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.

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 I've withdrawn my support.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.

@natecull Had a thought on the 6+1 numerology today.

Six degrees of freedom in space.
Three dimensions of translation (active)
Three axes of rotation (passive)
Each dimension/axis has two directions.
One dimension of time, unidirectional, pervasive change.

@natecull Someone else reminded me of this, but if you haven't checked out Paul Laffoley's artistic works, you should. He specializes in bonkers intense mystical diagrams.

https://www.kentfineart.net/available-paul-laffoley

When we find out that we cannot love the creator of something we do love, we feel obligated to not share the creation.

However, if that creator is long dead, the same feelings don't necessarily apply. Who cares if some person three hundred years ago was terrible?

If copyright were returned back to 25 years (which seems hilariously short, but now I think is a little long), would it be okay to praise those works in the public domain? Would the author need to be dead and gone? What's the line?

My brain today: here's a perfect witty response to that mean person 20 years ago.

Thanks, brain.

I'm a rockstar programmer - I was fooling around with my friends having a good time, and then someone gives me a pile of money and a list of responsibilities.