Burnout and the quiet failures of the hacker community

This has been a very challenging year for me. You probably read that I suffered from burnout earlier in the year. In some respects, things have improved, and in many other respects, I am still haunted.

You might not care to read this, and so be it, take your leave if you must. But writing is healing for me. Maybe this is a moment for solidarity, sympathy, for reflecting on your own communities. Maybe it’s a vain and needlessly public demonstration of my slow descent into madness. I don’t know, but here we go.

Yesterday was my 30th birthday. 🎂 It was another difficult day for me. I...

Звучащий код — пишем музыку на языке ByteBeat

Дорогой Хабр, через два месяца мне предстоит организовать и провести фестиваль компьютерного искусства, поэтому я уже сейчас собираю информацию про необычные проявления демосцены, на которые обычно никто не обращает внимания. Язык программирования для генеративной музыки ByteBeat — это как раз то, что я ищу.

Как вы догадались, глядя на заглавную картинку, сейчас будет нечто, очень похожее на язык программирования Lisp. Все примеры рабочие, их можно запустить прямо в браузере.

Послушать пример из заглавной картинки: [sarpnt][greggman]

Reforming the free software message

Several weeks ago, I wrote The Free Software Foundation is dying, wherein I enumerated a number of problems with the Free Software Foundation. Some of my criticisms focused on the message: fsf.org and gnu.org together suffer from no small degree of incomprehensibility and inaccessibility which makes it difficult for new participants to learn about the movement and apply it in practice to their own projects.

This is something which is relatively easily fixed! I have a background in writing documentation and a thorough understanding of free software philosophy and practice. Enter writefreesoftware.org: a comprehensive introduction to free software philosophy and implementation.

The goals of this resource are:

Good Vibrations

Throwing in the towel on mobile Linux

I have been tinkering with mobile Linux – a phrase I will use here to describe any Linux distribution other than Android running on a mobile device – as my daily driver since about 2019, when I first picked up the PinePhone. For about 3 years I have run mobile Linux as my daily driver on my phone, and as of a few weeks ago, I’ve thrown in the towel and switched to Android.

The distribution I ran for the most time is postmarketOS, which I was mostly quite happy with, running at times sxmo and Phosh. I switched to UBports a couple of months ago. I...

Understanding DeepMind's Sorting Algorithm

A few days ago, DeepMind published a blog post talking about a paper they wrote, where they discovered tinier kernels for sorting algorithms.

How to go to war with your employer

There is a power differential between you and your employer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve your working conditions. Today I’d like to offer a little bit of advice on how to frame your relationship with your employer in terms which empower you and afford you more agency. I’m going to talk about the typical working conditions of the average white-collar job in a neo-liberal political environment where you are mostly happy to begin with and financially stable enough to take risks, and I’m specifically going to talk about individual action or the actions of small groups rather than large-scale collective action (e.g. unions).

I wish to subvert...

Vision Zero — безопасные улицы

Смертность на дорогах можно уменьшить. Для этого вовсе не нужны сложные компьютерные системы, беспилотники, монорельс и прочая ерунда. Но нужно будет поменять подход к проектированию городской среды.

Наиболее успешным подходом сейчас считается норвежская инициатива Vision Zero (ноль смертей), которая постепенно распространяется в Европе. На хабре уже была разгромная статья про нее. Теперь пришло время, наоборот, похвалить Vision Zero и подчеркнуть ее плюсы.

Водитель не виноват

Виновата инфраструктура. Один из главных принципов Vision Zero - участники дорожного движения будут иногда ошибаться, а инфраструктура никогда не должна ошибаться.

Back to C++

I learned C++ in the late 1990s, back then with Microsoft's Visual Studio C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes. When I left Windows behind and embraced Linux and macOS, I concentrated on Objective-C, Vala, and (since 2020, being late to the game) Swift. Just recently I started getting into MCU programming (notably the ESP32-series). As I'm (still) not very fond of C, I was pleasantly surprised to see that C++ was supported well. I didn't look at C++ for almost two decades, but I like what the committee did since 2014. Type inference, move semantics, coroutines, ranges, and all that...

Building a Hacker News ChatGPT Plugin

I recently received access to develop and use ChatGPT plugins, and embarked on a project to build a Hacker News integration as a learning exercise. My goal was to enable retrieval of content from HN to answer questions and produce insights in conversations with ChatGPT.

You can experience the plugin in one of three ways:

Simple Demo ...