pleroma.debian.social

pleroma.debian.social

Jonathan Dowland | @jmtd@pleroma.debian.social

Principal Software Engineer on #OpenJDK #IBM. #Debian developer. PhD in Computing Science. Amateur historian (Computing Science and H/W, esp. Commodore Amiga). Guerilla archivist.

I didn't think I necessarily had more to write about lavalamps but perhaps I do. I recently bought some new colours/bottles. And a friend sent me this interesting Techmoan video where he reviews some Mathmos ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipFePT4Z270&pp=0gcJCZEKAYcqIYzv

Some people joke that you need a PhD to understand Haskell’s type system. I actually have one *substantially related to haskell* and I _still_ get stuck

I’ve been off my regular meds for about 2 weeks now (in order to take some antibiotics) and I don’t know if it’s psychosomatic but I generally feel more energetic and “with it”

@andrew_shadura oh nice. Nah the logo on the basic punter tee

@mcc also completely agree with you about the trilogy wow. What a time that was.

@mcc I think it’s just some screw up as the responsible publishers changed hands

@mcc hesitation marks has been deleted from *all* digital platforms at the moment

Is it just me or does this year’s FOSDEM t shirt glow in the dark?

I was thinking about how strange it is that the cupboard in a bathroom is called a "vanity unit", and then I got to thinking, what if all your furniture was named after the seven deadly sins?

* Bathroom cupboard = vanity unit
* Paid-work office = avarice unit
* Computer gaming station = anger unit
* Device running social media = envy unit
* Bed = lust unit
* Induction hob = gluttony unit
* Sofa = sloth unit

I wonder when the journal of functional programming is coming back…

I utterly utterly utterly HATE trails before bbc radio plays on smart speakers. Some variant on enshittification

@fraggle @bloody_albatross @scy I’ve seen it copied around a lot recently. You just be a proud comment-dad :)

Some interesting (to me) stats from

Talks about NFTs: 0.

Presentations about the Metaverse: None.

Cryptobros inviting me to a party in order to schill their coin: Zip.

Really enthusiastic LLM users describing how AI has improved their OSS codebase: Zilch.

People complaining about pronouns and codes of conduct: Nada.

"Ironic" hats saying "Make xyz Great Again": Conspicuous by their absence.

What did *you* think was missing from FOSDEM?

Folks selling Kindle books, you should know that Amazon now offers the option to allow EPUB and PDF downloads of DRM-free books.

The option is presented when adding new books to Kindle, but for existing titles you have to opt-in for each of them to allow these new file formats.

(Amazon isn’t great, but when a rare customer-friendly option arrives, please take advantage of it!)

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GDDXGH9VR22ACM8U

the OpenAL demo program should be called alxears

@pwaring that’s very kind, thanks!

Hey remember in the late aughts when a weird janky cheerful little program called "Sweet Home 3D" on a Windows XP box was the easiest and funnest way to map out a floor plan of your house and fiddle with furniture arrangement

Well it's 2026 now and it runs on Linux and still doesn't suck

@andrew_shadura I didn’t realise you were at Fosdem, I would have loved to say hello!

Tens of thousands of Czechs rallied on Sunday in support of President Peter after he refused to approve the nomination of a minister to the new eurosceptic coalition government who performed a Nazi salute and posted Nazi memorabilia.

https://www.reuters.com/world/czechs-rally-support-president-his-growing-rift-with-government-2026-02-01/

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