#software commentary

[socialjusticefail]

This video talks about the current state of open source software world and how corporations are changing the model.

[digitalismmm]

Jungle vines

[pseudophan]

I just had the thought that when I dream about phil he usually has his ginger hair. now he'll be blonde :)

dan howell ass statement

[secretagent9]

one of the best things about watching deltarune playthroughs (or any game playthroughs, really) is that people almost always wind up finding neat stuff that i never found in my own playthrough. like this:

the little white dog shows up in the power menu, sometimes! i had no idea!!

[spectrearia]

Aladdin had the Cave of Wonders, it's pretty obviously CGI imo but it does its job.

I believe the Magic Carpet also had some CG elements? maybe a bit of 3D camera movement as well throughout the movie? unsure about The Little Mermaid, which would've predated Beauty and the Beast... I think maybe one of the ships could've been CGI but don't quote me on that lol

either way, yeah. even throughout the 90s, Disney (AND Dreamworks) were utilizing CGI to assist in their 2D films but the 3D stuff never fully detracted from the traditional animation. I miss when it was just a tool for furthering creativity for 2D animation and not something that's relied on entirely. so sad that died out in the mid-late 2000s when 3D animation really took over as the new hot thing that every animation company wanted to pursue :c

There are instances where CGI ages gracefully, and I think the best examples are stylized 2D animation from the 2000’s or so.

Go rewatch Invader Zim. The show still looks shockingly good for being 20 years old, and none of the CGI looks dated, because it’s stylized to fit the look of the show.

Disney’s Atlantis

Lilo & Stitch

The Iron Giant

This is less a defense of CGI and more a defense of bringing back computer-assisted 2D animation.

[theenterprisemac]

Tools - Command Center

I will be curious to see this when it is actually released in February. If it ends up being free or sufficiently cheap I may give it a try. I do have a few bones I would like to pick with the premise of the tool.

Compiled Code as Security Feature

"Second, shell scripts are deployed in uncompiled code to the user's computer, which isn't great from a security perspective, but it also means you're dependent on the version of bash or zsh on that computer, which changes with each OS version."

I really object to the underlying implication here that compilation is a security feature. I am by no means an expert in reverse engineering, but I have done a lot of reverse engineering and binary patching and this is comical. Compile the code for speed, compile the code for power, if you want, but don't call it a security feature.

Jamf Script Handling is Weak

"Third, updating scripts in Jamf Pro is very cumbersome, especially when working with multiple servers. Updating a script is literally copying and pasting code, and if you had hardcoded any changes into that script, those changes are gone as soon as you update it. And since shell scripts don't support libraries, if there's a specific function that needs to be updated for any reason, you have to painstakingly update that across all of your scripts. Because of this, many Jamf admins don't update their scripts unless something breaks."

I agree and disagree with this comment. For example, various people have worked out how to use Github as your source of truth for things like scripts. See the following.

The inability to use libraries in shell scripts is also only half true. While it's not like what you get in Python or other languages you can source another script and call its functions. There are nuances to this, but it is not as cut and dry as the poster would have you believe. If there is one thing I have found–it's that lots of enterprise tools use this trick.

Finally a Lack of Industry Expertise

"Lastly, there is a lack of industry expertise with bash and zsh. Being a Jamf admin requires us to not only have a high level of understanding of the Apple operating system and a variety of IT software, but it also requires us to be good at customer service. But let's face it, most of us are not developers, and many of the difficult challenges we face with shell scripts are easy for a seasoned developer to tackle."

I do agree that there is a lack of expertise in bash and zsh. However, I don't think that this is necessarily a reason to build a tool for common operations. I am not a developer by any means, but I also don't think that encouraging dependence on tools is always the right call.

If you look at the number of third party tools that many Mac administrators rely on such as SwiftDialog, Installomator, etc while all good tools–those who rely on them are at the mercy of an ever increasing number of "vendors" many of whom are not paid for their work.

