Aleksandr Yakunichev

@yacodes
154 Followers
797 Following
1.4K Posts

Software developer interested in free, accessible, and privacy-respecting software. Using Emacs and Linux for all things digital. Interested in politics, philosophy, and cinema. Migrant and luddite.

The avatar is drawn by @postviolet via Wigglypaint.

Writing here mostly in English, but feel free to communicate with me in Spanish or Russian as well.

Websitehttps://ya.codes

Hello sloth valuers! #GoToSocial could use your help!

TL;DR, please help us by donating to our OpenCollective page so we (Tobi and Kim) can pay ourselves a basic monthly wage.

Long explanation:

In order to keep work on the GtS codebase buzzing along, Tobi and Kim have to perform the increasingly expensive chore of maintaining their flesh temples by consuming calories, keeping warm and dry (or cool and wet, depending on the circumstances), doing routine bodily maintenance, and so on. Not to mention paying for electricity, internet, etc.

The money we need for all this has so far largely been provided to us by NLnet, the Dutch organization that funds a lot of fediverse projects (among other interesting things). NLnet's support has been of incredible value. Indeed, without it GoToSocial would not exist in its current form; we'd have long since had to get "real jobs" and GtS would have been relegated to being a side project.

However, due to the way that funding from NLnet works, we get paid only for delivering features that we scope out long in advance of when the funding period actually begins. In other words, we get paid every time we merge a big feature, details of which are agreed up to a year beforehand. However, this payout happens only intermittently, since big features take a large amount of time to write.

As everyone who works on code knows, there's more to a project than just writing headline features. We don't get paid for spending time doing things like maintenance, bugfixes, small bonus features, refactoring, triage, helping people in the Matrix chats, code review, and what have you. So, the intermittent way that we get paid means we have to juggle working on very important but unpaid "maintenance" stuff, alongside paid "feature" stuff when our bank accounts start to look worryingly moth-filled. This causes semi-regularly panics in the both of us, as neither of us are particularly resilient when it comes to dealing with financial pressures.

To make working on GoToSocial more sustainable, then, we want to be able to pay ourselves--the two most active devs--a basic monthly salary for all the work we do that isn't big headline features. This will allow us to commit time to unglamorous but vital maintenance chores, without the constant background worry that by doing so we're going to end up running out of money at a critical moment. To make this happen, we need your help!

Thanks to all our donors on OpenCollective and Liberapay, we'd accrued enough unspent money over the years to be able to pay ourselves 1,000 EUR each, each month, for the months of February, March, April, and May 2026 (plus a little bit here and there from Liberapay). For transparency's sake, you can see those payouts here.

As you'll see from our OpenCollective budget, however, we don't make enough from donations to keep this up, and indeed at the time of writing we have only 2000 EUR left in our OpenCollective budget, which gives us ~3/4 of a month when accounting for ongoing hosting costs.

And so, we're asking you, dear sweet reader, sexy-ass cool reader, for a donation or two to our OpenCollective pot:

https://opencollective.com/gotosocial#category-CONTRIBUTE

With your help, we want to be able to raise about 2,500 EUR per month, so that we can continue to pay ourselves 1,000 EUR each per month, plus various other costs that are paid out of the OpenCollective.

Thank you for reading this absolute saga of a post, and for considering donating to us. We really appreciate it! 

GoToSocial - Open Collective

Develops open source Fediverse/ActivityPub software

This is my new favorite #design #fail.
I made this a few years ago, to compare the size of the entire screen on an original 128k Mac with the size of the Safari icon on modern macOS. Enjoy!
PRO TIP: if you want access to an academic paper, but you don't have a subscription to the journal, you can often get the paper for free by emailing one of the authors. There is nothing academics love more than people taking an interest in their nerd shit (affectionate).

Almost all code lives on GitHub or GitLab these days. Convenient, but your whole workflow runs on infrastructure you don't control.

By self-hosting Forgejo, a free, #OpenSource Git platform, on a small VPS you can change that. You get repos, pull requests, issue tracking, teams and it runs comfortably on modest hardware. Then your code stays for sure where you put it.

https://htznr.li/sh4_ms

Spanish homes (specially south & east, plus islands) are mostly prepared for the heat. There's a seesaw pattern:

The older the better: Thicker walls, good orientation, good ventilation with small windows on first floor... It depends on the area); but also newer buildings have efficient insulation and good AC machines.

It's the cheap, built between 70-90s houses that may lack some stuff.

The only reason most of us aren't <more> adapted is that we aren't as rich as northern Europeans.

yeah boomers may have been hard on millenials for our avocado toasts and things were not as easy from a financial perspective as it was for boomers / genx but also, we've still had it better then genz and also we got to experience a time where computers were exciting, promising things, rather than prisons we built for our kids to suffer inside of

and the irony of ironies is that, recognizing that kids are suffering in these environments, many people in my generation are just trying to make the prisons worse

so fucking depressing

I hoped we'd do better

The guinea pig had a bad day and decided to order a burguer, but he ordered from a different place, the order was late, and it wasn't even that good.

Do you remember Boaty McBoatface?
So the UK Met Office is inviting people to suggest up to 5 names for storms. And apparently lots of people have been suggesting "Storm Bigoil", along with BP, Equinor, Exxon & Shell... This is obviously appalling & definitely not to be emulated via this link:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/forms/name-our-storms-call-for-names

Name our Storms

Met Office
i fucking love the goose value thing because it is a premier example of "meme becomes well-known within a certain small group of people, and then somehow makes it onto fedi and then literally 1/3 of the entire network is gooseposting". i love how we just wholeheartedly embrace random things sometimes /gen