Brendan Howell @praxeology@post.lurk.org
Joined Jun 2020
Brendan Howell
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Brendan Howell
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In an upcoming @ieeesoftware #paper I've conducted a longitudinal #genderstudy of authors of #publiccode commits from @swheritage, analyzing 1.6 billion commits contributed by 33 million distinct authors over a period of 50 years. Short thread w/ links at the end 👇 #FOSS [1/6]
Brendan Howell
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Children read a wirelessly-transmitted newspaper in 1938.
Brendan Howell
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RT @LaurenKGurley@twitter.com
Scoop: I was leaked dozens of secret documents from Amazon's Global Security Operations Center detailing the company's reliance on Pinkerton spies, and monitoring of labor unions, @Greenpeace@twitter.com and @GretaThunberg@twitter.com's @Fridays4future@twitter.com, and France's Yellow Vests.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports-expose-spying-warehouse-workers-labor-union-environmental-groups-social-movements
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/LaurenKGurley/status/1330924648620466181
Brendan Howell
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Brendan Howell
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While #briar remained silence with this fediverse account during the last months due to missing resources, the development of briar and its ecosystem remains active.
(1/2)
Some bits of what is new since the last post:
- first beta relases of briar GTK (to use briar via desktop)
https://nico.dorfbrunnen.eu/posts/2020/briar-beta/
- second beta release of briar GTK
https://nico.dorfbrunnen.eu/posts/2020/briar-international/
- .deb packages for Debian Bullseye https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar-gtk#debian-bullseye
PSA for journalists (especially NYT): Yes we know you are trained to try to represent the facts of the moment and that can make one rather obsessed with the Zeitgeist.
But can you PLEASE STOP MENTIONING ZOOM in every other sentence! It sounds like an advertisement.
If you were paying attention the last 20 years you would know there are at least 20 other brand name and open source variations on video chat. And frankly, it's about as interesting or relevant as the brand of socks worn by the "anonymous official" you are quoting. Were they sitting in an IKEA™ chair, speaking on an HTC™ telephone and you wrote it with a Faber-Castel™ pencil in your Steno™ pad? Who cares. Give us news, not marketing shills.
Brendan Howell
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On Twitter, we can experience the dark undertones of heteronomous convenience. User Tony Arcieri [developed](https://twitter.com/bascule/status/1307440596668182528) a worrisome experiment about the automatic selection of a focal point for image previews, which often show only a part of them when tweeted. Arcieri uploaded two versions of a long, vertical image. In one, a portrait of Obama was placed at the top, while one of Mitch McConnell at the bottom. In the second image the positioning was reversed. In both cases the focal point chosen for the preview was McConnell's face. Who knows! The system spares the user the time to make such choice autonomously but its logic is obscure and immutable. Here, convenience is heteronomous.
Does it have to be this way? Not necessarily. Mastodon is an open source, self-hosted social network that at the first glance looks like Twitter, but it's profoundly different. One of the many differences (which I'd love to describe in detail but it would be out of the scope of this text, srry) has to do with focal point selection. Here, the user has the option to choose it autonomously, which means manually. They can also avoid making any decision. In that case, the preview will show the middle of the image by default. 
(thx @joak for pointing me to this case!)
Brendan Howell
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Please boost:
I'm looking for information about a curses based networked office application suite sold by Unisys in 1988-89. I administrated it in a legal office, and found it to be superior to anything else I've used.
But I've forgotten the name of it. I want to know more about it. More importantly, I want to build a modern equivalent.
Brendan Howell
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The torrent for the final PDF and all the source/assets files of FLOSS+Art (2008), an edited collection of texts about Free/Libre Open Source Software (#FLOSS) and #art #music and #design , is once again seeded!
Big thanks to @hellocatfood who motivated me to do so :)
The Hundred Horse Chestnut is a huge old tree near the summit of Mt. Etna in Sicily. 60m circumference and between 2 and 4000 years old!
The computer made me do it.
Brendan Howell
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Post your bookshelves!
I want to see what books you have and which ones mean a lot to you!
Boost if you want!
Perhaps I'm splitting hairs but it seems worth pointing out, in this moment of spectacle, that Apple does not really make anything anymore. They barely design anything. Mostly they just order things from other people who worry about the details.
For their latest hype, they buy a bunch of designs for the CPU, GPU and various peripherals, rearrange them and then have them made in a fab by another company. The manufacturing and assembly are all out-sourced to Foxconn, TSMC and similar companies.
It's funny to think that we get so excited about Apple's "hardware" but almost nobody who works for the core company ever touches a physical part or device. They mostly just do spreadsheets, logistics, purchasing, controlling, accounting and marketing – all which command people elsewhere, at much lower salaries, to do the physical labor with tangible objects.
Brendan Howell
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RT @MartinSonneborn@twitter.com
Als in den 90ern die Neonazis frech wurden, haben Benjamin Schiffner und ich auf Bitten von Regisseur Caspar Hogerzeil einen kleinen Film geschrieben, der das Pack vertrieben hat. Es scheint mir an der Zeit, ihn wieder auszupacken...
#HitlerbärtchenSmiley
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/MartinSonneborn/status/1196714813088550913
People who grew up in the GDR really like flowers. The retirees in my Plattenbau tower-block always seem to have a bouquet when they come in with their shopping. There are 6 florists within a few minutes walk of here.
Just a test here...
Hey @OCRbot what do you make of this image?
Brendan Howell
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RT @Shitty_Future@twitter.com
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/Shitty_Future/status/1325372320626651137
Brendan Howell
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Okay. It's live. introducing: the candy crystal rainbow codex: https://pbat.ch/codex/
And the code: https://git.sr.ht/~pbatch/codex
more transmissions to come.
