self

we’re seeing a bit of spam come in from lemmy.world. if you happen to see any (and a lot of it seems to be in DMs), make sure to flag it. that’ll let both us and the originating instance’s mods know. if we get a bunch of reports and it seems like lemmy.world isn’t cleaning things up properly, we’ll take further steps to limit the amount of spam we get

Amaranth is a simple-but-expressive hardware description language (the type of language you use to define integrated circuits for FPGAs, ASICs, and similar hardware) implemented as a Python DSL. I'm not the biggest Python fan, but Amaranth is worth it -- even though it's in heavy development and its documentation is incomplete, it's by far the most comprehensible HDL I've ever used, and I've tried many of them.

its documentation is incomplete since the language is under heavy development, but its language guide is still the best gentle introduction to HDL concepts I've read, and its tutorials are written for an older version of the language (sometimes called nMigen) but are still excellent -- in particular, Robert Baruch's tutorials combine design fundamentals with formal verification (which itself is usually considered an advanced technique, but Amaranth streamlines it), and the Vivonomicon RISC-V tutorials are worth a read too

You could get a robot limb for your blown-off limb

Later on the same technology could automate your gig, as awesome as it is

Wait, it gets awful: you could split a atom willy-nilly

If it's energy that can be used for killing, then it will be

It's not about a better knife, it's chemistry and genocide

And medicine for tempering the heck in a projector light

Landmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes

Cameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness

We can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with

The machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons, um

Technology, focus on the other shit

3D-printed body parts, dehydrated onion dip

You can buy a Jet Ski from a cell phone on a jumbo jet

T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y, it's the ultimate

the subject matter of Aesop Rock's latest album felt relevant to our instance's interests

this one should hopefully fix the remaining token issues folks have been having, though I'm not seeing anything in the commit log about fixes for the other session and pagination issues we've noticed. as always, let me know if anything looks broken. I'm still working on getting Photon deployed, which might be a good workaround for the frontend breakages we've been seeing.

today's (later than planned) upgrade to lemmy 0.19.2 provisionally appears to have gone alright. if you see excessive amounts of jank (and your page footer can't decide what version of lemmy it's running on, IE it shows separate FE and BE versions), clear your browser cache and cookies since lemmy doesn't seem to do that cleanly on its own

next up I'm planning to deploy the Proton frontend as an alternative to the default and I'm also going to start pushing code to codeberg (most likely) so stay tuned for that

I’m taking awful.systems down for a bit tomorrow (January 13) around 11 PM GMT because after 16 release candidates and 2 hotfixes, lemmy 0.19.x finally seems like a safe enough upgrade. this is going to be a major one, so I’ll be taking our instance down temporarily to get a database backup before I apply the upgrade. expect exceptional levels of jank!

now that threads is starting to federate, they sure as fuck aren’t with us

threads.net commemorative cocktail:

• glass: old fashioned (lowball)
• pour hard cider from red apples until glass is 3/4ths full
• top with 1 shot of bourbon
• smoke glass with cherry wood
• garnish with sliced lime, or add lime juice to taste
• drink and meditate on what AOL and then Google did to usenet

this is pretty cool. it’s a tutorial with interactive exercises that explores the Nix language as a general-purpose functional programming language, outside of its role as the configuration and package definition language for NixOS. understanding Nix better as a language makes more complicated packages easier to write (and is necessary to understand the guts of nixpkgs and the parts of Nix written in itself), but it also has a number of unique advantages as a programming language within a very specific domain.

from the linked github thread:

Your project is in violation of the AGPL, and you have stated this is intentional and you have no plans to open source it. This is breaking the law, and as such I've began to help you with the first steps of re-open sourcing the plugin.

the project author (who gets paid for violating the AGPL via patreon) responds like a mediocre crypto grifter and insists their violation of the law be debated on the discord they control (where their shitty community can shout down the reporter):

While keeping code private doesn't guarantee security, it does make it harder for bad actors to keep up with changes. You are welcome to debate this matter in the MakePlace discord: https://discord.com/invite/YuvcPzCuhq If you are able to convince the MakePlace community that keeping the code open-source is better, I will respect the wishes of the community.

aaaand the smackdown:

Respectfully, I won't attempt to "debate" or "convince" anyone; I'm leaving this pull request and my fork here for others to see and use. It is not a matter of "better"; you are violating a software license and the law. It does not "make it harder" for anyone; Harmony hooking exists, IL modification exists, you can modify plugins from other plugins.

a couple of our regulars have expressed interest in having an anti-cryptocurrency sub here. so interest check: reply to this thread if you want us to have buttcoin

edit: also, meme stock bullshit is on topic for our buttcoin (unless the threads get overwhelming, then we’ll split off another sub)

update: the fix for this was stupid, please let me know if anything still looks broken

it's looking like our federation with other servers may have fallen over sometime during the week. we're currently debugging; right now we're seeing that threads seem to federate between lemmy instances (and federate into mastodon when requested specifically), but comments aren't federating in either direction

having recently played and refunded a terrible “modern” text adventure, I’ve had the urge to revisit my favorite interactive fiction author, Andrew Plotkin aka Zarf. here’s a selection of recommendations from his long list of works:

• if you’re new to playing interactive fiction (essentially the modernized form of the old Infocom text adventures), check out his tutorial game and guide to IF parser commands
• Spider and Web is an old favorite; it uses the nature of the interactive fiction medium to involve the player in a game of deception
• Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home is a good interactive sci-fi short story
• Shade is an exploration into dreamlike writing and horror
• Lists and Lists is a gamified Lisp tutorial — it’s where I learned the language!