Some terminal-focused links I’ve been working in Cool-Retro-Term again, and craving a real green-screen glass tty, so here are some terminal-related links.
jwz: export TERM=aaa-60 jwz tells a story about an interesting terminal and its even more interesting termcap file. The pictures and video in this article are what gave me terminal envy again this time.
WiFi232 - An Internet Hayes Modem for your Retro Computer Of course, once you have your glass TTY, you need to be able to connect it to your modern computer.
Retro web, simple web, and alternatives to the web A simple gopher client for Gnome, written in Vala This is in early stages, but it works fine for most gopher sites. I would like to find time to help out with it.
Shizaru, an opinionated web server This is a web server written in golang that attempts to “serve no evil” by imposing strong opinions on pages that it serves. The default opinions focus strongly on a “fast, safe, simple, clean, respectful” web.
Technology and adjacent politics Gadgets, Power, and the New Modes of Political Consciousness This article is a good antidote to the standard kind of moral panic article over mobile devices. It takes a Marxist perspective on devices, and how the dominant narrative about them treats people (device users) as isolated economic units.
Memex(browser) This is the main page for the Memex browser, a browser engine that is being developed. Here’s what the developer has to say about it:
Web A JavaScript-Free Frontend This has some neat tricks that I hadn’t thought of for doing “live” front-end without JavaScript. The checkbox/label trick is really cool, though it’s a little over-complicated for my taste, and besides, doesn’t degrade well in browsers that don’t support CSS. The fact that you can use it to build a modal dialog is crash, though.
I’m using details/summary for subject/Content Warning in brutaldon. It degrades okay.
US Politics It’s Bernie, Bitch | Amber A’Lee Frost Amber from Chapo Trap House explains why Bernie is the only viable candidate for 2020, even if he dies on the campaign trail and his corpse has to be operated like a Muppet.
The Border Patrol Has Been a Cult of Brutality Since 1924 Even among law enforcement agencies, the Border Patrol has always been notably racist.
How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Allies Supplanted the Obama Generation | The New Yorker In brief: the Green New Deal completely changes the conversation.
Facebook Facebook rolls out AI to detect suicidal posts before they’re reported | TechCrunch This could actually increase deaths as armed police are dispatched to “check in” on reportedly suicidal people. And that’s not counting the opportunities for algorithmic cruelty, like notifying someone’s domestic abuser that they’re suicidal.
Goodbye Facebook This was the last straw for the fediverse’s jjg, who reports on the previous techcrunch post in his goodbye letter to Facebook.
Web The Web is still a DARPA weapon. – Giacomo Tesio – Medium
A good article on a few loosely connected points. How centralization of the web tends to promote US government/business interests, as against those of internet users and other countries. A lot of it is nothing you haven’t heard before, especially about DNS.
But the better part is the discussion of how JavaScript is fundamentally a weapon, aimed against users, because it is basically designed to execute untrusted code.
Links for the past few days, no unifying theme.
The continuing crisis This is fine.
Democrats break with left on ICE | TheHill
This is expected behavior for the Democrats right now — avoid doing something that is both right and popular, because it would be disruptive. Beto O’Rourke’s position (abolish ICE through a reorganization of DHS, and moving their responsibilities elsewhere) should be the base position of Democrats, allowing progressives to stake out more radical positions.
Links for the last couple of days, focusing on the US police state, and companies that are complicit with it.
Microsoft tldr; Microsoft is providing cloud services to ICE. They claim that this support is not going directly to supporting child detention, but services are fungible, and the ethical thing would be to refuse to accept the contract.
Microsoft needs to pick a side in the ICE debate. The world is watching
I am now offering Conscience-as-a-Service to select clients. This service is intended to allow conscience-free individuals to interact on a moral basis with normal human beings.
Here’s how it works:
We sign a contract putting me on retainer as your conscience; you agree to disclose all of your major business and life decisions to me before you make them. You may, at your discretion, disclose minor business and life decisions to me either before or after the fact.
One issue that is unfortunately contentious these days is whether denying Nazis a platform to organize and recruit by banning them from online spaces and university campuses (hereafter “No Platform”) is a violation of free speech principles. I say “unfortunately”, because it is hard to believe that we are actually having this discussion: of course it is not a violation of free speech principles to prevent evil people from organizing to commit genocide.
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman! Since his creation by Siegel and Schuster in 1933 and his debut in Action Comics in 1938, Superman has become the most widely-known superhero of all, and possibly the world’s best-known fictional character. Along the way, he has been interpreted in many ways by different writers, from the rough socialist crusader of his early Golden Age appearances, to the Silver Age’s protector of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way’’, to the “big blue Boy Scout” of the modern era and the conflicted alien of the recent movies.
