Daniel Lowe @dl@cantos.social

@chr
If this is your first moot
You _have_ to toot.

#introduction

I used to be a lot weirder. I'm a middle-aged geek, father to two boys, and I bang out code at #Google. I live near Boston now, but I grew up in central Mississippi.

I know the conlangs #Lojban and #TokiPona. I write hobby code in #Tcl and #CommonLisp.

I play a bunch of #music instruments, but none well enough to perform. I've been playing around with a DAW.

I started the cantos.social instance, trying to be a part of the small-scale Internet.

I try to be as kind as I can.

I had a dream last night that I met @scalzi and told him how much I liked the Interdependency series. It's clearly a sign, but I'm not sure what for.

@jwz@twitter.com mentioned recently that some kids were talking about *files* as though they were an old person thing. This is a cultural disconnect going way, way past the free/proprietary software divide, where at least you have some simulation of property. The notion of ownership at all is fading away, at least in the digital realm. The young understand that they pay for *access* to media and software, not *ownership*, and most of them (anecdotally) seem totally comfortable with that.^D

To stretch the metaphor to its breaking point, FLOSS enthusiasts had finally gotten their homes just the way they liked it...

and a bunch of soulless corporations took it and turned them into factory dormitories, full of identical robots that just talk to prosthetics.

One of the aspects of being a computer enthusiast back then was the feeling that your computer was like a little place you lived in. When the Internet opened its doors in the 90s, it was like being in a massive neighborhood party.

Nowadays, with the ascent of mobile devices, most people's experience with computing is as a prosthetic. An inseparable device that enables you to interact with modern society. No one feels like they live in their phone.

@nolan started a thread about free software yesterday, and I wanted to share a metaphor.

Pre-microcomputer days were like living in an apartment with a landlord.
Microcomputers were like getting a starter home after a luxury apartment.
Micros grew into less micro, but also started to resemble condos. You owned everything between the paint, but the structure wasn't yours.
A lot of people grew up in starter homes and didn't like the condo. Free/open OSes become common.

I love this characterization of notifications as needy tamagotchi.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/17/17465182/tamagotchi-mini-digital-tech-addiction

Something that bothers me about social media.

You don't miss people who disappear from your feed. They don't leave a hole like they do in other contexts. You can see the person who is no longer in their usual place, the classmate who isn't in class. You can even see that someone isn't updating their blog anymore.

But the feed has no hole that is left unfilled. It just rolls on, utterly indifferent.

Boosting @YinsoTheAkuma@twitter.com

Investor: We need 5% growth.
CEO: We already dominate the industry. There's no way to keep growing without screwing over customers, alienating them and destroying the company.
Investor, reaching for trap door: So you can't do 5%?

In concrete terms, if you have any defined protocol, there will be one implementation which most people use (so everyone builds to it), and a long tail of other implementations trying to stay compatible with the most popular.

My own conjecture: Hyrum's law implies a power law in protocol implementation popularity.

Hyrum's Law

With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract, all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody

http://hyrumslaw.com/