wızzwızz ıv @wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org

Sometimes, I make really compelling arguments about things that I stop believing five minutes later, because I realise (or am informed) that they're wrong.

Don't take my word for anything. If something I've written has convinced you of something major, it might be worth asking whether I still believe it – but if I don't, don't take *that* as gospel either.

I have a very simplistic view of the world. Sometimes that means I miss obvious things for a long time.

One of these paragraphs is wrong.

Blog Post: bootprints in butter and failures of imagination- an update on the Food bank.
https://alanlaneblog.wordpress.com/2020/10/23/blog-post-bootprints-in-butter-and-failures-of-imagination-an-update-on-the-food-bank/

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. Almost No One is Evil. Almost Everything is Broken.
https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/

Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/19/nobody-is-perfect-everything-is-commensurable/

So-called “compute shaders” can apparently do this, if you request the framebuffer manually and properly handle the atomic memory barriers.

(cc: @pixelherodev @chj0)

Does anyone know how to do GPU graphics without vertex and fragment shaders?

There's the “draw a full-screen rectangle and fragment shader that”, but that kind of feels like running a FreeDOS VM on Windows. I'd rather *avoid the vertex machinery* – or better still, *customise* it.

I don't know whether this is possible, but I struggle to imagine how you could design a GPU such that it isn't.

Apparently Moderna isn't enforcing their vaccine patents: https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/statement-moderna-intellectual-property-matters-during-covid-19

Is anyone “mad scientist” enough to try to synthesise it?

Any suggestions for a good #midi keyboard for a pianist? It's being subsidised by an education fund, so… well, money isn't *no* object, but it's worth it for me to buy something that will last, and *preferably* something I can mod with MIDI 2 support when that spec is finalised

@markosaric Do you know of a good tracker-consent widget? The one linked on your blog post doesn't seem to exist any more.

I'm asking because the folks on Stack Exchange are getting upset about their new (GDPR-non-compliant, not that that's unusual) unaccessible nagbox: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/361009

If you don't know of one… perhaps Plausible could diversify? (It might not be very profitable, though.)

Against my better judgement, I think I might be starting to like tkinter:

self.input.grid(row=1, column=1, sticky='ew')

Not in an absolute sense, fortunately – but every other GUI toolkit I've used is in some way worse.

Oh, how I missed Python. I like Rust, but it just isn't the same.

https://effbot.org has gone. ☹

Does anyone have an archive of the #tkinter resources? The Internet Archive doesn't.

I don't know how good change.org is, but if you use it, there's a petition to get LG to release their phones' code (since they're shutting down their phone business). https://www.change.org/p/lg-electronics-lg-to-open-source-their-phones-as-they-are-shutting-down-production-for-good

There's no such thing as a software design pattern.

Is there a multiplayer chess program / website that lets you combine variants (and perhaps write your own)? I really want to play a game of Atomic Crazyhouse Chess960.

TIL that my revolutionary new operating system idea is basically just Synthesis with some AmigaOS thrown in.

Fortunately for me, it hasn't been done yet. It's merely non-novel, not extant. (Plus, I already have evidence that the ideas work, and a new source of potential improvements.)

Things I like about this side of Fedi:

We have hell-threads about the most polarising sociopolitical topics, and can actually learn from it, and (usually) don't hate each other afterwards. And it mostly stays in one or two properly-CW'd threads.

(This doesn't apply when there's emotional US politics going on, like elections. We mostly all agree about that, but the local and federated timelines get full of it and it's distressingly hard to avoid.)

A lot of people are getting upset about the FSF's leadership. There's a proposal to get rid of the entire current leadership and replace them with a new leadership.

But why replace them? Most of our development is anarchic in nature. What if the FSF reflected that?

Don't make any important decisions while you're feeling righteous.

Yes, you're probably right to feel righteous. But what prompted your feelings of righteousness, this time? Feeling righteous and *being in the right* are two different, not necessarily related things.

If you've felt righteous about something recently, take a few minutes to analyse and introspect. Y'know, just in case.

> The rights of the child described in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 are recognized and ratified the world over, except within the USA, which may explain why even though other jurisdictions recognize parental control and juvenile emancipation, nowhere else is the issue of emancipation so important.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_of_minors

😐

The obvious plan would be to encourage people to move to a Proof of Stake system… but is there a proposed #Bitcoin #PoS system that's a meaningful improvement over #PoW (i.e. not requiring powerful computers or a low-latency connection)?

Double-spending might burst the speculative bubble and get you arrested for fraud, but I doubt it'd meaningfully affect how much electricity people are burning on the thing. (Its “value” would climb up again afterwards, anyway, because everyone expects it to.)

Assuming somebody had unlimited computing power, how could they best use it to render #Bitcoin *not* such an environmental catastrophe?

(Bonus points if it becomes a viable currency as opposed to a “speculative asset”, though I'm increasingly of the view that deflationary currencies aren't possible.)

Keep in mind that Bitcoin is a consensus-based protocol; thus, this is a sociology question. The Bitcoin protocol can be (and, in fact, *has been*) significantly changed.