An essay on AI, programming, and anarchist theory

Cultural practices of collective ownership over natural resources have been around for quite some time. Do these ways of working have a digital counterpart? It may seem simple at first. To translate cultural practices of collective ownership into the digital realm, just use a Creative Commons license to allow others to make use of your work, share further modifications, and contribute to the wealth of the digital commons. That’s it.

Some stories are just too good to be true.

Becoming Hypertext is a workshop on poetic and experimental ways of creating and reading the site, browser, and the desktop.

Well, that civilization thing was interesting, now wasn’t it? I mean, it certainly seemed worth a shot. We got a lot out of it: telescopes, wheelchairs, wikipedia. But we also just about took out the natural world. Science, agriculture, and specialization have done a lot for expanding cultural ideas and communication, but they’ve done even more for genocide and ecocide.

So it’s time we gave up the noble, failed experiment altogether and moved on to something new.

“It’s kind of quirky,” said one person — in an age of hype around how endlessly bigger and faster and smarter tech can be, they thought this event felt surprisingly quaint and charming. We were talking about tech, sure, and it was a group of people who were interested in tech, in general, but we were there intentionally to look through the lens of a technology and medium that can feel almost retro.

Computer people are fine human beings, but they do a lot of harm in the ways they "help" other people with their computer problems. Now that we're trying to get everyone online, I thought it might be helpful to write down everything I've been taught about helping people use computers.

A curated list of awesome small web publishing tools and frameworks.

The homebrewserver.club is a monthly gathering for those who (wish to) host their own online services from home, rather than using commercial and privacy unfriendly alternatives. Together we config and work on our homebrew server setups. These are low-cost, low-power, low-maintenance, high-fun computers through which we can host all of our online necessities and keep them out of the cloud. The club meetings are open for anyone, from more experienced users to interested beginners. During the homebrewserver.club meetings we exchange tips or look into particular topics together. As we gain more knowledge about a topic, we write and publish guides for others to share.

a manually curated collection of neat indie websites :)

Aphorisms on failure, resilience and safety

Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety

Forth is perhaps the tiniest possible useful interactive programming language.
It is a language that makes complexity painful, but which reveals that a surprising amount can be accomplished without introducing any. Forth is the opposite of “bloat”. If you've ever been like “Oh my God this Electron-based chat app is taking up 10% of my CPU at idle, what the HELL is it DOING, modern computing has gone MAD”, Forth is there to tell you that computing went mad decades ago, and that programs could be doing SO MUCH MORE with SO MUCH LESS.

With pairs of comically oversized exhaust pipes pointing towards the sky and enormous stacks of grey cooling aggregates flanking its sides, AMS09 resembles a child's drawing of an exaggerated, imaginary factory. Despite being painted in a variation of “Go Away Green”, a colour engineered by Disney to draw visitors’ gazes away from technical facilities across its amusement parks, the building miserably fails to blend in with its surroundings.

This page is being served from a from an EMF 2022 TiDAL badge. The badge contains an ESP32 microcontroller and runs MicroPython.

It’s always safe to assume JavaScript will not be available, so here’s a quick list of very realistic reasons it won’t be.

The use of images increases the size of a web page which considerably lowers the load speed of the page. To improve the speed of your website it is important to consider compressing or resizing images.

This guide explains everything you need to know to build stand-alone photovoltaic systems that can power almost anything you want.

Billions of phones will be hoarded in drawers and cupboards or thrown away rather than recycled, studies suggest.

A naturally intelligent network programmed by the sun.

When designing computer systems, one is often faced with a choice between using a more or less powerful language for publishing information, for expressing constraints, or for solving some problem. This finding explores tradeoffs relating the choice of language to reusability of information. The "Rule of Least Power" suggests choosing the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

How Tech Companies are Helping Big Oil Profit from Climate Destruction

The world's biggest cloud providers and the world's biggest oil and gas companies are deeply interwoven, and machine learning algorithms and computational resources are accelerating extractivist capitalism.