The world sees Japan as a paragon of minimalism. But its hidden clutter culture shows that ‘more’ can be as magical as ‘less’

WebKit browser with proper extensions. Best of both worlds! Gotta try when I get back to my MacBook.

You cannot complain about Facebook collecting your life’s history, while at the same time complaining that diaspora* cannot find your former classmates. You cannot complain about WhatsApp collecting your address book, while at the same time stating you do not use eMail because exchanging addresses is too cumbersome. You either get a system that knows who you are or a system that does not. I do not get the impression that the majority of users who complain about “bad privacy practices” have understood that point yet.

Mastodon did a lot of things right in the beginning. Their interface looks a bit like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, so everyone familiar with those tools felt right at home. They hit the perfect timing and launched just as a new privacy scandal was exposed, so it was easy for journalists to show off the new kid on the block. And, probably the most essential piece: They had tools available to cross-post from Twitter to Mastodon, basically on day zero. At first, this sounds like a minor thing, but a lot of people signed up on Mastodon and cross-posted their tweets to Mastodon. This means that there was a lot of content available on Mastodon from the beginning, and the users never stopped pouring material into Mastodon, even if they left and went back to using Twitter exclusively. Today, there still is a lot of traffic just from cross-posting tweets.

It feels like large portions of the “Federated Social Network” space, for the lack of a better term, are way too tech-focused, and completely lost track of what they once were claiming to do. We tend to be laser-focused on coming up with new technical challenges to solve, new bugs to fix, and new features to implement. But does it matter? What use is a social network with all the features imaginable, but no users to use them? What use is a perfectly abstracted and well-designed federation implementation, when there is no data to federate?

I wish that more people would consider the reason behind billions of users still using Facebook, instead of just going along their lives as a coder working on whatever their favorite project is. It is disappointing to see so many active people in this field to just say, “oh well, they simply did not learn from their mistakes”, and go on as if that was no big deal. In reality, most people are very unhappy with the current situation, and they would probably love to use alternatives that respect their privacy more. Still, they just cannot consider projects like Mastodon or diaspora* proper alternatives - for a good reason.

Thinking outside of your little technical bubble is hard and uncomfortable. Sometimes, it takes a lot of time and effort, and sometimes, you have to make decisions that violate your principles for the sake of actually helping people. I have seen too many individuals, projects, and organizations get busy petting themselves on their backs for fixing a bug nobody cares about, or for hosting a service nobody cares about, or for writing marketing material nobody reads. I have seen way too many instances of organizations being stuck in their ideology, to a point where they entirely stop fulfilling their original purpose: to bring people forward.

Исключения для бедных

Я Федор, ведущий разработчик 1С. На хакатоне компании команда под моим руководством перенесла игру «Герои меча и магии III» на платформу 1С. Расскажу, как устроена конфигурация «1С: Герои меча и магии» с технической точки зрения.

Consent based public domain federated communications server. Provides a feature rich ActivityPub and Nomad communication node.

A more social look on the spec by diaspora*'s developer. Just as profound.

Diaspora*'s developer's thoughts on ActivityPub soon after it was released. It's like he foresaw ever issue there is, without ever implementing it. Such insight. He foresaw that C2S won't get much use, he foresaw reply forwarding problems, he foresaw everything!

An exploration of Gnome's many failings and how to fix it.

FixBrowser is a truly lightweight web browser created from scratch. It intentionally doesn't support JavaScript to make things faster and much less resource intensive. Instead it contains an updated set of scripts that fix and improve various websites.

It is designed from ground up with privacy as the major goal, using a whitelist approach for loading resources to avoid any unwanted tracking.

The browser is currently in Alpha stage, all the foundation blocks are there but needs more work. There is also FixProxy which is using the "backend" part of the browser (everything except the actual rendering) to be used with a regular web browser. It provides a safe way to browse the web and is more mature, I've been using it for multiple years as my primary means of browsing with good results.

Вот это браузеры пошли! Без яваскриптов, но с регексами и фикс-прокси. И стек смешной: свой язык какой-то. Внимательно буду смотреть.

These choices are trade-offs. If you want to write a quiet song, it won't be loud. If you are writing a software tool and you want to prioritize speed over simplicity, then it won't be as simple as if you'd prioritized simplicity over speed.

There are two main signs that you've succeeded at your goals. The first, and more pleasant, is that you get compliments about how your thing is like you wanted it to be. "I love that song, it's so quiet!" "Your tool is so fast!" Why thank you, that's exactly what I was going for.

