Zed is very interesting. I know it.

Very recently, I found a fork of Zed that gutted the AI Assistant integration and Telemetry. I forked that, myself, and took it further: gutting automatic updates, paid feature-gating, downloading of executable binaries and runtimes like Node.js (for extensions that don’t compile to WASI), integration with their online services, voice-calling, screen sharing, etc.

My branch ended up down 140 000 lines^[1] of code and up less than 300! It was educational and the outcome was absolutely brilliant, to be fair. In all honesty, forking it and engaging in this experiment took less than 24 hours even though I restarted three times, with different levels of “stringency” in my quest.

This experiment was very realisable. Forking Zed and hacking on it was quite possible – the same cannot be said for just “forking Electron” or “forking VS Code” or even getting up to speed on those projects to the point of being able to fix the underlying issues (like this OP) and submit merge-requests to those projects. They have a degree of inscrutability that I absolutely could overcome but would not, unless I was paid to at my usual rates. (I have two decades of professional development experience.)

I shelved the effort – for the time being – for a few reasons I don’t particularly want to extenuate, today, but I shall continue to follow Zed very closely and I truly, deeply hope that there is a future in which I see hope (and, thus, motivation) in maintaining a ready-to-go, batteries-included, AI-free, telemetry-free, cloud-free fork.

Part of maintaining a fork would include sending merge-requests upstream even though I should hardly expect that my fork would be viewed favourably by the Zed business. But, from what I can tell, Zed seem to act true to the open-source principles – unlike many other corporate owners of open-source projects – and I see no reason (yet) to believe they would play unfairly.

I don’t see it as a “lol” matter.

The Electron project made an extremely stupid decision. Individual people who are left to wrangle with the fall-out and manage the PR have nothing but my utmost sympathy, as do all the down-stream projects (Signal, Discord, VSCodium…) who have to do the same. Even the developers of xdg-desktop-portal are facing unnecessary backlash because of this. Their release schedule and time-line for when org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser v. 4 could be reliably expected to exist in the wild was surely not kept in secret!

This doesn’t only affect Flatpak apps. The xdg-desktop-portal mechanism is used by many things. Even “gtk native” applications like Firefox use it when running on a correctly configured KDE environment and one of the nuances of this issue is that those applications – today – continue to work perfectly. Electron is not part of their stack.

I have flatpak on my desktop just for Steam and even flatpak’d steam still seems to work, correctly.

It’s a good question for the package maintainers.

In their defence: it isn’t a direct dependency, it isn’t advertised, and it is likely that the distro package maintainers just don’t know about it – Electron hardly announce that they chose to depend on something that they know isn’t released, anywhere, yet, and won’t be for months.

To lighten the mood, here’s a screenshot of one of the lowest points I achieved while hacking away, trying to resolve the issue: What even is going on, there?

• pixelated menu
• “Cancel” button at the top left??
• “Open” button at the top right??
• clearly Adwaita but not actually Adwaita as configured – the VSCodium window (behind) shows how Adwaita is actually configured on my system and that’s how all native gtk applications actually draw.

I found this through other means^[1] and appreciated it. It introduced new ideas to me while also describing a lot of things that resonate with me, personally, in words that I wouldn’t have strung together, myself.

In summary, the argument it makes is that “inclusivity” in games is performative at best and, nearly always, just a token gesture that looks good on the tin and gets praised by the mainstream press but is always implemented in a way that is aimed squarely at cis-het. male players.

One of the strongest examples used to support this is how female player-characters are usually intended to be characters that the player observes, like a voyeur, in the second-person, and player-characters which are intended for the player to identify with and project themselves into are invariably cis-het. males. Lara Croft vs Geralt.

I’m intending to watch it through, again, soon and it might not stand up to the scrutiny of a second, more critical viewing but I certainly found it thought-provoking on round 1.

I’d love to hear other opinions on the video’s arguments, though.

puritan

Ooh. Good. “Victorian” also comes to mind, now.

EDIT: I rather like “victorian” because it’s secular and more recent and has the right connotations suggesting how contrived the very concept of “proper” sexuality is – and how absurd. I fear that “puritan” might get bogged down in concepts of religious phobia and zeal which are certainly appropriate but could be a distraction – it’s adding trees to distract from the wood.

We won’t.

