That’s the biggest issue I have with the FSF, it’s all posturing with no substance. They should absolutely spearhead a project that would be an alternative for what Anubis is currently doing, or I don’t fucking know try and find one to support and endorse?? Their inability to compromise for a limited time is way too annoying.

This sums up my opinion of the organization as well. The whole thing gives me the feeling of learned helplessness. The state of the World Wide Web is a fucking disaster. The browser duopoly is a disaster. Mozilla’s position as the only ‘competition’ to Google, while being completely dependent on funding from Google is completely farcical and untenable. We are all Wile E. Coyote, standing 10 feet past the edge of the cliff waiting to look down.

I wouldn’t describe the FSF as Trots though. They are 100% dyed in the wool market liberals. The archetypal flaw of the Free Software movement under their guidance has been the messianic belief that the market will sort everything out, and the only work which needs to be done is to produce (tautologically) superior products and services. While this has had some positive aspects (the software and services generally are superior in many regards due to this fixation), it has left us in a situation where Free Software is still out of reach, and essentially invisible to the vast majority of end users 40 YEARS after the publication of the GNU Manifesto.

The movement has completely failed to engage with the process of production whatsoever, and the results are dire. Across the board, consumer electronics are manufactured exclusively by monopoly capital and shipping with proprietary software which is more invasive and abusive than ever before. Only one or two percent of end users appear to have the means, know-how, or desire to help themselves. We succeeded only in building a commune in the middle of the woods, surrounded by an entire continent of surveillance capitalist decadence which pays us no mind. Free Software itself has proliferated, but it hasn’t freed the users. It runs on billions of consumer devices around the world. But it comes in the form of an operating system kernel for Google’s cursed ad-tech mobile operating system, or some audio codecs and shell utilities buried like fossils under several layers of proprietary SDKs on an Apple iPhone.

The situation is a total crisis, like most other aspects of advanced Capitalist society. The situation calls for bold action. A reassessment and change of tactics, at least. But the FSF seems content to remain in this meek holding pattern indefinitely.

This rant doesn’t have very much to do with their statement about Anubis, but in this statement specifically there is another thing that rubs me wrong. You can make a technical argument that mandatory JavaScript puts considerable limitations on system accessibility (not specifically in a disability sense). They should stick to that argument. It is ideologically sound, if pedantic (pedantry is one of the FSF’s redeeming traits, though). This comparison to malware goes beyond the pale for me. The FSF has guidelines on the development of free, non-obfuscated JavaScript. It is news to me that the use JavaScript in and of itself is disqualifying for Free Software infrastructure. Additionally, the comparison to malicious crypto-mining malware just because it implements a basic proof of work algorithm is absurd and disingenuous. Again, a rational objection could be made about the distributed energy costs, battery drain, etc. of requiring clients to perform a proof of work computation, but that’s not what they’re doing.

Depends on what you’re looking for. You won’t find western social media posts in the results the way you do on Google / DDG, but if you are trying to research technological / academic subjects you will probably do fine.

Got three inches of rainwater in the parking lot

Update: Per police dispatch radio, people nearby are being evacuated due to flooding

“Mom, can we have socialism?”

“We have socialism at home.”

There’s a pretty robust modding community for Super Mario World (SNES). Many ROM hacks ranging from casual to kaiso.

Visit a dwarven tavern and use your suspiciously high rhetorical skills to assume the position of fortress mayor. Then initiate a project to eliminate the communal dorms and give each resident their own personal bedrooms… for privacy.

Dono from Maddie Thorsten (creator of Celeste): “The SMW Kaiso community is a cesspool of beautiful sickos.”

I use DDG. It’s getting worse, but it is still better than Google. At some point I might switch to Yandex.

Does China have any good search engines for English content? I’d consider Baidu but it is not practical to use if you don’t read Mandarin (though you can still query in English and get English results).

Also, for DDG heads looking to try something else, you might be interested in a browser plugin like this to keep DDG “bang” behavior with other search engines. I cannot vouch for this extension in particular though aside from pointing you to the same review page I just looked at.

Hell yeah.

Looks like my wireless router firmware has not been updated since Obama was in the White House.

It’s a meme.

Sending a report to the mods, “This ‘THING’ is not cute.”

I’m tempted to create an account and reply in that thread. Not to scold them or create drama, but to simply explain a couple things. About “echo chambers” i.e. that the biggest echo chambers in the world are run by Mark Zuckerburg, Elon Musk, Steve Huffman. That the “animosity” seen on the Fediverse is driven by the underlying political economy, i.e. the only reason the Fediverse exists is because there was not enough room on the mainstream Silicon Valley platforms for us. That it is not possible for LGBT+ people and anti-LGBT+ people to “get along” with some friendly ribbing in this political environment. We cannot “agree to disagree” about matters like pogroms and genocide.

