fun to digg through

ICWYDT 😉

For me Factorio is second only to the almighty Dyson Sphere Program

Dyson Sphere Program - more of a factory builder than a sandbox I guess but it is sandbox in a way

Also Garry’s mod - showing my age here but this was the classic sandbox game I grew up with

Got an ad consent popup when I opened this link…

“not just as the head of a company but as a rich dude with a €400k/Yr cocaine habit that I can’t afford to support if this law passes”

All of these companies would still be able to make loads of profit in Switzerland even if this law passed, seems like a game of corporate chicken and the Swiss general public blinked first

Whilst I’m somewhat cynical about the zuck’s Meta play being more of a marketing/branding thing to take attention off all the bad press Facebook has been receiving recently, it can’t hurt for the FOSS community to have a vision here for interoperable, open VR and augmented reality tools.

that’s super generous! Thank you for doing that!

I’m a $10/mo sponsor of Joplin - I used to pay a touch less than this for Evernote which over the years I’ve been using it has been pretty stagnant and the developers complacent. Couldn’t really get on with Notion and it’s still proprietary.

Joplin does everything I want from Evernote (multi device sync, Web clipper plugin, attachments) and more (e2e encryption, FOSS, nice plugin support). Laurent22 is a modern day hero

Kev is a bit of a personal hero of mine, he’s just an ordinary IT professional (like me) who uses his free time to blog about important tech issues, write open source and run fosstodon - one of the larger and more active mastodon instances. More info is available at his site https://kevq.uk

The only thing I disagree with him on in this manifesto is that there is nothing we can do. We can and are fighting a lot of the bullshit with decentralisation and decommercialisation of the many services. It is a slow and painful process that isn’t happening overnight but people are waking up to how crap Meta Facebook is (fuck Mark and his awful attempt at distracting folks with a rebrand) - anecdotal but most people I’ve spoken to in recent months about Facebook say they only keep it around for messenger and meme groups or they have deleted it entirely and they say they no longer share life updates or engage in ‘meaningful’ discussion there.

There is a huge opportunity for a grassroots push away from the corporate Web and surely we’ve got to take it? We can keep building usable tools like Lemmy, Mastodon and simple to use indieweb tooling to help draw in the average Joe and evangelising where possible. We should try to use some of their tools against them e.g pool together to pay for ads on Facebook, reddit etc to pull people away.

The decentralise and federate and anti-corporate web movement gives me hope that whilst the Web is fucked right now we can still fix it

Not sure if you’re joking or serious but many “modern” natural language processing models like BERT are trained using offline dumps of big collections of text like wikipedia - nothing unusual there and nothing to worry about :)