Jade

Its a sunny winter day today, and its very exciting to see these cauliflowers looking ready to eat. #gardening #solarpunk

RE: @Floppy@mastodon.me.uk

This is important folks. DHH has absolutely gone full fash, and an alternative fork of #Rails is now necessary.

I build a lot of my career in Ruby on Rails, I've started and run Rails meetups in two cities, ran a Rails podcast, attended many events and really enjoyed the fact that the community has long prided itself as being welcome, diverse, and inclusive, and nice.

I've long since moved on from Rails for other project related reasons, and now largely build my web apps in Rust. However, for those still working in it, it's absolutely critical to move it away from what has become a completely toxic influence. Huge props to those doing this work.

We had a really great night last night at the Naarm Solarpunk Meetup, at the great Maker Community makerspace in Brunswick.

We had to cap numbers at 35 because it’s not a massive space, but we had a lot of new faces, and people who were at our talks last month about “getting off big tech”, and “neighbourhood-first software”.

We had some Linux installs happening, a bunch of people started on Raspberry Pi setup to run nodes for https://lores.tech, and we had some discussions about getting off Spotify.

#solarpunk #lores #NeighbourhoodFirst

If my last post was depressing, here's the perfect chaser. I met both members of https://worm-blossom.org/ this week, and not only are they lovely, but their website been a breath of fresh air for me to remember that developing open source software can be cool and awesome and artistic.

Also, #willow looks genuinely awesome and I hope to try it out on LoRes soon, perhaps for synchronizing hosted websites between nodes.

Our #NDIS is under attack. There are many ways to improve it, but cuts isn't one. We're all disabled eventually. #disabilityjustice is justice

#TheGeneralAssembly just dropped their new albumn on #Subvert

https://www.subvert.fm/the-general-assembly/goodbye-nostalgia

I've been looking a bit at #reticulum. The references implementation is in Python, and the developer has given it a custom licence that is essentially public domain, except banning use for AI or for harming humans. They have a lovely manifesto/rant thing where they explain their reasons:

https://reticulum.network/manual/zen.html#ethics-of-the-tool

Now this sort of license makes it not officially meet the definition of open source, which puts a lot of people out. Personally I think that we've seen Open Source software co-opted by massive corporations in order to cause harm one time too many, and we need to have stronger values than that. Still, I understand that a lot of downstream open source projects need to be able to get grant funding and thus need official open source licenses and so forth, so I don't expect reticulum implementations to really use this license.

As primarily a rust developer now, I'm likely to use to rust implementation which has been developed by community members to the same spec. So, let's go over and look at that.

https://github.com/BeechatNetworkSystemsLtd/Reticulum-rs

It's MIT license, fair enough, no big surprise. I'm sure we all care about ethical software but we need flexible licenses to build software for the reality of the economy we live in, yada yada yada.

Except that I looked up "Beechat Network Systems". They build mesh network systems for "tactical teams, autonomous systems and sovereign communication" with lots of pictures of jackbooted thugs in case it isn't clear that this is for military use. 🤮

I'm so disheartened.

This is why we can't have nice things in open source.

350.org is running a community climate event in Naarm. Free dinner. :)

https://act.350.org.au/events/make-big-polluters-pay-melbourne-community-event

#ClimateEmergency #Naarm

RE: @timhollo@aus.social

Some really good points in this one folks, I highly recommend giving it a read.

"We surrender as if to the inevitable when we turn our backs on the possible."
- @RebeccaSolnit@spore.social

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/between-the-impossible-and-the-inevitable-the-case-for-defiance-aka-never-f-king-surrender/

@timhollo@aus.social lots of Hannah Arendt references for you in this one. :)

Yes, the race back to the moon is driven by competitive nationalism. Yes, most recent advances in space technology have been driven by fascist billionaires. Yes, NASA is funded by the US when many of it's people don't even have health care.

But the Artemis II mission was still exciting. We don't need space above all else, but it doesn't have to be either/or. Many advances in renewable technologies have their links to the original race for the moon.

"The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars"
- Octavia Butler

This always felt like a somewhat tacked-on part of the Parable of the Sowers / Talents. The books work fine without it in a narrative sense. However, it seems connected to the feeling of hope that is somehow present in those books, despite the awful reality of most of their day to day.

We need big bold vision. It doesn't have to be space. It certainly shouldn't be driven by countries busy bombing civilians, or by billionaires. But also well done to all the people involved in the mission, it's a tremendous human achievement.

A lovely essay by Rebecca Solnit, "Visions of Life / Agents of Death""

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/visions-of-life-agents-of-death-on-love-thy-neighbor-and-love-thy-nature/

Hey friends, please send me your recommendations on #subvert. Here's one from me:

How Temporary We Are
- sixten

https://alpha.subvert.fm/sixten/how-temporary-we-are

It's kinda dark/alt ambient or maybe lofi or something. I don't know the music words.