After all and briefly touching this in a conversation a few days earlier, finally took a bit of that time of being grounded to watch that "TempleOS - Down The Rabbit Hole" clip. And now am not feeling particular easy. I've been watching parts of this from way afar back then but never really did dig deep into it, lacking both time and interest to be spent on hobbyist operating systems without any practical purpose asides being "fun in programming". It always felt weird, the website and the system itself felt weird and it all had that appearance of yet another narcissistic hacker in his bedroom at his parents house writing code written all over it. It ended up to be the story of a difficult person living a difficult and sad life. It ended up to be the story of dynamics of online communication and communities, too. And it probably leaves a bunch of other thoughts behind as well. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCgoxQCf5Jg ... requires YouTube login or some proxy to circumvent that as there's an age restriction on it.) 

#linkdump #down_the_rabbit_hole #templeos

Morning thoughts, open ears and I wanted to briefly skip through yet stayed for most of the episode so far:

"... And what local-first is, is a principle for designing this kind of collaboration software so that the primary copy of the data is not somewhere in the cloud, but on your own machine. You have a copy of the data locally on your own machine, which means that you can access it while offline, for example, and you can just keep using the software without an internet connection, and it'll just resync the next time you come back online again. ..."

I haven't been listening to tech and software architecture podcasts that often recently but remembering rather well reading through the "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" book back then (which was a concise and great read, like most of the O'Reilly books used to be and maybe still are), speaker got my interest started and I remained there nodding again more often than I probably should. Talking making applications independent of particular cloud vendors. Talking making cloud services useful support tools that can be changed without being tied to them altogether. Giving users the autonomy and full control over their data, specifically also non-technical users. Spreading features absolutely familiar to software developers, such as the fully self-containing autonomy of git repositories, the change tracking and revision history, to other domains (such as social networks, talking ATProto / Bluesky again). Worth following up on.

https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/increasing-users-data-agency/ 

#linkdump #podcasts #social_technology #data_architecture

(The other day, too, following a different rabbit hole I learnt about "Andropovs Ears" and found a new web site that will be hard to forget: https://architectuul.com/architecture/andropovs-ears ... )

#linkdump #architecture #brutalism

Interesting to notice that, even though things like that usually make it around here, the Digital Cleanup Day went by almost unnoticed by the different timelines I'm living in. Which is sad, because that's something that more than just a bit should be taken into consideration I guess. As in: Reducing energy consumption. Making machines last longer and perform better. Reducing network bandwidth consumed. Reducing personal time of life to be spent on digital tools and platforms. This seems a good thing to notice and keep in mind from an end-users perspective, as in "be aware of what tools you use, and try to minimize these as much as somewhat possible". But it also ... seems an interesting thing to consider for developers of software and operators of services. As in: How to ensure whatever "we" offer can be used by people under these circumstances? How to make sure our tools minimize energy consumption or resource demands on their end? How to make sure the tools we offer limit resource needs globally? How to make sure the tools we provide help people doing whatever they need or want to do without adding unneccessary clutter or complexity to their lives? There's still room for improvement, here and there.

https://www.digitalcleanupday.org/ 

#digital_technologies #linkdump #minimalism #sustainability

Reading through this made me nod more often than I probably should:

A key reason for the continued effectiveness of DDoS attacks lies in organizational structures. Systems are often put into operation under time pressure, as temporary solutions or pilot projects. Security aspects take a back seat as long as functionality is guaranteed. Such temporary installations are rarely dismantled or revised if they remain inconspicuous in everyday use. Over the years, this results in unsupervised components that are neither monitored nor updated.

https://www.igorslab.de/en/30-years-of-ddos-why-a-structural-problem-persists/ 

As I'm running various pieces of infrastructure on my own, I also happen to then and now see which software does connect to my environments, including version fingerprints that have been considered old, unmaintained, unpatched for months if not years. And as I'm interested in this kind of stuff, I then and now tend to listen to podcasts or read through articles dealing with self-hosting of more or less complex pieces of infrastructure, most of them just all too often boiling down to the idea that it's all "trivial" and "just" takes will and a bit of dedication to do it - and even in some of these podcasts once in a while I'm negatively impressed to hear how little real experience in managing infrastructure is shining through and how much of this is more or less happy-path about initially installing a piece of software on a VPS or a shared hoster. And then I'm painfully reminded of the early 2000s and trying to keep our corporate mail server and other pieces of infrastructure safe from numerous more or less distributed DoS attacks mostly conducted by poorly maintained, unpatched, vulnerable installations of typo3, wordpress and similar pieces of software one "just" used to install at some point and left at this state for a random amount of time. This feels quite concerning, over and over again.

Washed into my inbox and worth a closer look:

As part of the development of our Custom Usability Index, which can be used to measure the degree of usability of a software project, we as Usability Team took a closer look at those principles and extended them to 13 top categories, which contain multiple usability aspects each. In this article those categories and aspects are explained in more detail and illustrated with examples.

https://blogs.zeiss.com/digital-innovation/en/13-important-usability-principles/

All along with other non-functional requirements to run into, usability, in its various aspects, is something both relevant and ignored just too often, with issues hard to fix afterwards.