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.

For reasons, we wanted to play with color quantization and dithering, and we found out about command line tool ImageMagick's color quantization/dither tools. Then we came up with a very silly idea: what if we took a given starting image and, using our limited knowledge of dither algorithms and complete lack of knowledge of image size optimization, tried to make the coolest versions we could under 32 KiB? Setting the limit to be filesize and not raster resolution means that every algorithm is going to create some compromise between size and detail … so maybe Floyd-Steinberg produces a clearer result at the same resolution, but how much smaller does it have to be to fit in the size limit?

"image processing silliness – from 9056 KiB to 32 KiB: a dithering rabbithole explored by the Packbats, Jan 2024"

We finally finished this freaking project, and it's such a big one that it's too big for a Dreamwidth post - click through to check it out.

the question "is this human" has expired - it has become a torment of con artists and cash grabbers

the one, perpetually remaking their machines to deceive us

the other, perpetually demanding that we become harder to fake so they can keep selling us to advertisers

the doppelgangers yell, "I am human!"
the marketers yell, "Prove you are human!"
we all tuck ourselves into corners trying to find respite from the noise

why? why are we being yelled at? why for humanity are we being yelled at?

Alan Turing started with "can machines think?" and went from there to "can machines make humans think they are humans?" but listen to his imaginary machines

his machines talk about poetry, arithmetic, chess, Mr. Pickwick and winter's days

his machines speak honestly to their interrogators, try to understand, try to help

our phone makes a noise after half an hour, because we asked it to in a way it understood

our friends speak honestly, because they want to us to know that they miss clubbing, they like umbreon, they think of a sunrise as a sun, rising

why should we put the people who traumatized us in the category with the friends who help us survive? why should we put the machines that exploit us in the category with the machines that help us survive? why is this the split we are asked to make?

why "are you human" instead of "are you good"?

why not "are you good"?

can you tell if something is good to you over a teletype connection? are you good to it?

(edit: followup)

Simplicio: Computers are magic.

Sagredo: There's nothing magical about it; computers are simply sophisticated mathematical machines. Magic, by contrast, is supernatural - an independent force with its own logic that acts upon the world, and is merely channeled or controlled by those with magical power.

Simplicio: So, in your opinion, computers are not magic because they are not supernatural, not independent, not logical, and don't act upon the world. Shall we take these in reverse order?

Sagredo: Gladly. And yes, of course computers act on the world, and do so through logical calculation - that is the entire reason we created them. But they are not independent of it, they are part of it.

Simplicio: The logic of a computer is hardly the logic of a landslide or river or growing tree, however. All of these are straightforward and natural, whereas computers are constantly seized with their own caprices. You have a telephone, so surely you have seen it decide your text means something entirely different than your intentions.

Sagredo: You underestimate the sophistication of trees, but you are again merely describing the difference between nature and artifice. My telephone and your grandfather clock are alike unnatural, in your sense, and the errors of autocorrection in the one are much the same as the slipping minutes of the other: reflections of our limitations.

Simplicio: Do not try to distract me with the miracle of clockwork timekeeping - I can argue for the magic in that another day; your telephone is a much clearer example. Its errors of autocorrection happen within it, from its own memories and caprice, independent - independent! - of temperature or setting.

Sagredo: Only as independent as a book that remembers what is written on its pages. It acts because it was programmed to, because it stored this data and processed it in the way it was designed.

Simplicio: It acts because it was commanded to, by one with the power to channel its force in a direction - but even then, the magician wanted it to guess infallibly, did they not? Certainly an autocorrect without error would be quite a selling-point.

Sagredo: They did - but such a thing is impossible.

Simplicio: The computer acts on its own internal logic, independent of what its controller demands.

Sagredo: Independent of their intentions, but not their work - its actions spring from what it is told to do, nothing more.

Simplicio: Can you remind me what you had to say about DNS? I remember you spoke at some length the other day.

Sagredo: When many voices are speaking, the results can become confused, but it is still the result of how it was made and shaped, nothing more.

Simplicio: Can you remind me of what you had to say about free will?

Sagredo: I can - I said that we are also machines, defined by our history and origins, our nurture and nature, but able to shape ourselves, changing even our goals and desires. Are you about to claim that my telephone's autocorrection is as independent? Perhaps it should be granted citizenship.

Simplicio: As, no ... but independent, yes.

Sagredo: It is not supernatural.

Simplicio: Sagredo, you are a cunning arithmetician, but let me ask you: why should I care? We are surrounded by forces that we do not understand, that listen to sounds we can hear and sounds we cannot, that remember what they encounter, and that respond according to arcane and unpredicable intentions. They imbue us with tremendous power, if we can control them, but are terribly dangerous if we cannot. Lives are saved and lost because of what flows through these channels. You yourself wield this power, turning it to answer your astronomical queries and mine, to prove and to refute our theories. Do you not see what it does?

Sagredo: Your contention is that I am a wizard, unwitting.

Simplicio: It is.

Sagredo: I don't know how I can accept that.

Simplicio: Heavens help me. Sagredo, you know that you are capable, no matter how much you insist on downplaying it.

We're thinking about making a new personal website for ourselves, and thinking about the way we avoid buying physical things most of the time, and suddenly we remembered a concept that computer software developers talk about: tech debt.

Like, the thing is, if you write code, then now you have to maintain it. If something changes in the computers that use the code, the code can break and you have to deal with that. If something changes in the problems the code must address, then the code may no longer fit and you have to deal with that. Writing code is work, but now that it exists it continuously produces more work, and that work doesn't happen on a schedule of you just feeling like writing code one day - it happens whether you like it or not. The upkeep costs come due no matter what.

And we're thinking about making a new personal website, and what to put on it ... and it's the same problem. Unlike a blog (where posts happen and then settle into the archive) or a microblog (where posts happen and then get buried in the churn of the past), anything we put on a website we have to upkeep. What ingredients we use in a recipe changes. We write new PICO-8 chiptunes. A webcomic's site hosting dies. These are changes and, to us, if we make a website, it's supposed to be correct, not just a historical artifact.

So ... yeah. We're thinking about making a new personal website. But it probably won't have a lot on it.