Je suis Antifa-Ost

@cstross @arrrg Consider the difference in size of the tech industry in 2000/2001 and today, and its place in our economy today versus 2000/2001. It's going to be so much worse.

When the dot-com bubble burst, it was a much smaller percentage of the overall economy/workforce/whatever. That bubble had built up for a few years, its impact was fairly contained. When this bubble pops it will take plenty of people's retirement accounts/401Ks with it. It will lead to a bloodbath of layoffs, which are going to cascade through the economy.

The silver lining, if there is one, is that maybe this bubble will burst and kill off some of the mega-datacenters that are be consuming water and pumping more pollution into the environment, as well as the ones in planning stages now.

I mean, I hope I'm wrong -- because I am envisioning a pretty dark outcome.

Google has moved from moral cowardice (removing ICE tracking apps) to direct complicity in the violent, unconstitutional abuse of vulnerable people. As a civil liberties lawyer who worked at Google for ten years, this one hits me in the gut.

Google Has Chosen a Side in Tr...

Geplante Asog-Neufassung zum Teil verfassungswidrig, muss gestoppt werden! Land Berlin will auch eine automatisierte Analyseplattform, vielleicht mit dem Überwachungsprogramm von #Palantir https://taz.de/Anwalt-ueber-Berliner-Polizeigesetz/!6126976/

Benvingut sia #DivendresDEscriptori
24.04.3 LTS

Die Koalition will die Luftverkehrssteuer um 350 Mio. Euro senken. Geld, das den Konzernen zu Gute kommt, aber im Verkehrsetat für Bus, Bahn und Rad fehlen wird – und gleichzeitig wird auch noch das Deutschlandticket teurer.

Eine fatale Botschaft, findet VCD-Chefin Christiane Rohleder: „Damit fördert die Bundesregierung das klimaschädlichste aller Verkehrsmittel, während sie den klimaschonenden ÖPNV zusätzlich belastet. Das geht auf Kosten der Zukunft und zu Lasten der breiten Bevölkerung.“

@toxi Hi! Yeah PDF is maddeningly baroque. I still really like it though.
PDF file format is really interesting software archaeology! It's something that troubles me a bit how much history rot has happened, that information about this stuff is moderately difficult to search for because of semantic overload. And there's lots of telephone-game style over repeated factoids like 'PDF is a simplified form of PostScript', which are only half-true, and give the wrong kind of emphasis because they're conflating a few things.
The most important thing to understand is that PDF is really old! The roots of PDF come from John Warnock's 'Project Camelot' white paper, which is from the dawn of the 90s. So the design goals are realised within the constraints of 80s computer architecture, around 16bit/32bit transition. Computers are very slow compared to what we have now.
Addressable RAM is measured in MB. Multi-tasking is optional. File formats, are generally tightly coupled to a single application. Multi-component documents / multimedia, are not really a thing.
Document sharing is close to impossible, digitally. You can't share detailed document layouts as bitmaps, because the resolution required is way above the ability of computer displays (one megapixel is pretty fancy for a VDU), and colour representation is pretty unevenly supported. If you want to send a document to someone else and have them view it on screen as close to possible as you made it, they basically have to have the same software as you, on the same platform, with the same drivers, and all the same fonts and plugins. Warnock/Adobe wanted to solve this problem once, and for everyone.
This really was an astounding reach. The format had to be completely self-contained, self-hosting fonts, images, and other media. It needed to be futureproof enough to extend forwards to media types and resolutions and data formats that do not yet exist.
And it needed to be able to render fast enough to use as a file viewer, whilst depending on resources that were likely to be significantly larger than the working memory of the viewing platform. And stored on slow magnetic storage.
This is the model for the problem you have to solve. And looking at it like that, you end up designing a contained filestystem / object store, which is really the right way to think about PDF files. It's a database system for modeling a tree of interelated media. The main technical constraint to solve is _rapid_ dynamic assembly and rendering of a sub-view of that tree from slow secondary storage. The storage system uses reference counting, and internal compression for efficiency, and it also supports incremental updating, so that PDFs can be amended without having to rebuild the entire database. An example feature that this architecture allows is efficient browsing of large documents via thumbnails / scaled minimaps on a screen too small to show more than a 30% of any single page. Almost completely irrelevant to today's hardware, but a deal-breaking feature at the time.
I think PDF an astounding technical achievement. I also think it's a huge odd and complex and weird thing that only makes sense in a historical context. It's full of hard engineering optimisations for things that are barely problems now. HTML / CSS / SVG has just about caught up with PDF capabilities at this point (many of it's capabilites are much lower priority in 2025, and maybe don't need to be supported, and we need to support a much wider array of viewports and contexts now) , but we're talking about a software system that's nearly 40 years old and still pretty valid.

"I believe that much of the commentary [about Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Kevin Roberts of Heritage Foundation] misjudges the true nature of Heritage, portraying it as a genuine think tank that picked the wrong leader or was corrupted by MAGA.

Because the truth is that Heritage has always been a fraud."

~ Paul Krugman

#HeritageFoundation #KevinRoberts #NickFuentes #groypers #antisemitism #Nazis #EconomicElites
/1

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-heritage

Taxing the super-rich and corporate polluters is not a nice-to-have, it is a necessity.

Billions of people are paying for the climate crisis with their safety, health and economic security, while the super-rich and oil and gas polluters are profiting from a system rigged in their favour.

The UN tax negotiations present a historic opportunity to address this injustice and unlock trillions needed for climate action and nature protection.

#TaxTheSuperRich 👉 https://www.greenpeace.org/international/act/tax-the-super-rich/

New laptop sticker! Thank you, J.

Someone once asked Fats Waller, in the early days of boogie-woogie piano, how he kept the right hand from doing what the left hand was doing. He said, "That's what I'm in the middle for."

If AI in every product was so great, people would be shelling out money for it, not digging through the settings, 18 mouse clicks later, and still can't figure out how to turn the damn thing off.

Patel doesn’t know squat. Or he lied. 🤷‍♂️

I'm absolutely humbled and grateful for all your offers to translate my Fedi promo video in multiple languages.

Guess how many subtitles we have now? EIGHTEEN!!!

The latest subs are:
- Espéranto by @MichelPatrice
- Portugal Portuguese by @filipe

🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/fediverse-video/

Thank you so much for all your help - it really takes a village ❤️ ✨

Ist jeder Mensch in der Bundesregierung sich dieser immensen Verantwortung bewusst? Frage für meine Kinder.