It might look likely through the lens that is appropriate for the rest of the “democratic” world but that lens is not reliable for Germany. In the rest of the “democratic” world, the extreme fascists are hidden much like a dirty secret and so any noise from them that slips through is hugely amplified because it signals the existence of a much larger and more significant fascist movement. In Germany, the extreme right are in clear sight and much more of their noise gets through and the lens that amplifies that noise makes it seem that they might win.

That same democracy will ensure that they do not. In Germany, we can see them for what they are and their seats in parliament represent a more accurate measure of their support base. That support base is tragically large and significant but not enough to give them more than seats in parliament: they do not have a majority and would only form a majority through a coalition with other parties and, here, the transparency is a disadvantage: other parties who stand to be part of the next coalition won’t join with the AfD.

Our democracy is not a two-party system. They will not win by jerrymandering or by playing the game. They cannot even sneak power by having a better candidate for key seats because individual seats are won through “first votes” while winning a majority in parliament would require them to take a majority of “second votes” – the system would put those “better” candidates in their seats while correcting the share of seats, overall.

The reason that they are given any space at all is also to their detriment: in Germany, there is exactly one way a political party can be blocked and that is if they contravene the constitution: Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar, usw.

This is why we tolerate their presence and one sees the noise they make: they haven’t – yet – violated that consequentially, and so they cannot be blocked. Blocking the AfD would be great – I’m all for it, in isolation – but it would compromise something about German democracy and the cure would be worse than the disease because it would only silence their noise: the movement would proceed apace and their movement is, itself, a symptom of a greater problem: there are people who are ill served by the status-quo and the AfD seem to be an “alternative.”

If the AfD ever did gain power, however, they simply could not do what they insinuate because that would tear it and the constitutional court would smash them. This is also true if they form part of a coalition: that coalition could not execute on the plans they hint at.

Now, “unantastbar” is a fantastic German word that cannot readily be translated to a single English one but one aspect of it implies immeasurability. The AfD could never pass legislation that discriminated against LGBTQ+ people because that would necessarily divide “people” into two groups and apply a comparator between them and that cannot be done if people’s worth is immeasurable. The constitutional court knows this, as do the defence teams who have surely prepared this argument for the day when it becomes necessary.

Germany is by no means perfect and even German democracy is flawed in some ways but, largely, Germany is a good place to live. There are many archaic laws that persist – the gendered language and gendered baby name things count among a legacy of problems – but, largely, these are being progressively overturned. (Albeit slowly.)

Sometimes, we make a few steps forward and then a few (hopefully fewer) backwards but, largely, I think Germany is on the right track.

Taiga is too broad. I tried it out with all the best intentions and, quite simply, it is too big. It is too complex and complicated and feels extremely heavy to use.

From decades of professional experience, I know that all forms of planning are performed breadth-first and not depth-first. One jots down a bunch of titles or concepts and delves into them, fleshing them out and adding layers of detail afterwards. Taiga just doesn’t seem to facilitate that workflow.

It is focussed on fixed ideas like “epics” and “user-stories” and its workflow needs one to understand how your planning should fit into those boxes. I never work like that: I don’t know whether a line-item on a scrap of paper is an “epic” or a “story” or just destined to be an item in a bulleted list, somewhere within something else. I don’t want to have to choose what level of the plan the line-item fits before I capture it in my project tracker – I just want to type it up, somewhere, and be able to move it around or promote it or add stuff to it or whatever, later.

In summary: Taiga seems “fine” but just isn’t for me.

I think I’m in agreement. I’m also inspired by Cory Doctorow’s recent piece in which he talks about how his blog – pluralistic.net – is ascetic: basically just a static site that spreads through other channels.

Hugo seems ok for this, I’m thinking, along with just about any static site hosting and my own domain name.

Moving into the new year, I’m going to actually do this properly but one key objective is this: I am determined only to write properly on positive topics, creativity, passion, delight and inspiration and to ignore all the hate and the destroyers and the bad stuff.

The TL;DR of my thesis is basically this: I only wish to write about topics I think are worthy of being read and, for me, any work is only worthy if the reader actually stands some slight chance to gain something from ingesting it.

I’m very nearly 40 years old, recently a father, unemployed, burned-out, and of such a confusing string of nationalities that I don’t get to vote anywhere in the world despite having worked and paid taxes in three countries on three distinct continents, all of which are supposedly “democracies”. As a reader, I can do little against the haters and the destroyers and the plutocrats and I need learn nothing new to recognise them and see them for what they are. As a reader, then, I get no worth from reading more assessments of the “bad”, neither is there any shortage of scriveners far more informed and skilled than I who write about that bad. As a writer, I am only interested in writing about the “good”: things that other readers can actually derive value from ingesting.

