organizing and ask how to scale it to other aspects of society, to all aspects. and there are answers to those questions. but it feels like a big deal to me that modern computing in large part is made possible by a kind of informal anarchist organizing.

a persistent frustration of mine is free software people struggling to make the bridge between the two, and i blame anti-left american propaganda and a limited western educational systems...

While GCP and CF and all their downstream customers are having outages, this is the perfect time to read https://computer.rip. Computers Are Bad is, as always, hand-built, artisanal internet served directly to you from Albuquerque, New Mexico. You can rest assured that when it is down or slow or otherwise broken, it is because *I*, personally, have fucked up, or hardware has failed and I am on the way to Best Buy.

Am I bad for feeling a bit giddy about all the massive centralized services being down and causing disruption? This is exactly why we should cure tech people of their cloud fixation. It's easy until it all dies. https://downdetector.com/

local goddess thinks you aren’t worshipping who you think. local goddess thinks more of your dog than you because you had a choice and you failed it. local goddess thinks you will die like an animal because that is all your faith makes of you.

> PSA for people that haven't read or haven't yet seen, the Permacomputing collective recently rewrote their principles to be more readable https://permacomputing.net/Principles/

Thanks @msavoritias for the information

#Permacomputing

A user called in. She needs three internets.

We're thrilled to announce our new project:
https://docs.coop/

Building on the great work of Suite Numerique (https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/home/), we are offering an opportunity to be part of a new collaborative Docs platform as a service, that provides an ethical alternative to Google Docs, Office 365, Notion etc.

Docs is the result of a joint effort lead by the French 🥖 (DINUM) and German 🥨 (ZenDiS) governments which represents a paradigm shift in the way open source software is funded.

#workercoops #coops #FLOSS #privacy

New from me @ Fight For the Human: Unfortunately, you have to think about cause ☠️

https://www.fightforthehuman.com/unfortunately-you-have-to-think-about-cause/

cybernetic system that smiles as it decides whether to self-replicate or self-deprecate

corporate slavery resumed ><

Why Bell Labs worked so well, and could innovate so much, while today’s innovation, in spite of the huge private funding, goes in hype-and-fizzle cycles that leave relatively little behind, is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot in the past years.

And I think that the author of this article has hit the nail on its head on most of the reasons - but he didn’t take the last step in identifying the root cause.

What Bell Labs achieved within a few decades is probably unprecedented in human history:

• They employed folks like Nyquist and Shannon, who laid the foundations of modern information theory and electronic engineering while they were employees at Bell.

• They discovered the first evidence of the black hole at the center of our galaxy in the 1930s while analyzing static noise on shortwave transmissions.

• They developed in 1937 the first speech codec and the first speech synthesizer.

• They developed the photovoltaic cell in the 1940, and the first solar cell in the 1950s.

• They built the first transistor in 1947.

• They built the first large-scale electronic computers (from Model I in 1939 to Model VI in 1949).

• They employed Karnaugh in the 1950s, who worked on the Karnaugh maps that we still study in engineering while he was an employee at Bell.

• They contributed in 1956 (together with AT&T and the British and Canadian telephone companies) to the first transatlantic communications cable.

• They developed the first electronic musics program in 1957.

• They employed Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie, who created UNIX and the C programming language while they were Bell employees.

And then their rate of innovation suddenly fizzled out after the 1980s.

I often hear that Bell could do what they did because they had plenty of funding. But I don’t think that’s the main reason. The author rightly points out that Google, Microsoft and Apple have already made much more profit than Bell has ever seen in its entire history. Yet, despite being awash with money, none of them has been as impactful as Bell. Nowadays those companies don’t even innovate much besides providing you with a new version of Android, of Windows or the iPhone every now and then. And they jump on the next hype wagon (social media, AR/VR, Blockchain, AI…) just to deliver half-baked products that (especially in Google’s case) are abandoned as soon as the hype bubble bursts.

Let alone singlehandedly spear innovation that can revolutionize an entire industry, let alone make groundbreaking discoveries that engineers will still study a century later.

So what was Bell’s recipe that Google and Apple, despite having much more money and talented people, can’t replicate? And what killed that magic?

Well, first of all Bell and Kelly had an innate talent in spotting the “geekiest” among us. They would often recruit from pools of enthusiasts that had built their own home-made radio transmitters for fun, rather than recruiting from the top business schools, or among those who can solve some very abstract and very standardized HackerRank problems.

And they knew how to manage those people. According to Kelly’s golden rule:

How do you manage genius? You don’t

Bell specifically recruited people that had that strange urge of tinkering and solving big problems, they were given their lab and all the funding that they needed, and they could work in peace. Often it took years before Kelly asked them how their work was progressing.

Compare it to a Ph.D today who needs to struggle for funding, needs to produce papers that get accepted in conferences, regardless of their level of quality, and must spend much more time on paperwork than on actual research.

Or to an engineer in a big tech company that has to provide daily updates about their progress, has to survive the next round of layoffs, has to go through endless loops of compliance, permissions and corporate bureaucracy in order to get anything done, has his/her performance evaluated every 3 months, and doesn’t even have control on what gets shipped - that control has been taken away from engineers and given to PMs and MBA folks.

Compare that way of working with today’s backlogs, metrics, micromanaging and struggle for a dignified salary or a stable job.

We can’t have the new Nyquist, Shannon or Ritchie today simply because, in science and engineering, we’ve moved all the controls away from the passionate technical folks that care about the long-term impact of their work, and handed them to greedy business folks who only care about short-term returns for their investors.