I would also submit that the less technical we become as administrators the easier it is to replace us with a tool. I would go as far as to suggest that if you solve your problems with other people's tools, then you aren't putting yourself all that far from being replaced by a tool yourself.

[bluemadafaka]

A PROMPT DEVOID OF ANY EXECUTIVE EXPECTATION AS A TECHNIQUE FOR ACCESSING AN AVOIDANT FLOW STATE.

Come up with a short broody poetic prose describing both the dread and the joy he feels returning to a place he enjoys greatly. The writing should obscure every meaning that could bring him too close to a known path, as his path is known only by a few.

The photograph includes the tools he himself is using, as it is a finished edit colorized and perfected as a surreal piece because it was developed within that excellent software. The art integrates the designing machinery along the emergent consciousness as co-performers enact the art piece as inextricable.

Beyond the meta-comment, this is a portrait by a cyborg crafting on itself. nothing to talk about photography—neither critique nor commentary or projection, yet an affective self representation of a one who happens to feel its own extension not as body, not as color, not as hardware, not as software, not as mind withing a brain, but as a contingent ensamble whose cognition extends its mind among, throughout, along and within all of which affect and can be affected in a current that doesn't need any segmentation since the turbulence, the vortex, the fluent cultural idioms, every movement reshuffles the current so every self is itself and the circumstances, reterritorializing continuously into new cyborgs, into new vortexes and tandems—into new unseen extended minds, autopoietic as a true agent, conscious by itself, emotionally unique, and an affective cognition continually emergent via the extended minds that lend the body and the hardware, yet novel, supra-volente, willful—constituting a self that's not the projected supplement to any one of its constitutive embodied minds: it's a new mind, fluent, volente, affective, emotional and self aware, alive as a virtual cognitive resident in the [hiper-complex, relational] machine from which its physiology-lenders permit its continuum by housing the fragmentary obscure subsets crucial in its fluent consolidation.

[auntie-browning]

||: Off to a great start...

[sierraconsult]

Sierra Consulting and Monday.com Join Forces! 🎉 We’re excited to introduce Monday.com’s advanced CRM solutions to simplify your business processes! From task management to project tracking, Monday’s intuitive interface enhances team collaboration and keeps everything on track. Ready to improve your business efficiency? Contact us today and find out how Monday.com can empower your team and elevate your workflow!

[artistic-gay-walrus]

New video coming out tomorrow morning🗣️🗣️

[antihumanism]

wow, introversion software reference, at least like five real people have at least partially played this game by now

[kapurcell]

Top 5 Logos March Matchups Deals Worthy Buying Now

[codemagnet]

Admin Dashboard With Source Code

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How lock-in hurts design

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

If you've ever read about design, you've probably encountered the idea of "paving the desire path." A "desire path" is an erosion path created by people departing from the official walkway and taking their own route. The story goes that smart campus planners don't fight the desire paths laid down by students; they pave them, formalizing the route that their constituents have voted for with their feet.

Desire paths aren't always great (Wikipedia notes that "desire paths sometimes cut through sensitive habitats and exclusion zones, threatening wildlife and park security"), but in the context of design, a desire path is a way that users communicate with designers, creating a feedback loop between those two groups. The designers make a product, the users use it in ways that surprise the designer, and the designer integrates all that into a new revision of the product.

This method is widely heralded as a means of "co-innovating" between users and companies. Designers who practice the method are lauded for their humility, their willingness to learn from their users. Tech history is strewn with examples of successful paved desire-paths.

Take John Deere. While today the company is notorious for its war on its customers (via its opposition to right to repair), Deere was once a leader in co-innovation, dispatching roving field engineers to visit farms and learn how farmers had modified their tractors. The best of these modifications would then be worked into the next round of tractor designs, in a virtuous cycle:

https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/

But this pattern is even more pronounced in the digital world, because it's much easier to update a digital service than it is to update all the tractors in the field, especially if that service is cloud-based, meaning you can modify the back-end everyone is instantly updated. The most celebrated example of this co-creation is Twitter, whose users created a host of its core features.