That said, I know I need an outlet to vent in and I know I need another space to experiment in. I don’t mind if the “proper” journal and the free-association style blog become unofficially associated with each other for much the same reasons why I don’t mind when my personal stuff and my open-source contributions signed under my real-life name get associated: I’ve nothing to hide. (I choose to live in the world I wish existed: a world in which I need not hide.)

But I don’t want them to be too easily linked because that sort of thing becomes a career limiting move simply because dumb algorithms will readily cancel one’s professional profile long before any actual human ever sees one’s job application or C.V. in a real-life setting.

I’m thinking I’ll use the WriteFreely space as the sand-box and do the real essays, properly, with something like Hugo.

I also am a huge fan of personal pages and wish to see their return. Would you join a web-ring with me?

Ok. I’ve been trying out WriteFreely and, yeah, here: https://personaljournal.ca/schleudersturz/it-is-more-important-to-flaunt-our-humanity-today-than-it-ever-was-before

How does it look?

• I really like the simplicity of it.
• I do not like how hard it was to discover a seemingly appropriate host.
• I never worked out how drafts were supposed to work and this post was just published without drafting or without any way to preview it or test whether it came out with the right formatting.
• At least one taxonomy would be good: single-level categories, at a minimum.

Maybe some of the features I want are actually there and I’ll find them, eventually.

I know Bugzilla from the days of yore. I haven’t actually used it since about 2007, I estimate, and I’m happy to say that your post didn’t trigger any hyper-ventilation or other post-traumatic-stress reactions so I do appear to be recovering. 🙃

You are right, though: it is very classic. And libre.

I do like putting task-cards in columns and dragging them from left to right but I’m explicitly not going the Kanban route nor the Scrum route. I reject the prescriptivism that inevitably accompanies those “brand name” methodologies, even while I acknowledge that both methodologies do encompass several excellent ideas one might usefully borrow.

In fact, I always rather liked Trello simply because one could do whatever the heck one wanted with its boards – and the hotkeys were brilliant. (If I test out Planka, hotkeys will be evaluated for sure!)

Sadly, Trello devolved into and, yeah, I wouldn’t touch any Atlassian^[1] product with a barge pole, today, nor have I in years.

Ta. Along with Taiga – which is presently first in the queue to try out^[1] – I’ve added Planka simply because it looks so immensely and elegantly simple and down-to-earth. I shall not be surprised if Planka wins out from pure simplicity: that would be the same reason why I migrated my self-hosted environment to Gitea (from GitLab)

Planka actually looks to do precisely what I want where as Taiga appears to be an Eierlegende Wohlmilchsau. The latter is great when one actually wants wool, milk and pork, but I’m thinking I only want the eggs. ;)

I did know about the association with PenPot but hadn’t actually looked at that because that’s not what I’m seeking, presently. But, I did, now, and they are the same people and I also find it very reassuring to see this as No 1 in their FAQ, too:

Penpot is Open Source, and self-hosting Penpot will be free forever.

There are many recommendations in this thread – Wow! Thanks, Lemmy – but I think I shall begin with trialling Taiga, first, and report back on my findings.

I’m fairly certain that the original authors recommended using another generator – like split-mix-64 – to extrapolate low-entropy seeds to the required state width. Using high-resolution time as a seed is common practice throughout software development and I think they were envisioning split-mix-64 to be adequate to get decent seed entropy from a linearly increasing timestamp. I’m certain it would be adequate to widen 32-bit seeds to the required width.

If my memory is correct, the reasoning was that split-mix-64 – although not as robust a PRNG as the XO*SHIRO family – is trivial to compute and reaches a reasonable level of entropy without needing many iterations.

It looks like^[1] the state width is 256-bits, anyway – not 64 bits.

I’m thinking to try Taiga, next, but not today. Their pricing page doesn’t seem to indicate that self-hosted instances will be limited and there are other overtly positive signs on their site, too.

Self-hosting is an option they openly promote on the landing page. If you use ctrl+f to search for self-host, you immediately find a link to documentation on how to do that.

Has anyone any experience of Taiga? Horror stories? (Save me time!) Or good recommendations are also welcome.