times is hard, sir...times is hard.

not a single thing we've tried to do webcam avatar stuff has worked, on multiple systems (of course we never expected anything would work on FreeBSD but weirdly, we got just about as far before things started breaking. other tries: PopOS and Manjaro Linux)

Gogo waits alone. (*sighs*)

OKAY we added a couple more features to the Connett CIRCLE2 CGI script for procedural generation of patterns. now one can specify a larger palette if desired.

https://alphyne.bramble.house/cgi-bin/connett_circle2.cgi

#programming

btw Juicero guy was super gross: https://youtu.be/-x_cjPxfrVg

RE: https://mastodon.octofriends.garden/@kris_of_pnictogen/117520378073762955

BTW as if to prove the point, we came across this remark in a YouTube video about the epic misfire that was the "Juicero". The CEO of the Juicero startup, Doug Evans, said in a podcast interview (full transcript: https://archive.is/Pff9S) when asked why he didn't just buy himself a juicing machine:

What happened is I knew too much. Like at that point I knew too much about quality. I knew that the best juice was juice made in that moment. And so I became obsessed. I told Maria, and she does, “Well, what are you going to do now?” Right? “You have money, you have time ...” And I said, “I’m going to do what Steve did. I’m going to take the mainframe computer and create a personal computer, I’m going to take a mainframe juice press and I’m going to create a personal juice press..."

LG: Steve being Steve Jobs.

The Steve, yeah.

Now...it would be easy to laugh at this chucklefuck for thinking that Steve Jobs invented the personal computer (he didn't, personal computers existed before Apple) and calling Jobs "The Steve". But why was Evans saying such ridiculous things? Because he picked it up from the press. He was simply repeating the official propaganda line about Steve Jobs, one that's been endlessly repeated and reinforced by #tech journalists.

Mx. Chara's new DreamWidth post: "Steve Jobs, supervillain"

Without Steve Jobs there would be no Elon Musk, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Maye Musk would have found some other racket for her failson to advertise. The other day I stumbled across a YouTube video by some computer-science chump reacting to Musk's faked-up "flying car" stunt (no actual flying, just a few seconds of temporary levitation achieved with compressed nitrogen with a stripped-down replica that was almost certainly non-functional as a car) and this doofus lamented, "How did we get from THIS [referring to a video clip of Steve Jobs announcing the ruinous advent of the iPhone] to THIS [referring to Musk?]" as if the evil of Elon Musk weren't a direct consequence of the evil of Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs didn't invent the "smart phone", and in any case thanks to the iPhone the "smart phone" is now one of the shittiest hunks of technology that's ever been forced upon the public, but that's not really the point. Steve Jobs didn't invent anything at all, not at any point in his career; he was a repackager, a slick confidence trickster grabbing onto existing ideas, appropriating the work of people with genuine ability (like Steve Wozniak), stamping his personal brand onto them and building himself into a veritable cult leader—and not merely in the eyes of the suckers who failed to realize that Jobs's Apple was a poisoned fruit. The #tech press enthusiastically slobbered over the Steve Jobs personality cult instead of ripping him to pieces, as they should have done, and in coöperating so shameless in Jobs's personal myth-making they set a fashion. Now EVERY sufficiently prominent criminal trying to make fast crooked money through high-tech grifting, especially Elon Musk, gets the Steve Jobs treatment, and it's considered high praise from high-tech journalism to be touted as "the next Steve Jobs", as if we're supposed to be grateful eternally for the flamboyant crapulence of the first Steve Jobs.

( Read more... )

comments
[...]

https://mxchara.dreamwidth.org/3427.html

#DreamWidth #BlogPost #SmallWeb

We got our CGI-script implementation of John E. Connett CIRCLE2 algorithm from Scientific American to the point of interactivity:

https://alphyne.bramble.house/cgi-bin/connett_circle2.cgi

#programming

our furry friend in Montana is hoping to raise some dollars for medicine. https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/blueraptorpony

#crowdfund #begpost #pleasehelp

as usual we won't vote in the poll ourselves but our answer would be "ugly as sin" and we rewrite all sample code to eliminate K&R braces

Chara is suggesting that we should try to think of the creaky overcomplicated Wayland API like it was the old MacOS API. Chara, that's YOUR memory, not mine

I love that #Wayland tutorials are already breaking on fundamental stuff.

look for wl_shell! I mean xdg_shell! I mean-- what a crock

OK Chara liked to do #programming polls so I'll do one.

K&R braces. you know like

void foo(int bar) {
// code goes here
}

or

struct mumbo_t mumbo = {
// assign fields here
};

https://peertube.wtf/w/2MSrAJ2hx4ASbUTGwPrR8c

the Löve2D Lua-scripted game engine seems relatively painless to use

we can no longer log in to our bit of web-hosting space, which our metamour Gravislizard arranged for us; he's been maintaining the domain bramble dot house for a while via DreamHost and he set up that subdomain as a favor. and between this afternoon and now the password was changed on us, or maybe we've been locked out for...I dunno what, it's difficult to imagine that the trivial amount of stuff we've done with the space, little one-off things, has violated the terms of service.

so uh...is there any feasible free #web hosting that permits CGI scripting as a feature?

that was a test post from some #Perl script

Posted to a Mastodon server!

New Dreamwidth blog post: "Welp I got kicked off the fediverse, again"

I've been flagrantly political on my various fediverse (i.e. Mastodon and Pleroma and Misskey and all the other ActivityPub social networks in loose federation amongst themselves) and that's made me enemies, at least one of whom (I think I know who but I could be wrong) must surely have told the instance runner quite a yarn about how evil and abusive I was, cos I was kicked off summarily. I'm disappointed at this action but I don't feel like I could have expected a better result: the plain truth is that a "tech entrepreneur" has many orders of magnitude more social clout than the impoverished custodian of a small Internet social-media server. When the "entrepreneur" decides to throw his weight around, there's nothing to do but yield or close up shop. The dude may even have made specific legal threats; I honestly have no idea what they said, though. But I'd already gotten on the bad side of the "entrepreneur" (sorry I just REALLY despise that word and regard it as a euphemism for "swindler") in the past, if it's the guy I think it was.

I like the idea of the fediverse generally but the plain truth of the matter is that one person or a little group of people who think that they can be part of the grand network just by paying for hosting space and a domain name are in for trouble when anything serious needs to be discussed. Shitposting and distributing pictures of cute animals is all well and good but y'know we're all living under a state of fascism so long as the Internet is controlled by global capitalism, and it's not possible to keep the tendrils out merely through obscurity and trying to stick to innocent and light-hearted chatter. Happiness itself is "political" in the eyes of fascists who politicize everything while simultaneously howling about the evils of "ideology" and such. Bitter disputes over political and social issues are inevitable and when such disputes break out, the folks without money and power behind them are almost certain to lose. There's rarely even the hope of a making a good fight of it; try, and you're likely to get sued into oblivion (or worse.) Hence the fediverse is not a safe place to make political enemies. I would almost feel safer on Twitter or BlueSky although I'd have to constantly leap from account to account on a practically daily basis in order to keep ahead of the heavy technological censorship of those platforms, and in so doing I would be smeared as an obvious evildoer.

After all, only evil people use more than one social-media account. Right?

~Chara of Pnictogen

comments
[...]

https://mxchara.dreamwidth.org/2359.html

#Dreamwidth #BlogPost #SmallWeb

well the job counseling thing went ok. kinda wonder who pushes forward in the system to help us with dealing with job sites and communications and shit because now that I'm at home it seems impossible again

clocks https://peertube.wtf/w/rjhJB5qzRyYdXJTHeBGuUL