The second sign, though, is that you will get complaints. Specifically, people will complain that your thing does not achieve the things you didn't set out to achieve. "I wish this song was louder", "this tool is so hard to use". That you are receiving complaints at all means that people are aware of your creation; that they are complaining about what you specifically set out to make a non-goal is a side-effect of the fact that you made that trade-off.

This forum is Mycomarkup-enabled now!

Converts a PNG to 2- or 4-colour uxntal data literals.

Cladosporium sphaerospermum is a remarkable species of radiotrophic fungus that is thriving in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and which scientists are studying to unlock applications in a wide range of fields.

Yet another technical wiki with good content. Sadly, it's running Gitit, thus being very poor to navigate.

Apertium is a rule-based machine translation platform. It is free software and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

gwit is a minimalist system for a Web of replicated, host-neutral, lightweight sites backed by Git.

so i've been playing j2me games for 20 years I've regarded “phone games” as absolute dog shit, unworthy of even a second glance. i have recently discovered that this only applies to smartphone games - despite “resident evil for flip phones” being a

Detailed (?) look at how existing ActivityPub implementations work.

an extremely based frontend manual from the GOV.UK

Fork of vpub, the forum software. Contribute to hugmouse/vpub-plus development by creating an account on GitHub.

A story of a Julius who lacks knowledge but has good charisma. There's a lot to learn from such Julii.

Когда я работал в Совкомбанке, пришлось чуток поработать с аналитиком Э. Он мне сразу не понравился. Потом он ушёл, раньше меня. Статья помогла понять, что с ним было не так. Наверное он был таким Юлием.

Но очень может быть, что я неправ, и у меня просто не было возможности увидеть хард скиллы этого аналитика. В конце концов, мы пересеклись только на одном низкоприоритетном проекте.

Instead of:
yoursite.com/blog/2022/05/08/short-urls-why-and-how.html
… consider just:
yoursite.com/short

Introduced by Artyom.

I visit Derek Sivers' website from time to time. Every time I do, I discover he had

• written some half a hundred new blog posts,

• moved to another place,

• and started a new diet/philosophy/routine/book.

He's too productive for a human, but that's a topic for a different time.

Artyom makes a good point that plaintext is a lie. Of course it is! Nothing worse than being presented with a .txt file. Screw that! Folks, user proper text formats.

This is a personal story I hope will give web designers and user interface experts some food for thought: my experience with reading digital screens with eyesight degraded by cataract. There may be more users with suboptimal vision than usually thought.

I always preferred the light theme and never figured what's the fuss with the dark theme. Until cataract came.

Typical speedups over vanilla Python are on the order of 10-100x or more, on a single thread. Codon's performance is typically on par with (and sometimes better than) that of C/C++. Unlike Python, Codon supports native multithreading, which can lead to speedups many times higher still.

Codon is not a drop-in replacement for CPython. There are some aspects of Python that are not suitable for static compilation — we don't support these in Codon.

Immerse yourself in the legendary world of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 online, right in your browser! This iconic turn-based strategy series, beloved by millions since 1999, is now available without installation. Explore vast worlds, develop towns, battle for resources, and build armies just like in the good old days. Enjoy classic gameplay with modern convenience—play anytime and share the nostalgia with friends!

Static keyboard layouts are boring and predictable. Let's spice up the whole idea of keyboard layouts by having the layout CHANGE WHILE YOU ARE TYPING!

DevCrowd вместе с Авито провели исследование рынка Go-разработчиков, 2024

Knowing the consequences I want, what choice would create them? What big choice would nudge a hundred others that way?

Recently, I went on a week-long vacation to Japan. Besides being a ton of fun, something that stood out was how long the trip felt. One week in Japan felt like three weeks of my regular life. I've thought about why this is and found that the amount of time felt is greatly related to the number of memories created.

A few basic rules for buying and using computers can save anyone significant amounts of money and produce the confidence required to try new things with computers.

Happy Birthday!

A self-hostable personal cloud inspired by serverless platforms and cgi-bin.

This is a translation of the article I originally wrote in Russian a year ago.
Lately, after Elon Musk bought Twitter, people have started looking for its alternatives – and many found one in Mastodon.
Mastodon is a decentralized social media platform that works on the federation model, like email. The federation protocol is called ActivityPub and is a W3C standard, and Mastodon is far from being its only implementation, albeit it is the most popular one.

a tool to let your readers dive into details

An open standard for data-driven blocks

A way to be on the web!

Новости о важных событиях для работников ИТ индустрии