John Clements @jbclements@types.pl

POPL paper: Ta-daaaaa! Look at this huge problem we solved! (200 citations)

Workshop paper, same people, four years later: uhhhh so actually it turns out that that doesn't work, here's what to do instead (7 citations)

This hits a little too close to home.

Workers should not feel pressure to be scrutinized in their workplace or in their own homes to keep their jobs. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/eff-agrees-nlrb-workers-need-protection-against-bossware

racket-mode’s improvements are major improvements to Cur

Works entering the public domain include:

Written work by: Agatha Christie, Baroness Orczy, Hermann Hesse, Marcel Proust, Upton Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf

Art by: Ansel Adams, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Tamara de Lempicka

Films including The Jazz Singer, Metropolis, Napoléon, and Trolley Troubles

Music by Béla Bartók, Ira and George Gershwin, Igor Stravinsky, Irving Berlin, Louis Armstrong, Ruth Etting, and Sophie Tucker

Read this and understand why Twitter and Facebook are failing. They’re run by people who fundamentally hate what those sites are, hate the people who use them, and so they keep trying to make them be something else.
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and

@arjun Also a reminder that TurboTax is one of the main reasons we don't have a much simpler tax filing system, where the IRS simply tell us what we/they owe based on the info they already have — as some other countries do.

Fun fact: one of the main advocate for it in the US, who even spent his own money trying to get that legislation passed, is Joseph Bankman, father of SBF.

Here's his interview where he explicitly calls out Intuit:
https://www.npr.org/2017/03/29/521954033/stanford-professor-loses-political-battle-to-simplify-tax-filing-process

If you're thinking of running your own Mastodon instance, EFF's Legal Director Corynne McSherry breaks down some of the common legal issues and practical considerations here:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer

@cstross I think giant batteries to stick the wind into are more immediately interesting.

These guys seem to have the best tech for municipal container batteries:

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/28/ess-flow-battery-to-supply-200mw-2gwh-of-energy-storage-to-california-utility/

It's iron, road salt, water, and vinegar in a bunch of PVC pipes. It's all 1970s tech. Their patents are all around special filters (clever but still pool/aquarium level of complexity) that take it from a few hundred cycles to "the plumbing wears out long before the chemistry does".

There are many legitimate reasons to track Elon Musk's flight coordinates, for example to offer him ads more relevant to his interests

This is significant ...

The German office for data protection and freedom of information hosts the official #Mastodon server for government departments

They are now calling for all ministries on the server to put their focus on Mastodon

They are also asking ministries which are not yet on Mastodon to join as soon as possible

Firefox is really nice. Thanks @jbclements for the recommendation 👍

#Security truths

OK, so I setup a blog, and wrote a post about the crazy month of November for Mastodon.world.

https://blog.mastodon.world/and-then-november-happened

“You can find us anywhere you get your podcasts.”

I *adore* this phrase, because it has been like two whole-ass decades and not one single venture capital darling has managed to unseat plain RSS as the distribution method for podcasts. Not one. (And they have really tried!)

Podcasts are just out there, like air. You don’t go to one place to get them; you get them from everywhere and anywhere. You can choose how you want to engage with them and manage them and it is legitimately heartwarming that nothing has ever gotten in the way of that being a fundamental fact.

This is the best of what the web is. It will never have a stock ticker or even a marketing scheme. Most people don’t even know it is there. But it endures (past the many, many attempts by squillionaire corporates to kill it) because of its absolute unshakable utility.

My suggestion: any time you hear “anywhere you get your podcasts”, send a little thanks to RSS for keeping the real web alive.

#RSS #Podcasts #ProtocolsNotProducts

December 15th (Thursday) is this year’s #RNGDay!

It’s a day to celebrate and think about random numbers, and also the day that next year’s date is decided randomly!

https://rngday.com/