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.

My #PinebookPro runs FLOSS and executes everything flawlessly except web browsers. It's like an anti-Chromebook.

I'm writing another MUD, using a bunch of ideas I've collected over two decades of running one and thinking about all the social and gameplay dynamics. I have zero expectation of getting any players (the time of MUDs is long past), but it brings me joy so I'm doing it anyway.

I know I just posted about this. I am working to improve my terrible hype skills.

Firefox version in the works!

Picture this: You are chatting online, and you want to share a cool link to a website you have open, but the address in the bar has cruft and tracking parameters. It would be nicer to share links without all that, but it's a pain to edit out the irrelevant bits. URLs from shortlink services hide the site and sell click tracking data.

In Chrome, the Linksnip extension (https://linksnip.app) will solve your problem! Just click on its button and a trimmed url will be in your clipboard.

Also, due to massive SEO by shortlink services, searching for these shorter links is almost impossible. If you know of a similar "shorter url" scheme for your favorite service, please share it with me at https://source.linksnip.app/issues and I will add it.

I made a thing!

Linksnip (https://linksnip.app) is a Chrome extension that copies a minimal URL of the active tab into the clipboard. It doesn't use URL shortening services. It converts youtube links to youtu.be, amazon links to amzn, etc. If it doesn't have a shortening rule, it just removes any tracking parameters before copying.

Firefox version coming soon!

Section 5 of the #OSL (https://opensource.org/licenses/OSL-3.0) seems like much less of a blunt legal instrument than the #AGPL's Section 13 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html). I wonder if this is what I've been looking for. I haven't yet gone through the entirety of the OSL, though, so I'm not sure.

Also, will you license authors please put anchors in your section headers?

Thanks to superpowered AI optimizing for inhuman success maximums, eventually the entire Internet becomes too toxic yet compelling to humanity to interact with directly, but still too essential to disconnect from. Some people start employing AIs of their own, called daemons, to obfuscate their tracks, fudge their data, and protect their privacy as a matter of safety. Daemons are less powerful, but only have to protect one person or small group. It becomes illegal to enlist a daemon.

I love thinking about selection effects, and this essay on "why am I surrounded by assholes" rings very true: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/2015/09/15

I say this as a lover of video games, pop music, TV shows, and all the entertainments that modern life has brought us. I've been in love with computers since I could talk. But.

Humanity started down an incredibly dangerous road as a social species when we made devices more interesting to us than the people around us, starting with radio broadcasting. The mechanisms of social cohesion have been breaking down, bit by bit, over generations.

Perhaps someone leadership-skilled could create the Humanist Software Foundation to pick up the torch dropped by the #FSF.

Has an open letter ever solved anything?

#FreeSoftware is a good idea, if incomplete. But the #FSF isn't a good banner holder anymore. I've withdrawn my support.

Can someone explain to me why a new protocol like #gemini has continued to enshrine CRLF as a protocol-meaningful sequence instead of using just LF?

These were printer control codes, fer cryin out loud.

I am haunted by the domain name renewals of projects long dead.

I've been told that the hardware for this already exists, though it's used for vm boundaries rather than processes.

Let's start encrypting RAM contents. The kernel can swap out decryption keys as part of the context switch.

An encrypting MMU for speed is totally a thing that could be made, and it seems like we really might want such a thing.