Retweets, for example, were a user creation. Users who saw something they liked on the service would type "RT" and paste the text and the link into a new tweet composition window. Same for quote-tweets: users copied the URL for a tweet and pasted it in below their own commentary. Twitter designers observed this user innovation and formalized it, turning it into part of Twitter's core feature-set.

Companies are obsessed with discovering digital desire paths. They pay fortunes for analytics software to produce maps of how their users interact with their services, run focus groups, even embed sneaky screen-recording software into their web-pages:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-dark-side-of-replay-sessions-that-record-your-every-move-online/

This relentless surveillance of users is pursued in the name of making things better for them: let us spy on you and we'll figure out where your pain-points and friction are coming from, and remove those. We all win!

But this impulse is a world apart from the humility and respect implied by co-innovation. The constant, nonconsensual observation of users has more to do with controlling users than learning from them.

That is, after all, the ethos of modern technology: the more control a company can exert over its users ,the more value it can transfer from those users to its shareholders. That's the key to enshittification, the ubiquitous platform decay that has degraded virtually all the technology we use, making it worse every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

When you are seeking to control users, the desire paths they create are all too frequently a means to wrestling control back from you. Take advertising: every time a service makes its ads more obnoxious and invasive, it creates an incentive for its users to search for "how do I install an ad-blocker":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

More than half of all web-users have installed ad-blockers. It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But zero app users have installed ad-blockers, because reverse-engineering an app requires that you bypass its encryption, triggering liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law provides for a $500,000 fine and a 5-year prison sentence for "circumvention" of access controls:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Beyond that, modifying an app creates liability under copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets, noncompete, nondisclosure and so on. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

This is why services are so horny to drive you to install their app rather using their websites: they are trying to get you to do something that, given your druthers, you would prefer not to do. They want to force you to exit through the gift shop, you want to carve a desire path straight to the parking lot. Apps let them mobilize the law to literally criminalize those desire paths.

An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it (or do anything else that wrestles value back from a company). Apps are web-pages where everything not forbidden is mandatory.

Seen in this light, an app is a way to wage war on desire paths, to abandon the cooperative model for co-innovation in favor of the adversarial model of user control and extraction.

Corporate apologists like to claim that the proliferation of apps proves that users like them. Neoliberal economists love the idea that business as usual represents a "revealed preference." This is an intellectually unserious tautology: "you do this, so you must like it":

https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/hp-ceo-says-customers-are-a-bad-investment-unless-they-can-be-made-to-buy-companys-drm-ink-cartridges.html

Calling an action where no alternatives are permissible a "preference" or a "choice" is a cheap trick – especially when considered against the "preferences" that reveal themselves when a real choice is possible. Take commercial surveillance: when Apple gave Ios users a choice about being spied on – a one-click opt of of app-based surveillance – 96% of users choice no spying:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/

But then Apple started spying on those very same users that had opted out of spying by Facebook and other Apple competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Neoclassical economists aren't just obsessed with revealed preferences – they also love to bandy about the idea of "moral hazard": economic arrangements that tempt people to be dishonest. This is typically applied to the public ("consumers" in the contemptuous parlance of econospeak). But apps are pure moral hazard – for corporations. The ability to prohibit desire paths – and literally imprison rivals who help your users thwart those prohibitions – is too tempting for companies to resist.

