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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You shouldn’t eat candy given to you by strangers. If you’re in a large group and someone knows the candy, maybe. Code is food for your computer. Be wary. Our large Open Source group of friends has learned about many kinds of candy and shouts loudly when some in the group becomes ill. You don’t want to become ill. Some risk exists, but with a large group it is generally ok. Don’t install packages as root, don’t install what you don’t need.

    I run my frontend builds through Docker (also during development). By isolating access to the host system to the files/folders necessary for development I’ve shielded off the majority of current realistic attacks I’ve seen as NPM based exploits. I’m certain the approach can be replicated for other frameworks, but we use Ember and docker-ember. I doubt it runs as smoothly on a non-Linux OS.




  • Exactly. The Semantic Web is broader than Solid but Solid is great for personal apps.

    Say you buy a smartphone. The specifications of the smartphone likely belong elsewhere than in a Solid Personal Online Datastore, but they can be pulled in from semantic data on the product website. Your own proof of purchase is a great candidate for a Solid POD, as is the trace of any repairs made to it.

    These technologies are great to cross the barriers between applications. If we’d embrace this, it would be trivial to find the screen protector matching your exact smartphone because we’d have an identifier to discover its type and specifications. Heck, any product search would be easier if you could combine sources and compare with what you already have.

    The sharing tech exists. Building apps works also. Interpreting the information without building a dedicated interface seems lacking for laymen.


  • IPFS would replace Content Delivery Networks in present day.

    It would also allow you to host software and other content from your own network again without the constraints modern Internet Service Providers pose on you to limit your self-hosting capabilities.

    If applications are built for it, it could serve as live storage for your applications too.

    We ran ipf-search. In one of the experiments we could show that a distributed search index on ipfs-search, accessible through JavaScript is likely feasible with the necessary research. Parts of the index would automatically be hosted by clients who used the index thus creating a fairly resilient system.

    Too bad IPFS couldn’t get over the technical hurdles of limiting connection setup time. We could get a fast (ElasticSearch based) index running and hosted over common web technologies, but fetching content from IPFS directly was generally rather slow.



  • To be honest, I didn’t know by heart what we stated exactly. It says “Open source”. When we ask we may well say “like a GitHub handle”.

    For people without much experience it can all be a bit daunting. They’ll know about GitHub and it helps them identify what we’re hoping to see. By now I expect links to open source work in a CV due to the nature of our company but it’s not a requirement.

    It’s a balancing act in getting the right hints in a vacancy for people in the know and providing enough info for people who don’t know yet.

    GitHub wasn’t all that bad years ago and it’s easy seeing this find their way in HR forms and taking as long to be removed again. I certainly wouldn’t shun entering a CodeBerg/GitLab/selfhosted url in a form where I should enter a GitHub handle.




  • Belgian here. It’s about money and racism. Flanders (north) makes more money and has a higher employment rate. The separatist movement aims to put Flanders’ wealth first.

    Foreigners are perceived to threaten our way of life and are perceived to cost money too. Vlaams Belang has been rather controversial in their statements earlier with a new young team creating some uproar. Both claim to benefit the Flemish citizen and will create better jobs with higher incomes.

    Far left also gained ground so we are becoming more polarised.



  • I write my notes in org-mode. It’s supported in many editors in a basic form, letting you add code snippets etc in an unobtrusive way. Using a well thought out format helps you in the long run.

    I use this in Emacs, through which it lets me refer to emails, execute code snippets, attach related files, fetch content on/from remote servers, send off the debug session as an html email, … Support will depend on your editor but even as raw text it works.

    I don’t use something specific to make non-code repeatable as you suggest here, but you could embed a test language in an org code block.

    The syntax is straight-forward and exports to multiple external formats exist (eg: html).







  • With that explanation I am still not clear whether the statistic on percentage of recycled batteries was car batteries, the battery industry as a whole, li-ion batteries, rechargeable batteries, … I am honestly interested in which statistics you are referring to. Especially the evolution of recycling of car batteries and the regions where recycling and collection occurs.

    It seems you are adding uncertainty and doubt on the topic of battery recycling which I’m not sure is grounded. We are well past the point in our environment where we can live our current lifestyle in the way we live it today. We have to adapt to a different lifestyle and make strategic bets. It seems clear that we should stop pumping up oil and electric cars may help there. I’m looking for research that indicates that current car batteries are waiting in stockpiles to be recycled but no plants exist to recycle them.

    As far as I can tell, there are not even enough bad battery packs around to suit the diy hackers to reuse them for home energy storage and with some luck your research points me to where I can find them.


  • Are you talking about Li-ion batteries in general, or car batteries?

    I don’t think there are many car batteries to be recycled yet. Only the Leaf’s batteries degraded sufficiently to warrant replacement and even those seem to be used with shorter range. Tesla batteries with faults get refurbished IIUC. The ev conversion market likes to use second hand packs and prices are strong because there are too few.

    I have read that recycling is feasible and realistic but did not bother to check. Can you point to the research that says it is hard and that the batreries will serve no future use as is?


  • My whole work environment is tightly integrated ensuring I can use the same tools nearly everywhere. Things like keybindings (deleting a sentence, spellchecking a region, multiple cursors), macro’s (ad-hoc repetitive command sequences), the consistent mostly text-based visual look & feel. All of this lowers the cognitive load.

    Comparing to an IDE, Emacs is more of a hyper-configurable integrated work environment. In my case, my code editor (Emacs), my knowledge base (org-roam), my tasks manager (ad-hoc on top of org-mode), my email client (mu4e), my tiling window manager (exwm), interaction with git (magit) and git issues and PRs (forge) as well as some other tools are controlled from Emacs. I call them ‘my’ because they’re sometimes slightly modified to scratch my own itches. I could integrate my calendar but Google’s webdav APIs seemed flaky at the time and FireFox only gets some consistent keybindings.

    Just a few more years and Emacs will turn 50 years old. You never know what the future will bring but there’s a reasonable chance I will not have to throw away what I have learned so far.

    Some examples of this integration:

    • When I start developing on a project as full-stack I usually have a M-x develop-projectname command that boots up the application, arranges my windows with the right folders open, backend and frontends started, and a place for FireFox (not integrated, only uses some of the same keybindings)
    • It is not uncommon for me to receive about 100 emails in a day, some just informative and some requiring action. Processing these can lead to tasks or just information. In any case, treating them and doing actual work on the same day requires focus and a smooth path from throwing it away to drafting out tasks.
    • An email can lead to an action to be taken on a server. When managing a server (local or remote), I’ll outline the tasks to execute. I can execute these tasks through org-mode’s code-blocks on the remote host and have a read-back of commands and output. In this use my knowledge base becomes similar to a Jupyter Notebook but integrated with all the rest. I can also reuse the results whilst working on it and I can mail the read-back to whomever would need to have the result in a readable email.

    If you want to come to the dark side and like VIm’s keybindings, you may want to use Emacs’s evil-mode and keep them. It might just be the best of both worlds.