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ambitiousslab

@ ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

Posts
6
Comments
44
Joined
1 mo. ago

  • Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software

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  • Ooooo, someone's getting worried!

  • Independent News - an idea for aggregating independent journalism

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  • I like the idea and also want to support independent journalism, but in the UK context, I don't think a separate community makes sense. I had a look at !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk and I think most (70%+) of the posts from my unscientific sample would count as independent (in the sense of "free from government and corporate interests, and not controlled by a major media conglomerate").

    I wonder if it would make sense to set up a bot to automatically crosspost articles from allowlisted domains from these general news communities? And if unknown links were found, there could be a mechanism to add them to the allowlist?

    These were the sources I found:

    • The Guardian
    • Al Jazeera
    • Novara Media
    • The Canary
    • Socialist Worker
    • Morning Star
    • Democracy for Sale
    • BBC
    • Politics Joe
    • ITV
    • New York Post
    • Metro
    • The National
    • Associated Press
    • Big Issue
    • London on the Inside

    A lot depends on the definition of independent, and I'm focused on the text rather than perhaps the intent of the definition. If that was stronger, a lot of these could be excluded and a separate community might make more sense.

  • FR#153 – What does a Discord replacement look like?

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  • I agree with you, and I think there's a tension between the technical solution (meeting users where they are) and political solution (persuading the users to come to our way of thinking).

    The technical solution is an unequal fight. We have to provide a familiar and equally good experience - integrating everything into these easy-to-use everything apps, on a shoestring budget compared to the proprietary apps. And, without the "education", users will converge on particular instances because that's what's most convenient, giving a lot of power to particular players in the network.

    If we can persuade people to prioritise freedom over convenience, then we end up with a much more resilient userbase who will go help with the existing networks.

    I don't know how we can make people care, though. The free software movement has been trying for 40 years to make regular users care, but the message only really lands with developers. There's certainly more interest in taking down big tech nowadays, but convenience still seems to come first.

  • FR#153 – What does a Discord replacement look like?

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  • Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for.

    This is the most interesting part to me. Can users be persuaded to have different expectations from the proprietary apps they're used to?

    Whenever these sudden migrations happen, the alternatives that win seem to be the ones that look and behave as similarly to the proprietary app as possible, as the people switching don't care about decentralisation, and are much more sensitive to any changes in experience.

    I think we need to create separate experiences, backed by the same protocol, for people who care about decentralisation and freedom (and discover the fediverse naturally, outside of these big migrations), and those that show up during the big migrations.

    For the first group, we want software that's easy to self-host, customisable, spreads users between instances, ultimately empowers them to have the exact experience they want. For the second group, we should just copy the exact experience of the proprietary networks as much as the protocol allows.

    Of course, the risk is that we get even larger influxes of people who never had to learn the community norms. Is that worth it? - I'm not sure.

  • Programming @programming.dev
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    What Functional Programmers Get Wrong About Systems

    www.iankduncan.com /engineering/2026-02-09-what-functional-programmers-get-wrong-about-systems/

  • Page views for "Zulip" Wikipedia article skyrocket after Discord announces its age verification nonsense

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  • Zulip has a big jump, but worth pointing out that this is part of a wider trend, and other software has seen bigger jumps.

    The export function doesn't include the legend, so the order from top to bottom by the final day of the graph is:

    • Matrix
    • Signal
    • XMPP
    • Zulip
    • Stoat
    • Rocket.Chat
    • Mattermost
    • Discourse

    Thanks for introducing me to this tool. I hadn't come across it before and it's pretty nifty!

  • Removed

    YSK that Dark Chocolate is healthier than White Chocolate and Milk Chocolate

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  • I bought someone I fancied 99% chocolate as a joke. After a year or so, we got together. I opened the cupboard one day and saw it there, unopened. It came upon me to eat it :)

    I love dark chocolate and until that point I thought the darker the better. Since then, I realised that I top out around 85%.

  • Mental Health @lemmy.world
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    How to stop work anxiety impacting the rest of my life?

