today's leftovers
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Mastodon Is Doomed
I asked some of the largest instance admins to share how much it cost to run their instances on a per account and per monthly active user (MAU) basis. On average it cost $.0085 per registered account and $.041 per MAU. That may seem cheap, but if Mastodon ever hopes to grow into the millions of MAU or have any celebrities join their platforms admins are going to be paying thousands or tens of thousands per month. As volunteers. With no income potential. They also will be trusted with user’s private keys and unencrypted DMs.
The financial and trust models of Mastodon just don’t add up.
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Test your Drupal website with Cypress
If you don't include tests in your Drupal development, chances are it's because you think it adds complexity and expense without benefit. Cypress is an open source tool with many benefits:
This article covers three topics to help you start testing your Drupal project using Cypress:
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5 open ways to help UX designers and developers collaborate better
Ideally, designers have a good relationship with their product team and users. However, the relationship between designers and developers is more difficult to build and maintain. The lack of a close relationship makes it difficult to solve problems or improve.
In my experience, the open source Open Decision Framework can overcome many of these obstacles.
The Open Decision Framework asserts that open decision-making is transparent, inclusive, and customer-centric. It involves clearly sharing problems, requirements, and constraints with affected parties. It enables collaboration with multiple stakeholders to secure diverse opinions and comprehensive feedback. Most importantly, it manages relationships and expectations across competing needs and priorities.
These principles probably resonate with anyone involved in the many decisions around designing a product, feature, or service. For a designer, developers are key stakeholders in making the best design decisions. If you're a designer, it's time to embrace the opportunity to get diverse opinions.
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Cloud computing: 3 business advantages [Ed: Red Hat is pushing clown computing, citing Microsoft Gartner, despite the corporate media openly saying now that it may be a passing fad]
Most global enterprises have embraced – or at least considered – moving to cloud computing, and the momentum continues to grow. According to data from Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to reach $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022.
But for those who are slow to adopt the cloud, its benefits can seem unclear, especially given the significant effort required to move decades of data from on-prem servers. Regardless of the size of your organization, moving to the cloud is imperative if you want to be an innovator in the next decade.
The most successful cloud migrations happen when business leaders keep the problem they are trying to solve at the forefront. This ensures that cloud investments translate to business outcomes that will continue to push the business forward.
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Red Hat accelerates platform engineering as developer experience takes center stage
As Kubernetes enters its maturity phase, more emphasis is being placed on developer experience. With platform engineering gaining momentum, Red Hat Inc. is using Kubernetes to boost this discipline, as it allows developers to work seamlessly using self-service capabilities, according to Natale Vinto (pictured, right), developer advocate lead at Red Hat.
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A new operating system for health care
What we don’t have is a way to make this data all work together—a “personal health ecosystem,” says Bharat Sutariya, MD, managing director in health care for Deloitte Consulting LLP and an emergency medicine specialist. The endocrinologist treating your diabetes doesn’t have ready access to your eye exam results, which could help them preserve your eyesight. Your phone might contain vital medical information that emergency room (ER) staff needs to properly take care of you, but it has to be able to connect with the hospital’s systems to transmit that data.
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The old Thinkpad X201 has become my daily driver
Also, my X270 runs FreeBSD, so it can run jails, something that OpenBSD does not facilitate.
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Report From The German Parliament's "Sustainable by Design" Conference
In March 2023, a conference on Green Digitisation, "Nachhaltig by Design - für eine klimaneutrale Zukunft", took place at the German Parliament. I was invited as an expert due to KDE's experience obtaining the Blue Angel ecolabel for Okular. The Green Party organized the conference, and participants from a wide range of organizations attended, contributing their views and expertise.
The first part of the conference featured keynotes and panels where subject matter experts and political representatives discussed the challenges surrounding sustainable digitisation. Cory Doctorow (Invidious link) spoke about how we lose control of our digital lives as big vendors force changes on users and legal regulations hinder our ability to prevent this. Mojib Latif (Invidious link) presented a scientific perspective on climate change, emphasizing the urgency of taking action to mitigate long-term harmful effects on our global living conditions. Germany's Vice Chancellor, Robert Habeck (Invidious link), provided insight into current political activities and stressed that energy-efficiency isn't getting the required attention yet.
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You could have invented futexes
The futex (fast userspace mutex) is a Linux kernel feature designed for synchronization primitives (mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, etc.). Like many topics in concurrency, they have a reputation for being tricky (for example, see the paper Futexes Are Tricky). Despite that, they really are a well-motivated and simple but powerful API. This post tries to explain that motivation, and even shows how to implement something similar yourself.