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What should the next chat app look like?
As you’re surely aware, Signal has officially jumped the shark with the introduction of cryptocurrency to their chat app. Back in 2018, I wrote about my concerns with Signal, and those concerns were unfortunately validated by this week’s announcement. Moxie’s insistence on centralized ownership, governance, and servers for Signal puts him in a position of power which is easily, and inevitably, abused. In that 2018 article, and in articles since, I have spoken about the important of federation to address these problems. In addition to federation, what else does a chat app need?
Well, first, the next chat app should be a protocol, not just an app. A...
Go is a great programming language
No software is perfect, and thus even for software I find very pleasant, I can usually identify some problems in it — often using my blog to do so. Even my all-time favorite software project, Plan 9, has some painful flaws! For some projects, it may be my fondness for them that drives me to criticise them even more, in the hope that they’ll live up to the level of respect I feel for them.
One such project is the Go programming language. I have had many criticisms, often shared on this blog and elsewhere, but for the most part, my praises have been aired mainly in...
The world's stupidest IRC bot
I’m an IRC power user, having been hanging out in 200+ channels on 10+ networks 24/7 for the past 10 years or so. Because IRC is standardized and simple, a common pastime for IRC enthusiasts is the creation of bots. In one of the social channels I hang out in, we’ve spent the past 6 years gradually building the world’s stupidest IRC bot: wormy.
For a start, wormy is highly schizophrenic. Though it presents itself as a single bot, it is in fact a bouncer which combines the connections of 7 independent bots. At one point, this number was higher — as many as 11 — but some bots were consolidated.
2021-03-28
On Wednesday, 2021-03-31 there will be scheduled maintenance of the suckless servers. It's estimated this will take about 2-3 hours from about 19:00 to 21:00 - 22:00 UTC+02:00.
The mailinglist, website and source-code repositories will have some downtime.
Update: the maintenance was finished at 2021-03-31 19:10 UTC+02:00.
The complete guide for open sourcing video games
Video games are an interesting class of software. Unlike most software, they are a creative endeavour, rather than a practical utility. Where most software calls for new features to address practical needs of their users, video games call for new features to serve the creative vision of their makers. Similarly, matters like refactoring and paying down tech debt are often heavily de-prioritized in favor of shipping something ASAP. Many of the collaborative benefits of open source are less applicable to video games. It is perhaps for these reasons that there are very few commercial open source games.
However, there are some examples of such games, and they have...
We are building a new systems programming language
It’s an open secret: the “secret project” I’ve been talking about is a new systems programming language. It’s been underway since December ‘19, and we hope to release the first version in early 2022. The language is pretty small — we have a mostly complete specification which clocks in at 60 pages. It has manual memory management, no runtime, and it uses a superset of the C ABI, making it easy to link with libraries and C code. It should be suitable almost anywhere C is useful: compilers, system utilities, operating systems, network servers and clients, and so on.
use io;
export fn main() void = {
const...
Drew DeVault's blog
Status update, March 2021
After the brief illusion of spring, this morning meets us with a cold apartment indoors and fierce winds outdoors. Today concludes a productive month, mainly for the secret project and for sourcehut, but also marked by progress in some smaller projects as well. I’ll start with those smaller projects.
I have written a feed reader for Gemini, which is (1) free software, and (2) available as a free hosted service. Big thanks to adnano, the author of the go-gemini library, which has been very helpful for many of my Gemini-related exploits, and who has been a great collaborator. I also used it to provide Gemini support for the new pages.sr.ht,...
The corporate surveillance machine is killing people
I have never been angrier about the corporate surveillance complex, which I have rallied against for years, than I am today. Buying and selling user’s private information on the open market is bad enough for the obvious reasons, but today, I learned that the depths of depravity this market will descend to are without limit. Today I am more angry and ashamed at this industry than I have ever been. Corporate surveillance and adtech has turned your phone into an informant against you and brought about the actual murder of the user.
Vice: Military Unit That Conducts Drone Strikes Bought Location Data From Ordinary Apps
Say you’re a...