  • XMPP @slrpnk.net
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    Upcoming changes to Let's Encrypt and how they affect operators

    blog.prosody.im /2026-letsencrypt-changes/
  • United Kingdom @feddit.uk
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    'It is jaw-dropping': Ian Hislop on Mandelson and Epstein

  • Does anyone else get phrases stuck in their head the same way songs do?

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  • Ok, I know this is crazy, but I've had one phrase go round in my head for at least the last 15 years:

    No thanks, I really would not like that please, thank you very much.

    When I was a child, some intrusive thoughts would pop into my head that bad things would happen in random situations, unless I did certain things. E.g., if I didn't breath in at least 15 times before the end of a song, or take an even number of steps before someone said something, then I would suddenly die.

    My brain developed the lore that, when these thoughts popped into my head, they would be binding unless I repeated the above phrase in my mind over and over again. I think it started off as "no thanks", and gradually got expanded to its current crazy form.

    Although I don't believe that anymore, the phrase is firmly implanted in my mind and pops up several times a day. It's probably one of the few things I've remembered verbatim for so long, and it's completely useless :D

  • Removed

    Screen time needs to be regulated ?

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  • For me, the problem is not all screen time, but big tech proprietary software companies. I don't support regulating screen time, but I do think governments should regulate big tech companies harder, while investing in free software - that genuinely serves user interests and has no incentive to be addicting or harmful - as an alternative.

    Big tech explicitly tries to keep people addicted, whatever the consequences. They don't support user agency. Even if you want to make Facebook/Instagram/TikTok etc. less addicting, you are limited to a "show less like this" button that probably does nothing. On iOS and Android, companies abuse the notification categories, and yet there's no way to filter out keywords or work around this, despite the widespread abuse of user attention.

    If everyone had full control over their own (or their child's) devices and algorithms, I doubt there would be such a backlash against technology as a whole. But, despite all the bad the techbros are doing, technology can be so empowering when it serves the users. To regulate screen time seems to me to treat the amazing parts of technology the same as the worst parts.

  • Removed

    Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

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  • I would like it if, in all incidents, the self driving car companies were required to release to the public all of the video feeds for 30s before, during and 30s after.

    That would prevent situations like with Cruise, where they released the first part of the video, and neglected to talk about running the pedestrian over after hitting them.

    Then, we can judge for ourselves whether we think the car behaved correctly or not. In most cases, it should be obvious if there was any more it could have done.

  • We created an incredibly efficient method of transport and then most of us abandoned it

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  • The person in the video shows this graph, or a very similar one.

    She highlights the different categories between swimmers, fliers, runners and vehicles.

    Then, she reveals the "human on a bicycle" entry on the graph and says that humans on a bike are much more efficient than anything else.

  • ProcessOne (ejabberd) just released a new XMPP client - it works on mobile!

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  • I just miss ad-hoc commands, which Fluux already does. I’d prefer libadwaita as well, but having a way to config my IRC transport on the go is great. Gajim mostly works on the phone, but now as well as Fluux.

    That makes a lot of sense. I hope it works well on the phone!

    Pretty sure there’d be a community fork pretty quickly, as this is already one of the clients with the most clean UI.

    Yeah, in fairness I'm probably overreatcting a bit. One of the things I really like about XMPP is the diversity of stakeholders and developers. I would be really sad if that went away.

  • Introducing Fluux Messenger: A Modern XMPP Client Born from a Holiday Coding Session

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  • The client looks good. Having an SDK to bridge between the XMPP world and UI world makes sense to me. It's a direction many projects are going in.

    I'm frustrated that they require a CLA that allows them to relicense the project. I don't want to contribute to a project where one player gets more power compared to everyone else. As far as I know, no other developers in the XMPP world have the same dynamic.

  • ProcessOne (ejabberd) just released a new XMPP client - it works on mobile!

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  • I'm really happy to see that they shamelessly ripped off discord. We saw with bluesky that having an ultra-familiar UX is a big advantage.

