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.

It would sure save me a lot of energy, time, and effort in my life if I were to just stop fighting these larger trends. Clearly I'm not the person to lead the way.

I'm pretty discouraged at my failures at budging the needle toward an open web.

I've spent a ton of energy trying to build nice things for people who ultimately don't give a shit about them. They know these mega-networks are bad, they read the news, but they are really, really uninterested in trying out alternatives.

You all are lovely people (most of you), but I'm really here to try and move the people I know. And I've failed. I guess I should have become popular first.

Narrator: It did not.

After a plea on #Facebook to try out #Hubzilla, I got 7 likes, 2 new accounts, 1 new channel, 0 posts.

I'm so discouraged...

What if we were teaching history all wrong? Classes tend to treat it as a narrative, where A causes B causes C, and then eventually, maybe, you reach the present.

Why not frame history as a series of questions starting from where things are today and going backward in time? You could pick any aspect of today's world and trace its evolution back hundreds of years.

Wouldn't that be a great class? History would seem so much more relevant and connected to the now.

'setxkbmap us colemak ctrl:nocaps' sets up my X keyboard mapping from the command line, and took way too long to figure out #colemak

This is a lovely collection of historical source code, including ZIL code for many Infocom games! https://github.com/historicalsource?tab=repositories

Trying to bootstrap my #hubzilla community again with friends and family. Let's see if it actually takes this time...

Enjoying this year's Advent of Code, both the puzzles and the silly story.

Google fired us for organizing. We’re fighting back.

https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/google-fired-us-for-organizing-were-fighting-back-d0daa8113aed

There's a creepy trend recently of toys that detect when they've been abandoned and make noise to "re-engage" the kid. My kids ignore them, but I'm mad that these companies are even trying. I just want to start jailbreaking all these toys.

Making really good coffee is 16 parts water, 1 part fresh ground beans, and 10 parts superstition.

"A writer who works on the old system of production can spend days crafting a sentence, putting what feels like a worthy idea into language, only to find [...] that the internet has already produced countless sentences that are more or less just like it, even if these lack the same artisanal origin story that we imagine gives writing its soul. There is [...] no more place for writers and thinkers in our future than, since the 19th century, there has been for weavers."

https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2018/12/its-all-over.html

@fraggle I am amused at this Doom visual novel engine and its associated dating sim: https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=47550

The best part of being boosted/favorited is getting to poke through the posts of new people! 😁

From https://twitter.com/sportsballcat/status/1191399526269145088

You can say 'all are welcome', but if wolves and sheep are both welcome then you're only going to get wolves. The smart sheep will go somewhere else and the naive sheep will be eaten and processed. [...]
Refusing to choose is a choice. It's a choice in favor of the people who prey on others and who refuse to acknowledge the humanity of those they hate.