Free Software Leftovers
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Why is open source software so badly designed?
The ‘free’ part of free, open source software refers to its licensing: something that has nothing to do with software in particular. FOSS started as a social philosophy. Here’s how the GNU Project summarizes their view on computing as follows: [...]
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Blogging or posting on social media—what's better?
I believe I reach more people with this blog than via social media. It’s hard to quantify that though, because what does it really mean to reach someone? Views don’t say that much. If we’re talking impact/effort, I recommend the approach of my one tweet that got over 900 likes: reacting with a joke to an already popular joke tweet. Reached over 30k people, took me a few seconds to post. But I forgot what it was about and I don’t think those 30k people remember. And when I post something on my Twitter timeline, it usually gets less than a hundred impressions.
The platforms reward the best performing accounts with a big but short burst of users’ attention. But readers find my blog posts years after I publish them.
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A revealing Vim addressing mistake that I made today
What I actually was thinking of was the :g[lobal] command, and after I realized what I'd done wrong, that's what I used. I've used ':g' before, but this may have been the first time I've used it with a range (at least recently), and evidently my mind remembered the idea but forgot the important bit of the actual 'g'. So the real version I used, after I realized it, was only different by the addition of that one crucial character that made all of the difference: [...]
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Mastodon vulnerable to multiple system configuration problems
More specifically, Alevski recently found that the infosec.exchange instance of Mastodon was uploaded to storage buckets that failed to apply access controls.