“We can tell you what it will cost, when it will be finished, or what it will do. Pick at most two.” Or, honestly, just one.
But how to get to that European cloud?
One major problem is that businesses and governments are very clear about not wanting to deal with new things. The European Commission, for example, is currently in a ridiculous legal battle against its own privacy watchdog just to keep using Microsoft 365. Or take the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, which shares the IP addresses of all its secret service job applicants with Google because it’s supposedly tens of thousands of euros per year cheaper than European alternatives. These are strong signals.
Relevant: This article is part of a series of posts on (European) cloud challenges.
Passwords are okay, impulsive Internet isn't.
Most of the modern Internet is founded on one simple principle: people have problems with impulse control. It's basic psychology. Most humans receive terrible, inadequate parenting, they end up as malformed adults who do not know how to delay/defer their gratification. Big companies use this emotional deficiency to make money.
The CADT Model (via lobste.rs).
This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.
Embeddings are underrated.
Here’s an overview of how you use embeddings and how they work. It’s geared towards technical writers who are learning about embeddings for the first time.
“Why I use WebAssembly.”
My favorite way to use WebAssembly is as a way to share code between platforms. Write the core logic of your application in Ru… a language that can easily compile to native code and WebAssembly 😊. In this architecture, most of your code is shared between the “native” and the “web” variants of your app. Maybe some platform-specific features will need to be turned on or off with compile-time flags, but if you’re building a cross-platform app, you are probably already dealing with different code paths for different platforms anyway. With WebAssembly, the web just becomes another platform to target!
Relevant: nemastudio.app.
Relevant 2: tauri.app.
Small remains beautiful.
How To Launch Big Complex Projects.
Little problems have an incredible capacity to compound large, disastrous problems — ruining big projects and sinking big ambitions at a phenomenal scale. The more little problems we can design around early, the more chances we have to get the project out the door successfully.
The cats are listening!
Look, I’m not going to justify this experiment. It makes no sense that it pleases me that my website’s html/css/js is pretty when you pull up the source. So that’s it. There’s nothing else to say about it. It is what it is.
Having a human-readable website source code would be beneficial for humanity overall, maybe not in huge amounts but small is beautiful after all, too.
Willard Wigan, MBE (born June 1957) is a British sculptor from Ashmore Park Estate, Wednesfield, England, the son of Jamaican immigrants, who makes micro miniature sculptures.
His sculptures are typically placed in the eye of a needle or on the head of a pin. A single sculpture can be as small as 0.005 mm (0.0002 in).
Chickens figure out enshittification.
Relevant: The Man Who Killed Google Search.