Alan Zimmerman @alanz@social.coop

In destroying content libraries, Warner/HBO is using a publishing trick.

Because of the way intellectual property is valued and taxed across much of the English-speaking world, insufficiently profitable property is more profitable out-of-print than bringing in cash.

I could do this too. Here's a vastly simplified example.

Let's take my Prohibition Orcs. What's the value of PO? Well, there's the film rights, the TV rights, audiobook rights, branded fedoras... This is such an innovative property, for a few grand I can easily hire an outside evaluator to tell me it should be worth, say, fifty million.

I claim PO on my taxes as worth fifty million dollars.

PO fails to live up to that. Nobody even buys the branded liquor rights, even though that's a no-brainer.

So I take the product off the market, and write off a fifty million dollar loss.

"It can't be this blatant," people think. But it can. Every IP-related industry lobbied for these laws. This is part of why tech is so profitable, because surely the new game is worth top dollar.

The catch is, only a certain kind of person can do this and sleep well at night.

The tax system is Dungeons & Dragons, except the dragons wrote the rules.

This, by the way, is why publishers won't bring back so much of the out-of-print blacklist. Internally, they value all those vanished first novels at a bajillion dollars, and resurrecting them would require un-writing-off those losses.

Under current tax code, creators are more valuable dead than alive.

Some publishers/distributors play the game fair, and have deep backlists. But if it's a big conglomerate, like HBO or Randy Penguin? It's sociopathy all the way down. Remember, it's not about making money; it's about the quarterly statement, and massive deductions are a win there.

The 1981 paper by RMS about Emacs' design is kind of an amazing read. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html

A lot of insight there into why certain design decisions would be important, and Emacs' longevity as, dare I say it, still the world's most powerful editor, is a testament to that.

My book about beginning #roguelike #development just became available for free for ACM members.

Build and Publish Roguelike Genre Games with JavaScript and Phaser,

https://t.co/nIkmbpjKYc?amp=1

RT for reach plz <3

@fsf @conservancy @fsfe #GNU Mes 0.24 released, closing the gap with Stage0: the Full Source Bootstrap is here!

The @GuixHPC package graph is now rooted in hex0, a 357-byte binary & ASCII-equivalent https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds/blob/master/POSIX/x86/hex0_x86.hex0…

@fsf
@fsfe
@conservancy
@nixos
@NGIZero
@reproducible_builds
#reprobuilds #gnutools #NLnetFDN

Introductory resources to type theory for language implementers - Gabriella Gonzalez: https://www.haskellforall.com/2022/05/introductory-resources-to-type-theory.html

Looking at my account, just realized that #SocialCoop turned 5 years old this month.

Social dot Co-op: We're Still Around™️

New episode of @fossandcrafts! 44: Celebrating a Decade of Guix! https://fossandcrafts.org/episodes/44-celebrating-a-decade-of-guix.html

Heck yeah! Guix is one of the best communities I've participated in FOSS, some of the coolest technology, and has been an entry point for me learning all sorts of things about programming!

Start your journey to becoming a lispy time lord with this episode!

Folks, I'm gonna ask some questions here about Mastodon instances and ActivityPub in general. I'd appreciate any answer or boost you folks can give me. ;-)

* Anyone know instances geared towards creative writing, and science fiction & fantasy fandoms?

* What is the current state of alternative ActivityPub implementations beyond Mastodon server? I'm aware of Pleroma.

The second question is because I might be considering running a server and I'd like something simpler than official Masto server

@socketwench I've had to wade into a lot of unfamiliar codebases in my career to figure out what's gone wrong and fix it, occasionally under significant time pressure, and one thing that's always been true is this: if crack the lid on that code and the first thing I see, top of main, is logging? I know it's going to be ok.

Devs who think logging is a waste of time have the same contempt for their colleagues in ops that devs who think documentation is a waste of time have for their users.

"Why Zulip will stand the test of time"

Lots of head nodding reading this piece.

#OSS #sustainable

https://blog.zulip.com/2021/12/17/why-zulip-will-stand-the-test-of-time/

@meena @technomancy @erincandescent @civodul @cwebber
I wish Erlang and Lisp were the only ones I had experience with :(

In my case, both of these seemed really scary because of syntax. Both of them I got to appreciate and feel that the syntax matches the concepts really well though. In the end, I simply appreciate that not all languages look the same.

Greenspun's Tenth Rule strikes again.

Deep in a large #C++ codebase, I just found some polymorphism using std::variant and visitor pattern. There are three visitors: main one returning a result, and a pre- and post-processing visitors returning nothing.

The latter two are basically :before and :after methods from #CLOS in #CommonLisp.

Only thing missing in this picture are :around methods, and the ability to compose the visitors...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

its fucked up nowadays, you cant just make a thing. you have to make a running series of that thing, which goes on forever, and has a patreon, a mailing list, a discord channel, an official wiki, a fan wiki, a prima strategy guide, its own cryptocurrency, flag, national anthem, nuclear deterrent, etc

Please boost this post if you would like the EFF to join the fediverse.

In a survey the EFF sent me, I suggested they create an account on the fediverse, so they can reach more supporters and support innovative free software that promotes interoperability among platforms, something they've advocated for in the past, too.

If you can boost this post, maybe I'll be able to show them that there are quite a few users who would like them here!

The EFF is the infamous nonprofit organisation that fights for privacy, government transparency, and digital freedom. Their fight is very important, and the EFF is very special to me. https://www.eff.org/about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation

You can see some of their work here https://www.eff.org/work

In the meantime, you can follow @eff, which is an unofficial mirror of their Twitter.

Social.Coop members -- tired of using surveillance capitalist platforms for video conferencing? Sign up for your account on our new BigBlueButton instance. Open source and cooperative.

https://wiki.social.coop/meet.coop-registration-form.html

#OpenStreetMap changeset 100,000,000 !

https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/100000000
#xp #OSM @OpenStreetMap

*sadly goes to reset the counter to 0 on the "days since I saw someone shit on the existence of light themes" sign*

I think on average I see this like once a week.

I cannot see dark themes at all. And it's a hell of a thing to see this hostility not just to a software option but to my own existence and qualities as a person who uses this option. Like I've seen people say you have to be a psychopath to use light theme, which is an awesome way to double up on the ableism!

"Why don’t we pay as much attention to the benefits of resilience as to the benefits of efficiency? We tend to get good at what we can measure, and it’s easy to produce numbers that support efficiency, such as crop yields per acre. Resilience cannot be easily measured, though. Its benefits are most evident during the catastrophes that can’t be predicted and the trends that haven’t been foreseen."

I spent parts of January working on a new kind of search engine. Instead of indexing the unfathomable internet, it focuses on enabling search for neighbourhoods of related websites—webrings, or other kinds of topically similar sites.

The search engine is called Lieu.
Try it out: https://lieu.cblgh.org
See the code: https://github.com/cblgh/lieu