Aral Balkan @aral@mastodon.ar.al
- Small Technology Foundation
- https://small-tech.org
- Site.js
- https://sitejs.org
- Better Blocker
- https://better.fyi
I make Small Tech.
Joined Apr 2017
Mozilla exists to normalise surveillance capitalism. Don’t @ me.
Mozilla (funded by ~$500,000,000/year from Google) does product privacy reviews.
They’re as bad as you’d think:
“What's the worst that could happen? We suppose your roommate could access your Peloton, pretend they are you, and hurt your leaderboard status. Or maybe help your leaderboard status!”
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/peloton-bike/
#mozilla #google #privacy #PrivacyWashing #SurveillanceCapitalism
Aral Balkan
boosted
@aral @dsfgs @actualsteerpike No, Bitcoin is not a "net positive for the globe".
Bitcoin set out to disintermediate the banking system, but it failed.
What it produced was a horrendously inefficient energy-guzzling monstrosity, which only really empowers people who already had a lot of money in the economy prior to Bitcoin's invention. The usual suspects got richer out of Bitcoin and the banking system wasn't obsoleted by it.
Aral Balkan
boosted
@GuppeGroups
Guppe has been updated with automatic cert management thanks to the brilliant mind of @aral and I fixed the "active groups" query on the homepage to use the most recent 10K posts instead of the first 10K posts 😅
Surveillance capitalism isn’t some corruption of capitalism; it’s just what capitalism is in the digital network age.
If you missed today’s live stream, you can watch it here:
https://small-tech.org/events/small-is-beautiful/
We take you through our live streaming setup. Includes me struggling with a Just Works™ iPhone/AirPlay/Apple TV (while all the Linux stuff around them were busy, ahem, just working) and Laura covering creating transcripts – a crucial accessibility requirement.
Small is Beautiful – live stream – starts in half an hour: a meta look at our live streaming setup 🤓
The energy consumption of Bitcoin exceeds that of the Netherlands (https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons)
Bitcoin is a crime against our habitat and thus a crime against humanity.
Yay, got Place (fork of Site.js specifically for the small web that is very early and experimental and broken so don’t touch it yet) to serve a svelte-based place with snowpack properly for the first time. Currently requires some hacks to esinstall and a Rollup plugin but nothing too major. This is going to be so sweet :)
(Haven’t tested a build yet. That might blow up too at first.)
Also, learned heaps about the innards of esinstall, Snowpack, and Rollup this week while debugging.
Live Streaming on a Budget
Small Is Beautiful – live – tomorrow – Thursday, Jan 21st, 2021 – 5PM Cork (UTC +0) / 12PM New York (UTC -5) / 9AM San Francisco (UTC -8)
https://small-tech.org/events/small-is-beautiful/
We’ve gotten a number of questions about our live stream setup and the equipment we use. Join us as we take you through it.
(Have your webcam/microphone and headphones ready if you want to join the conversation in our virtual studio.)
Privacy is the bedrock of personhood. It is the right that ensures the encapsulation of the person. All else – self-determination, agency, etc. – derive from this basic protection which we must treat as an inalienable human right.
Aral Balkan
boosted
@aral my team at GitHub also just pushed out default branch renaming. You can perform these changes on GitHub and we will walk contributors through updating their clone’s default branch. Also we will handle redirects for old URLs that point to your old branch name.
Aral Balkan
boosted
And now we have the captions and transcript up on our site for the Small is Beautiful #3 livestream.
This was a really great discussion, so much fascinating detail on the strategies for introducing more ethical (and easy-to-use!) computers into schools.
99% of programming is figuring out why you received a banana when you asked for an apple.
(And the answer is always “because you actually asked for a banana all along.”)
[kings, queens, barons, lords, billionaires, trillion-dollar corporations]
[social justice, human rights, democracy]
Pick one.
Aral Balkan
boosted
@aral @silmathoron such a pain... If you have a startup idea with basically zero realistic chanche of working, combined with some unethic business model, you are still much more likely to get public funding than if you propose something that is "only" made for the public good.
Even worse, in some EU-funded projects one must include some disfunctional idea that maybe maybe maybe will bring in some money that can be used to demonstrate one thinks of "sustainability". These mostly do not work, so it's mostly just a tax to the gods of business, in which you must demonstrate to have faith... In practice, one has to throw away, say, 10% of project budget to do something completely useless but that "looks like businness".
It's the cost of ideology.
Either way, I still believe that public funding should eventually become the main source of support for "small web" core technologies and a different approach to platforms more in general.
Even worse, in some EU-funded projects one must include some disfunctional idea that maybe maybe maybe will bring in some money that can be used to demonstrate one thinks of "sustainability". These mostly do not work, so it's mostly just a tax to the gods of business, in which you must demonstrate to have faith... In practice, one has to throw away, say, 10% of project budget to do something completely useless but that "looks like businness".
It's the cost of ideology.
Either way, I still believe that public funding should eventually become the main source of support for "small web" core technologies and a different approach to platforms more in general.
Me: *posts something about the main branch in git on the fediverse*
Some random guy who lives in his mother’s basement: cuck
If you’ve migrated the default branch of your git repository from master to main, please delete the master branch and ensure that the main branch is set as the default in your git remote host (e.g., GitHub, etc.) so people don’t accidentally base their contributions on the master branch.
If you do a git branch --move, you won’t have the above issue.
Here’s a good guide for all this, including updating your local settings so that git init uses main instead of master: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/easily-rename-your-git-default-branch-from-master-to-main
Fediverse accessibility challenge: before boosting a post without alternative text (“alt text”) for people who use screenreaders and other assistive technologies, reply to it with the alt text.
– Where’s your easy-to-use, plug-and-play, ethical alternative to these toxic trillion-dollar products?
– Thanks for asking. We’ve been paying out of pocket for years to work on it. Fancy giving us a few million to speed it up?
– No.
– How about a few thousand so we don’t starve?
– No.
– So, is it ready yet?
- Small Technology Foundation
- https://small-tech.org
- Site.js
- https://sitejs.org
- Better Blocker
- https://better.fyi
I make Small Tech.
Joined Apr 2017
