If all goes well, the music on the stream tonight will be Stevia Sphere. If you have any music which either you have made yourself or which is human-made and Creative Commons-licensed, I'd be happy to play it as well. I expect the stream will eventually be viewed, through the magic of VOD, by a small handful of people, maybe.
Alright. I'm gonna v-tube on makertube.net tonight, barring unforeseen technical difficulties or familial responsibilities. I'm gonna be reinstalling Windows 98 on my 400Mhz AMD K6-2. Gonna be a lot of watching a progress bar and monologuing.
If it can only be done with LLMs, it doesn't fucking need to be done.
One more shot of my goldless #kintsugi work.
The leftmost plate is one of the first I did. I should have accepted received wisdom and broken it the rest of the way in half. The crack I was covering over has lengthened past the lacquer now. I did not make this mistake with the larger plate to its right!
The leftmost plate was also put through the dishwasher, so the lacquer is flaking pretty badly now.
The break on the small cat plate was too perfect to *not* repair.
Realized I hadn't posted my completed goldless #kintsugi repairs here yet.
In the foreground is one of my own bowls, the primary piece I'd wanted to repair. You can see some of my practice pieces in the background.
Traditional lacquerware work is slow and difficult. (Well, it was for me anyway.) The sanding was the worst part. I probably won't do this again for a long time. Certainly not until I wind up breaking one of my other favorites.
In her book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem," Hannah Arendt notes that Adolf Eichmann had no particular hatred of Jewish people, nor of Freemasons (he even nearly joined the Freemasons before getting invited, via personal connection, into the National Socialist Party). He did what he did out of a desire to advance in his career, and he (like other Nazis) told himself that, if he did not do these things, others would anyway.
This is the banality of evil.
I feel like "the banality of evil" gets glossed over as "evil people seem normal" sometimes. I think the more immediately relevant bit for most people is that evil does not require feeling any particular sort of animosity; it only requires compartmentalizing such that one pursues one's own interests without due consideration for the impacts of those choices. It's no more or less than a lack of self-reflection and empathy.
RE: https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/117301575465954345
Deprogramming people requires a lot of patience and compassion. It's not work for everyone, and you've gotta be honest with yourself if you've not got it in you for whatever reason, but it is work that does need doing.
At least I can rest easy knowing @OpenBSDAms won't be giving money to fascists.
I guess we're at the "yellow stars" stage in some parts of the US now.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships."
- Wendell Berry, Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer
/3
"To make myself as plain as I can, I should give my standards for technological innovation in my own work. They are as follows:
1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
2/
I found myself looking through my book of Wendell Berry's essays again today, as I've just written a small "quote of the day" program for the tilde I'm setting up. I landed on "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer," a short open letter published in 1987 which one of my computer science professors required all his undergraduates to read (I forget which class; most likely the one we covered ethics in).
I'm copying a portion below, because it seems timely: 1/
I am really happy to have finally gotten a "hello world" from something compiled with Idris 2 (under Linux, to be clear) on the seL4 kernel. In theoretical terms, this was not much of a technical challenge, but it did take me a longer to achieve it than I'd expected because I wound up fighting CMake's assumptions a lot, so it felt very satisfying to finally get to that point.
What exactly that will look like feels very unclear to me, which I think is part of my nervousness. The one thing I feel most certain of is that we have to find a way to keep capital from coopting our work if we ever want to move on past it.
I'm a little nervous about this because it feels like a big step. I've never run a communal server before, and I'm out here doing so as part of my probing into what a post-FLOSS future might look like.
I want to bring a lot of the spirit and openness of FLOSS into it, but I also want to make sure that we more explicitly acknowledge the political dimensions of this project and commit ourselves to a stronger self-defense and a stronger self-sustaining model than seems possible under FLOSS.
Okay, so I now have code written in Idris 2 and running on seL4. Next steps are to begin modeling seL4 within Idris 2 so I can start writing drivers and the like. Gotta do a little planning.
Might also take a pause to get the careful.party server set up enough to begin inviting people in. I want to share my code, but I'm trying to feel out a post-FLOSS method of doing so as I go. The minimal route I see is through a sort of tilde server with services secured via Wireguard.
CMake just feels... incredibly overfit. "CMAKE_<LANG>_ANDROID_TOOLCHAIN_MACHINE"? This was the most generalizable route you could've taken?
I'm glad they have documentation, but touching this tool is just making me incredibly tired.
Alright, this is tricky, but I think if I want to improve Idris' bootstrappability, I'm going to have to write a custom backend or two. This means I need to familiarize myself with the language more. If I want to port the whole runtime, I'll also have to familiarize myself more with seL4 and find a clean way to map the runtime's concepts onto seL4's concepts.
I guess the next immediate step is just going to be gaining some practical knowledge of Idris by porting some of my Guile code to it.
Hmm. Owl Lisp looks interesting.
Guess I'll be auditioning Scheme implementations for a role as a new bootstrap path for Idris today, starting with this one.