markjgsmith

2024/07/30 #

• No food for ages then breakfast, lunch and dinner pretty much all at once. Got gifted a couple of croisants late last night, then two meals in quick succession in the wee hours, hence I’m up earlier than usual. I’ll get a few hours of coding done at the internet place where I can test my code online, and now that I’ve eaten something I’ll have some energy.

  Hopefully the starvation from the last few days won’t have too many side effects. I’ve found in the past that my body has needed a day or two to recover. This time it wasn’t total starvation, as I managed to eat a few small snacks here and there, though mostly quite devoid of any nutrition. We shall see.

  I think my build minutes reset today or tomorrow so it’s the last chance to use those minutes up. The good news is that next weekend’s newsletter is already done so that takes the pressure off a bit. I’ll keep on adding links and posts and listening to podcasts, and update the newsletter at the end of the week.

  I find it odd but not unnexpected that the week after I published a newsletter and blog post about kicking poverty’s ass, that the universe decided to totally kick my ass. What are the chances? #

• The Swiss example of open source software being used in government is awesome. It’s great but let’s make sure it’s done responsibly.

  I wonder if the type of government has an impact. There’s a lot of politics happening at the minutes, the tectonic plates are shifting somewhat in many places. In Europe, in the US, and even in the Middle East, there have been several landslide elections, often with controversy.

  Does a lefty government do open source differently to a righty government?

  What are the dangers and pitfalls to watch out for in each case? #

Today’s links:

• StreamPot/StreamPot - "StreamPot is a project that provides scaffolding for transforming media in your app (e.g. trimming a video, stripping the audio from a video, transcoding a video from mp4 to webp). We are building this because an increasing number of projects are transforming media as part of their workflow." - I thought this looked pretty interesting. Uses ffmpeg and can be fully self hosted, but they also have a hosted service. github.com #

• Western DJs accused of ‘normalising war’ for playing at Russian techno events - It’s really a tricky one this situation because I think a complete boycot from western DJs would likely make the divide wider, especially as the war is so protracted. I tried to think of a creative way to do this but ultimately the west is worried that the war spreads and turns into something bigger, perhaps even with North Korea and China joining in, so westerners playing DJ sets in Russia are really playing with fire, especially if you are getting paid extra, that’s pretty gross. www.theguardian.com #

• Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source - Overall I think this is really good news, I’m a big fan of open source software. The one thing that makes me incomfortable is that open source is not a panocea in every dimension. There are some aspects of open source that aren’t very desirable for society at large. I’m thinking specifically about the tendency for project maintainers to get abused. There is a tendency for exploitation to happen. It would be great if these government projects tried to tackle such issues. They are well positioned to do so. Generally though, more OSS in government is very cool, but let’s do it in a responsible way. www.zdnet.com #