Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Homebrew social networking
Homebrew computing — as epitomized by the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley — consisted of hobbyists designing and assembling their own computers. But like Nóva and her fellow Hachydermians, these hobbyists were in fact experienced engineers; their “homebrew” was just them building for themselves, for fun. Yes, homebrew computing was fragmented and incoherent; the participants at the time were not possibly thinking that the machines that they developed would form the basis (for better and for ill!) for all future computing. But by the late 1970s, the time for radical decentralization of compute had indisputably arrived — and its spirit would burn so bright that it would endure long after the homebrew became commercial, as viscerally expressed in Apple’s iconic 1984 Superbowl ad.
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Twitter May Be Dying. It’s Time to Build Our Own Social Network.
All these issues are outlined very well in Richard Seymour’s excellent The Twittering Machine, and if the site does die, nobody will miss them. But, for the most part, until very recently, I enjoyed Twitter. I enjoyed its accessibility, the way that I could instantly ask or be asked all sorts of things. I learned a lot through it, and I met many lovely people. Years ago, when reading a well-meant account of the 2017 election that seemed oddly deficient, I realized what it was missing. Twitter — and the hysterical momentum of the campaign as it was expressed on there, with Corbynite accounts becoming ever more giddily euphoric as it became clear what was happening. Put simply, you’ll never understand the fact — and it is a fact — that Jeremy Corbyn came within a few thousand votes of being prime minister in June 2017 if you don’t understand the “Absolute Boy” meme.
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Find Your Twitter Friends on Mastodon - Alan Pope's blog
Depending on who you speak to, Twitter is (or isn’t) in turmoil, and Mastodon is (or isn’t) here to supplant (or backup (or not)) the “de facto town square”. Whether any of that is true or not, there’s been a surge in people signing up, and trying out the Mastodon experience.
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Index Merges vs Composite Indexes in Postgres and MySQL
While working with Readwise on optimizing their database for the impending launch of their Reader product, I found myself asking the question: How much faster is a composite index compared to letting the database do an index merge of multiple indexes? Consider this query: [...]