    For mobile linux, I'm going to stick with Dino. I like that it is lightweight, natively supported and integrates well with the rest of the system thanks to libadwaita.

    I'm disappointed that contributors have to sign a CLA that allows them to relicense to proprietary licenses. So, all the power goes to them.

  • If you have one, how much do you pay for a domain name? Any cheap registrar recommendations?

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  • I use mythic beasts. They are not the very cheapest, but they offer predictable pricing and just charge a fixed increase compared to the price they pay their supplier. You can trust that they won't mess around with the renewal price or arbitrary extra fees.

    For my .org domains I pay ~£15 per year, but if you don't care about the tld, you can get some for ~£6 per year (the costs on the website exclude VAT, but if you buy multiple years at a time, the amortised cost including VAT ~= the price excluding VAT).

  • An alternative decentralized internet for sharing text and media: The Gemini Protocol

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  • I personally prefer browsing the web with JavaScript disabled, and using search engines like Marginalia to find simple websites. I don't see a big difference in experience between browsing these websites in lynx or edbrowse, vs using Gemini.

    I get the appeal of having everyone on the network share the same culture and values, but I prefer to just find the people doing that in the wider network of the web.

    Still, I'm happy it exists and that people enjoy using it. To each their own!

  • Whats the hardest days work you've had?

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  • I worked at a bank at the time. We were moving to a new system and running recons against the old system to check the behaviour was the same. I had to run a manual recon of the old system vs the new 4 times per day. There was a lot of focus from management and users on the new system.

    The week leading up to Christmas, I was the one person not on holiday yet, and also the most junior person on the project. I found that week so stressful, as I had to run these recons and quickly decide whether each break was real or not before reporting to the users. Despite having worked on that system, I had very little confidence and didn't have the same intuitive mental model of the system my colleagues had. I had to dig into each break case-by-case, but they seemed much more able to understand what was going on via a few simple queries.

    Anyway, I get through the week and left for the holidays on Thursday evening. I'm just grateful that I've gotten through it. Then, around 3pm on the Friday, I see a missed call from the tech lead. I log in, and everything's on fire. I join the incident call, and it turns out that we hadn't processed a single trade in the new system that whole week. I discover that it was thanks to a config change I'd made several weeks before, that had just made it to production. No-one (neither the users, nor I) had realised! But we missed several hundred million pounds worth of payments in that week as a result.

    It was so jarring, having been relieved that I made it to the holiday, then joining the incident call and struggling to work out what to do. I completely dissociated and my mind was blank. I remember being on the call and really passively and calmly walking around my room. I kept thinking "I need to do x, I need to do y" but my mind couldn't focus and I was just staring at the screen. At some point I just lay in bed with my laptop while on the call.

    There had been a total failure of process: my change had been approved by two people, the nonprod environment was configured differently in a way that didn't expose the bug, the recon failures looked very similar to the false positives, and there were so many false positives that it was impossible to dig into all of them. Meanwhile, we didn't have basic queries monitoring that trades were flowing in, and the users weren't paying much attention either, until they realised that it was broken.

    Still, I made a lot of mistakes. I should have just escalated that there were breaks instead of trying to figure it out myself. I shouldn't have been afraid to call the tech lead and bring them out of their holiday. And I shouldn't have been afraid of the confrontation with the users.

    Anyway, that experience really messed me up mentally for a long time. I lost so much confidence and became so much more scared of production (not in a healthy way). It really was not the right environment for me.

  • This smartphone runs Android, Linux, and even Windows 11

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  • What's the best way for me to donate to FOSS projects?

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  • There are a few such foundations!

  • Buy it for Life @slrpnk.net
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    Durable water bottle

  • What Is 'Pathways' And Who Is 'Amelia?' The Controversial Memes About The Viral U.K. Anti-Immigration Goth Girl Explained

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  • Nice to see that even in the virtual world, anti-immigration protesters are not "patriotic" enough to know what the flag looks like.

  • OpenStreetMap community @lemmy.ml
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    How to query the map offline, on Linux?