Tux Machines
Free Software and FSFE Leftovers
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 09, 2023
2023-09-07 [Older] Ada goes to Italy - ice cream included! [Ed: FSFE has been reduced to book publicist of its crooked chief]
2023-09-05 [Older] "Back to school" for EU and German policy +++ Ada available worldwide
2023-09-06 [Older] The Netherlands: Important points for the election
FOSS Week in Review: LibreOffice Fixes Bugs, KDE Release Plans, Automakers ‘F’ on Privacy, and more…
It’s Friday, and for a change I’m turning in Friday’s FOSS Week in Review on Friday instead of on Saturday. I’m not making any promises about punctuality for the future, but at least I’m working on it.
It looks like my side lost in the poll we published here last week. If you’ll remember, there were a couple of headlines that were worded in a way that tripped my funny bone, and I couldn’t figure out which one I would use for a “headline of the week,” if we had such a thing — so I ran a poll to let my gentle readers decide.
Usenet had to die
Usenet was the anti-BitTorrent. BitTorrent is efficiently letting people share small parts and pieces of binaries and piece them together. It’s the opposite of redundancy. Usenet was redundancy city. And flaky as all heck redundancy with a lot of posts missing and threads being read out of order and laggily and buggily and it just didn’t work very well. (And the comparison to Reddit unfortunately also extends to the toxicity on a social level.)
A lot of Fedi’s struggles both early on and today come from this idea that every server should carry every post, which just doesn’t work. That’s also why hashtags on Fedi aren’t a good idea.
It doesn’t work technically and it’s inhuman socially. Ebba Grön has a song about it, “Mental Istid” which means “Mental Ice Age”. It’s all about one long algorithmic timeline where you can’t cry, you can’t sob, nothing matters, everything is homogenous, our lives are rapidly flittering past on status updates. That is what Twitter is. That is where the “Usenet-glob” model of Mastodon was heading.
Proof You Should Not Run My Code: my SNMP agent
This code has been called “comically evil,” which warms my bitter heart. Yes, I could use a database. But why? The data changes 3-4 times a year, if I’m productive. And yes, the data is in columns, not rows. SNMP doesn’t do rows. It doesn’t really do tables. It only has columns, which you could choose to arrange side-by-side, but that’s a feeble human thing and irrelevant to this primordial protocol.
In writing this I had to choose between complex code and simple data, or simple data and complex code. Given that updates consist of adding an entry to the end of each column, I chose simple code. Yes, there’s an occasional painful update where I realize that I missed one of my old books, but those are increasingly rare.