| https://www.brandtryan.com/ |
"At each increase of knowledge, as well as on the contrivance of every new tool, human labour becomes abridged."
-Charles Babbage
I prefer the unabridged in most things; for instance, labour, knowledge, Russian novels, and teeth.
con·triv·ance
noun
a device, especially in literary or artistic composition, which gives a sense of artificiality
RE: https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/116662938576982814
Vielen Dank an @webvision für diese Initiative! 🙏
https://www.ehrenamt-opensource.de/
Als langjähriger Open Source Entwickler und Betreuer vieler Projekte unter dem https://thi.ng Schirm, möchte ich mich auch selbst weiterhin für eine tiefere offizielle Anerkennung dieser gemeinnützigen Tätigkeiten aussprechen und dabei engagieren. Ich hoffe auch, dass viele weitere Projekte und Partner in Industrie, Kultur und Bildung an dieser Petition teilnehmen (speziell auch jene, die täglich Open Source Werkzeuge benutzen). Indirekt ist dies auch in ihrem Interesse!
Innovative Organisationen wie @sovtechfund oder @nlnet spielen eine wichtige Rolle, um Open Source Entwicklung besser und realistischer zu unterstützen und zu etablieren, speziell in diesen fragilen Zeiten, haben aber auch relativ engen thematischen Infrastruktur Fokus. Projekte in anderen Themengebieten (z. B. Wissenschaft, Design, Architektur, Kunst, Kultur) sind zumeist leider weiterhin völlig auf sich allein gestellt, spielen aber seit Jahren auch dort eine wichtige Rolle in der Hochschulbildung und Industrie. Es geht hier nicht um Symbolik/Zeichensetzen, sondern um dringende praktische Unterstützung dieser zeitintensiven Aktivitäten, deren Anerkennung und Wertschätzung als Gemeinschaftsgut und fester Bestandteil moderner Wirtschaft (in allen Gebieten). Es geht aber auch um die gesellschaftliche Auswirkung, wenn diese Tätigkeiten strukturell immer weiter gefährdet sind/werden und rechtlich weiterhin nur als Hobby/Altruismus behandelt werden...
Eine Anerkennung als Ehrenamt ist einer der kleinstmöglichen Schritte in diese Richtung!
RE: https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/116662938576982814
Suppose a struggling developer creates a solution to an ongoing V&V crisis in an industry, cutting manufacturing giants and their customers' V&V costs by 90%. Assume this solution is not limited to a specific domain/industry and making it open source would undeniably contribute to the common good. What are the important ethical questions developers consider when something of value is held back from the public for the sole purpose of securing exclusive right to sell commercial licenses?
Magic Moment (when the view finally opens up)
(On the way to Drachensee, October 2023)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #Alps #Mountains #Forest #Hiking
Wow, just noticed #ThingUmbrella reached 3700 stars on GitHub — I'm celebrating... 🤩🫠
Heartfelt thanks to all of you who've been helping along the way (in any shape & form) and been supporting this work for all these years and across different programming languages/camps! Merci beaucoup!!! Esp. big Thank You's to fellow fediverse people/supporters from various stages of this project: @avi, @made, @lurvey, @alesroubicek, @brandtryan, @latrokles, @rc101, @jeffpalmer, @jack, @Yura, @danielrothaug, @computersandblues, @shiffman... (apologies if I forgot you/others here!) 🙏😍
Not counting the earlier years spent on my related toxiclibs library collection for Java/Processing (developed between ~2006-2012), the larger thi.ng project is now 14+ years old, starting with various 2D/3D geometry and dataviz-related libraries for Clojure/ClojureScript in 2011.
Since 2018 the main focus has been https://thi.ng/umbrella, a monorepo collection of (so far) 210+ #TypeScript projects/libraries. It will be 8 years old in January and covers an extremely wide spectrum of topics, use cases, data structures and techniques (take a look at the tag cloud on the https://thi.ng website or the tag browser[1] to explore the scope and related projects).
These 200+ main libraries are NOT forming a monolithic framework and can largely be used individually. However, many of these libraries are complementing each other, or are structured to be composable, expose related functionality at different levels of abstraction and/or are heavily re-use functionality to ensure high code density and small bundle sizes when building large(r) projects. 99% of the packages have NO 3rd party runtime dependencies... The umbrella meta-project also includes 185 commented standalone example projects, hundreds of code snippets in documentation and readme files, illustrating other possible usage & composition patterns.
The total code size of this project is now around 3850 source files, 140k lines of code and 71k lines of comments/docstrings. The example projects add in total another ~35k lines of code & comments. The average package readme size is 11.8KB. 99.9% of this all has been created & maintained by yours truly...
There're still so many unreleased (and useful/interesting!) parts of functionality I've been working on and still need to figure out how to best refactor and package them up (bit by bit) before releasing... we're not done just yet!
There seemingly are quite a few active users (~1.8 million of combined installs per month) and it's so pleasing to see how these tools have matured, are stable/reliable[2] and it confirms to me these efforts were all somehow worth it. Especially this year, I've also spent a lot more time myself using these packages in production, mostly for client projects, but also my own (some of which will be open sourced too). Of course, we all have our own particular likes and preferences for our own tools, but for my kind of work/workflows, #ThingUmbrella provides some of the most varied, productive, _composable_ and malleable tools I've ever used...
Happy coding! 🙌
[1] https://demo.thi.ng/umbrella/thing-browser/
[2] ...even many of those packages which still manage to have a v0.x.y version number, often for years already! My release tool only creates new major versions when there're breaking changes, so if the API is already stable, the version stays at 0.x — I just need to manually bump some of them to a v1.0... 😅
#ThingUmbrella #OpenSource #TypeScript #JavaScript #Community #Github
A working QR code in the style of Piet Mondrian. Inspired @divbyzero and @andrewt.
I've been studying Newtonian physics lately and it occurred to me that the "normal" force is much like our psychological system of inhibition.
When we start losing it the world starts falling apart.
This article in The Register [1] reported that Meta's apps (specifically Facebook and Instagram) on Android devices were secretly opening network ports on users' phones as part of a "localhost tracking" technique to covertly link web browsing activity to user identities, bypassing standard privacy protections like incognito mode, VPNs, and cookie clearing. This practice was uncovered by security researchers in early June 2025 and had been ongoing since at least September 2024.
Whatever needed to enhance data collection for advertising purposes will be done. Privacy violations of users may not get a priority when it comes to profit driven digital surveillance. I don't think it has impacted the user base of Meta products. In India switching costs are high since WhatsApp is essential for daily life [2].
Till researchers find another violation again, it will be business as usual.
1. https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/03/meta_pauses_android_tracking_tech/
2. https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/8/24/23320183/india-whatsapp-meta-land-of-the-giants-mark-zuckerberg
#Meta #Facebook #Instagram #DigitalSurveillance #Privacy #MastodonIndians #MastIndia #India
Karsten Schmidt
Oscar Cunningham
Srijit Kumar Bhadra