The Packbats' Weblog

I - and us Packbats collectively - think it's a good thing when stuff that works is kept out of the trash. That's not a terribly controversial statement, I think.

Unless you're Microsoft. Our newest computer is ten years old and they think it belongs in a landfill - even Windows 10, the OS they don't sell any more and will stop supporting next year, doesn't support it. To Microsoft, our ability to have a computer at all is only permitted if we pay to give them permission to install their latest ad service and maybe also their latest AI spyware.

Or you're Apple, and you secretly push updates that shorten the battery life of old iPhones - an update which many believe was deliberate sabotage to force updates. After all, Apple has a deliberate policy of shredding old phones rather than allowing them to be repaired, which removes the option of buying used rather than new. This is also personal for us - our iPhone 6 was working perfectly fine, and then it started overheating and running dry faster and faster.

They can do this because their software is proprietary, and their hardware is proprietary, and their customers have no choice. It's put up with the abuse or run a zombie operating system for eight years as you watch more and more of the modern world cease to support your computer.

FLOSS software isn't like that.

And yeah, there's more to it than that. It's more complicated than that. There's an entire universe of philosophical, pragmatic, and political calculation going on, conversations about rights and safety and governance structures. But our 2010 laptop, a truly delightful and fast machine to live in running Windows 7, is ... still that, running Xfce in openSUSE. Because to Unix, an Intel Core i5-520M is just another amd64-compatible CPU, and 4 GB of RAM is more than enough to run a graphical desktop environment - y'know, the thing with windows and mouse and taskbar and so on, where you can double-click a PNG file to see it pop up in an image viewer. Why would it be inadequate? They aren't selling us dissatisfaction or new shinies - they're making things work, as best as they can, in a world that doesn't want your computer or ours to survive.

Everything that's annoying about FLOSS software is because FLOSS is a world where something made mostly by 11 developers with an annual budget of under US$8000 is basic infrastructure for literally millions of users. And that's not even strange here - like, there's standards designed for interoperability, and those get created and implemented by a crowd of different projects. Instead of Microsoft designing Word documents in secret to ensure no-one else's programs can open them, you have LibreOffice using the Open Document Format that anyone else, from megacorps like Google to some random single dev making a project solo, can implement. It's just how things happen here, and it means that one person can make a project for millions that mostly works.

Even when Microsoft and Apple would rather you pay for their thing. And be locked in their house. Where they can force you to give them more money.

There's more to FLOSS than that, but there doesn't have to be more to FLOSS than that for us to care. Our computer is alive. We can't not be passionate about that.

Okay, you might or might not know the constructed language Toki Pona, but we're certainly still learning, so I think we can construct a good metaphor.

okay, but for real now

depending on genre, fantastical elements are approached in different ways

in much of the ~speculative fiction~ umbrella - sci fi, fantasy, superhero stories, blah blah blah - there's prolly an answer to how it works, and knowing the answer can help people deal with the challenges they face

for example, one of the characters in the 1999 Mystery Men movie, Invisible Boy, can make himself invisible when no-one (including him) is looking at him

like, obviously, that's funny - like, how do you even know

but also that's the rules, that's how it works, and that's how he saves the day later in the movie

in that story, knowing how things work is how you win

...but in other genres - something something magical realism? - how it works is simply not considered interesting

if Hobbes is a person, a walking tiger who can demolish Calvin at snowball fights, you can make humor and story out of it

if Hobbes is a toy, a plush animal that Calvin plays with, you can make humor and story out of it

if none of Calvin's magical nonsense is real, then he's a kid, using his imagination to create stories that feel real

but also for a lot of kids, especially neurodivergent kids, toys are a kid of real which matters

but also Calvin isn't real, none of this is real

Hobbes makes sense to us, reading a newspaper comic, because a kid and his tiger friend makes sense, and a kid and his tiger plushie makes sense, and living in a different world than the people around you makes sense

and if you want to tell a story with that? choose which one you want to tell

(We're still fascinated by Project Gemini and still lack access to a gemini web host to be able to respond to blog posts directly, so ... doing it here, sorry.)

There's been a little bit of a conversation happening among the gemlogs that we follow on Project Gemini about the limitations of the standard Gemini markup language. Someone found an old Reddit comment that was contemptuous of its limitations, and (unsurprisingly) a lot of folks who use it regularly wanted to talk about why it's good, actually.

Oddly, though, I don't think we've actually seen any of these posts center the point that caught our attention about the text/gemini format, which is (ironically) a point we've seen made about HTML: you do not have to specify formatting.

If you don't want that, you don't use Project Gemini. If you do, then Project Gemini is a relief.