So we ended up with a culture that feels like talent must be managed, even micromanaged, otherwise talented people will start slacking off and spending their days on TikTok.

But, as Kelly eloquently put it:

“What stops a gifted mind from just slacking off?” is the wrong question to ask. The right question is, “Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?”

Or, as Peter Higgs (the Higgs boson guy) put it:

It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964… Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.

Or, as Shannon himself put it:

I’ve always pursued my interests without much regard for final value or value to the world. I’ve spent lots of time on totally useless things.

So basically the most brilliant minds of the 20th century would be considered lazy slackers today and be put on a PIP because they don’t deliver enough code or write enough papers.

So the article is spot on in identifying why Bell could invent, within a few years, all it did, while Apple, despite having much more money, hasn’t really done anything new in the past decade. MBAs, deadlines, pseudo-objective metrics and short-termism killed scientific inquiry and engineering ingenuity.

But the author doesn’t go one step further and identify the root cause.

It correctly spots the business and organizational issues that exist in managing talent today, but it doesn’t go deeper into their economic roots.

You see, MBA graduates and CEOs didn’t destroy the spirit of scientific and engineering ingenuity spurred by the Industrial Revolution just because they’re evil. I mean, there’s a higher chance for someone who has climbed the whole corporate ladder to be a sociopath than there is for someone you randomly picked from the street, but not to the point where they would willingly tame and screw the most talented minds of their generation, and squeeze them into a Jira board or a metric that looks at the number of commits, out of pure sadism.

They did so because the financial incentives have drastically changed from the times of Bells Labs.

The Bells Labs were basically publicly funded. AT&T operated the telephone lines in the US, paid by everyone who used telephones, and they reinvested a 1% tax into R&D (the Bells Labs). And nobody expected a single dime of profits to come out from the Bells Labs.

And btw, R&D was real R&D with no strings attached at the time. In theory also my employer does R&D today - but we just ended up treating whatever narrow iterative feature requested by whatever random PM as “research and development”. It’s not like scientists have much freedom in what to research or engineers have much freedom in what to develop. R&D programs have mostly just become a way for large businesses to squeeze more money out of taxpayers, put it in their pockets, and not feel any moral obligation of contributing to anything other than their shareholders’ accounts.

And at the time the idea of people paying taxes, so talented people in their country could focus on inventing the computer, the Internet or putting someone on the moon, without the pressure of VCs asking for their dividends, or PMs asking them to migrate everything to another cloud infrastructure by next week, or to a new shiny framework that they’ve just heard in a conference, wasn’t seen as a socialist dystopia. It was before the neoliberal sociopaths of the Chicago school screwed up everything.

The America that invested into the Bell Labs and into the Apollo project was very different from today’s America. It knew that it was the government’s job to foster innovation and to create an environment where genuinely smart people could do great things without external pressure. That America hadn’t yet been infected by the perverse idea that the government should always be small, that it’s not the government’s job to make people’s lives better, and that it was the job of privately funded ventures seeking short-term returns to fund moonshots.

And, since nobody was expecting a dime back from Bell, nobody would put deadlines on talented people, nobody hired unqualified and arrogant business specialists to micromanage them, nobody would put them on a performance improvement plan if they were often late at their daily standups or didn’t commit enough lines of code in the previous quarter. So they had time to focus on how to solve some of the most complex problems that humans ever faced.

So they could invent the transistor, the programming infrastructure still used to this day, and lay the foundations of what engineers study today.

The most brilliant minds of our age don’t have this luxury. So they can’t revolutionarize our world like those in the 20th century did.

Somebody else sets their priorities and their deadlines.

They can’t think of moonshots because they’re forced to work on the next mobile app riding the next wave of hype that their investors want to release to market so they can get even richer.

They have to worry about companies trying to replace them with AI bots and business managers wanting to release products themselves by “vibe coding”, just to ask those smart people to clean up the mess they’ve done, just like babies who are incapable of cleaning up the food they’ve spilled on the floor.

They are seen as a cost, not as a resource. Kelly used to call himself a “patron” rather than a “manager”, and he trusted his employees, while today’s managers and investors mostly see their engineering resources as squishy blobs of flesh standing between their ambitious ideas and their money, and they can’t wait to replace them with robots that just fullfill all of their wishes.

Tech has become all about monetization nowadays and nothing about ingenuity.

As a result, there are way more brilliant minds (and way more money) in our age going towards solving the “convince people to click on this link” problem rather than solving the climate problem, for example.

Then of course they can’t invent the next transistor, or bring the next breakthrough in information theory.

Then of course all you get, after one year of the most brilliant minds of our generation working at the richest company that has ever existed, is just a new iPhone.

https://links.fabiomanganiello.com/share/683ee70d0409e6.66273547

uspol

why should i pay any attention to any analysis where this part is very green

Park rave

They keep feeding us postapocalyptic fiction, where everyone has to fight everyone else to survive, so we won't imagine all of us fighting against those who are bringing about the apocalypse with their unquenchable greed.

Twenty-six people have been killed and 150 injured in Israeli tank shelling and gunfire near an aid distribution centre in Rafah, southern Gaza

Lure starving people in with promises of aid, then kill them.

#Gaza #Israel #Starvation #WarCrime

Gaza: 26 killed in Israeli tank fire near aid centre, medics say - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c991j01lym3o