“Lemmy needs more normies,” No. Yes, but that’s not how this fucking works. The normies are all still on Reddit, browsing the default subs, and upvoting u/GallowBoob’s reposts. Those are the last fucking people you’re going to get. Those are the last people you should be interested in talking to, too. You’re talking about people who (for example, among hundreds of other things) are perfectly comfortable on a website where the canonical “lesbian” community is a category of pornography instead of a community for the L in LGBT.

but honestly I would never pay for it.

Well yeah. You might as well buy a CNC mill with that money :D

I haven’t tried SW, but from my experience with Creo, the workflow is very similar to FreeCAD. Designing 2D sketches driven by an algebraic constraint solver, extruding / pocketing them, and repeating indefinitely. You could run into similar problems as well, like if you make a sketch on an unreliable datum, and then go change sketches and dimensions earlier in the model tree, it is fairly easy to break the model. FreeCAD was notoriously fragile in this regard, but the 1.0 release incorporated significant improvements to what they call the “topological naming problem.” None the less, I feel like these trials have made me better. There are often several ways to model the same geometry, but it helps to spend some time thinking about what is the most robust approach. What has the least likelihood to explode if you go back and change something? There is a methodology behind this which carries across to all CAD systems.

I’m kind of surprised to hear Blender CAD is in good shape. It always seemed like a cursed project to me, but I haven’t taken a close look in a long time. Not to say Blender itself is bad. Like you said, It is probably the most capable free software program when it comes to doing 3D sculptures and such. I’ve only dabbled with it in amateur game development, and in that discipline it is incredibly solid.

One more thing… Solidworks is pretty easy to pirate of course, so is worth trying out.

Good to know. I should try it out, if only because it would help me get in the door for a CNC programming position.

For the record, the same is true for Creo Parametric. The main reason I haven’t used it much at home is because of issues running it in WINE on Linux. Rebooting to run it on Windows was too inconvenient for me to invest much time in it. But if that isn’t a problem, it’s an option for anybody reading.

What are your thoughts on Solidworks vs. other solid modeling applications? I use FreeCAD at home to model things for my 3D printer, but I’ve also had the opportunity to use Creo Parametric (formerly Pro-Engineer) at work. We have Solidworks too (the software is on the computer), but I haven’t gone out of my way to get IT to set up the licensing because it is a bit beyond my job description to begin with. In my humble opinion, I am pretty happy with FreeCAD, but the fillet tool will absolutely kill you at the end of the day.

In my experience, Creo is (obviously) more robust, but the gap gets smaller every year, and there have been several occasions where the engineers are hogging all the licenses so I’ll just bang something out in FreeCAD. We have a couple CNC programs in production (tens of thousands of parts made) which started as a sketches in the FreeCAD sketcher workbench.

That thread quickly turned into a “What’s wrong with the Fediverse” meta discussion, and there is a lot of big time ideology going on in there.

When I petittion to get Hexbear.net defederated from Discuss.Online, thereby opening up a generic instance that would be open to all incoming people fleeing from Reddit from Huffman’s shittiness, I started to have a brief hope. It did not last long, b/c the USA elections happened, and more importantly the trolls seemed to switch their strategy, no longer remaining constrained on the Triad servers and instead appearing everywhere, by which I mean Lemmy.World, lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, etc

Surely it can’t be that people hate the Democrats, hate that the bar for “lesser evil” has been lowered to unlimited genocide, that this is a broadly held public sentiment, and as a result you can find evidence of this anywhere you look. Especially around election season, when all the people who still believe in American democracy are thinking about what policies they should advocate for, and what they should expect in return for their votes. It must be a conspiracy. It must be a social contagion. It must be a highly organized disinformation operation.

I have even had to resort to going back to Reddit - damnit the events happening in the world are IMPORTANT, and so when I’ve blocked most of the toxic communities on Lemmy, or even when I don’t block anything at all, that NEWS often simply is not here to be found and read, much less discussed! :-(

I blocked all the places where people discuss current events critically and now I can’t find any discussions of current events.

I’ve been a bum for the past couple weeks and haven’t been riding my bike. Got back on the horse today and worked up a good sweat. Also found the time to clean my rims and scrub them with emery paper. My breaks went from sounding like a neglected public transit bus to silence.

“My eyes are up here”

Unrealistic.

“Can I count on your $27 support to elect the next Democrat who will vote to pass a non-binding resolution to posthumously condemn my EXECUTION?”