The fact that the majority of web users block ads reveals a strong preference for not being spied on ("users just want relevant ads" is such an obvious lie that doesn't merit any serious discussion):

https://www.iccl.ie/news/82-of-the-irish-public-wants-big-techs-toxic-algorithms-switched-off/

Giant companies attained their scale by learning from their users, not by thwarting them. The person using technology always knows something about what they need to do and how they want to do it that the designers can never anticipate. This is especially true of people who are unlike those designers – people who live on the other side of the world, or the other side of the economic divide, or whose bodies don't work the way that the designers' bodies do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

Apps – and other technologies that are locked down so their users can be locked in – are the height of technological arrogance. They embody a belief that users are to be told, not heard. If a user wants to do something that the designer didn't anticipate, that's the user's fault:

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

Corporate enthusiasm for prohibiting you from reconfiguring the tools you use to suit your needs is a declaration of the end of history. "Sure," John Deere execs say, "we once learned from farmers by observing how they modified their tractors. But today's farmers are so much stupider and we are so much smarter that we have nothing to learn from them anymore."

Spying on your users to control them is a poor substitute asking your users their permission to learn from them. Without technological self-determination, preferences can't be revealed. Without the right to seize the means of computation, the desire paths never emerge, leaving designers in the dark about what users really want.

Our policymakers swear loyalty to "innovation" but when corporations ask for the right to decide who can innovate and how, they fall all over themselves to create laws that let companies punish users for the crime of contempt of business-model.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

Image: Belem (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desire_path_%2819811581366%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[leynaeithnea]

Greek Mythology Sources

Interest in greek mythology rises anew with the new number of retellings and adaptions...and misconceptions all around...

Claims like "that never happened" or "that's the roman version" are around a lot...but even if you wanted to learn more, where would you even start looking? Where do you begin your research for your next fic, or next discussion? Well...That's for you!

Here's a list of source names, links to access them, maps, family trees & more

Where to access the texts:

ToposText

Database, interlinks all names and places, has almost all sources translated, can find all name mentions of place or character in the sources, has a map with the places

Perseus Collection Greek and Roman Materials (and Scaife Viewer)

Digital Library, nearly all main greek and roman sources, including OG language text and dictionary for those languages (is instable at times, try coming back a few hours/days later and it should be up again)

Theoi Greek Mythology

Database, has summary posts for individual heroes, creatures, gods and events, as well as many translations, has a search function

List of Ancient Sources

Homer's Iliad (8th BC)

Homer's Odyssey (8th BC)

Epic Cycle (and Theban Cycle) fragments (8-6th BC)

Homeric Hymns (7th BC)

Orphic Hymns (2nd BC/2nd AD)

Quintus Smyrnaeus’s Posthomerica (3rd AD)

Tryphiodorus’s Taking of Ilium (3rd AD)

Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica (3rd BC)

Nonnus’ Dionysiaca (5th AD)

Hesiod’s Theogony, Works and Days, Catalogue of Women (8th BC)

Statius’s Thebaid, Achilleid (1st AD)

(More under cut)

Virgil’s Aeneid (1st BC)

Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica (1st AD)

Colluthus’s Taking of Helen (6th AD)

Pindar’s Odes (5th BC)

Plays by Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides (5th BC)

Fragments of lyric poets (8th-6th BC)

Athenaeus’s Deipnoshists (2nd AD)

Lycophron’s Alexandra (3rd BC)

Pausanias’s Description of Greece (2nd AD)

Strabo’s Geography (1st AD)

Scholia on Homer (~ 5th BC - 11th AD)

Scholia on Pindar  (2nd AD?)

Scholia on Sophocles, on Euripides (1st BC-15th AD)

Maurus Servius Honoratus’ Commentaries on the Aeneid (5th AD)

Corpus Aristotelicum (4th BC)

Fragments of Hellanicus’s works (5th BC)

Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca Historica (1st AD)

Herodotus’s Histories (5th BC)

Dionysius Halicarnassius’s Roman Antiquities (1st BC)

Plutarch’s Quaestiones Graecae (1st AD)

Eustathius’s commentaries on Homer (12th AD)

Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca, Epitome (2nd AD)

Hyginus’s Fabulae (2nd AD)

Ovid’s Works (1st AD)

Antoninus Liberalis’s Metamorphoses (2nd AD)

Conon’s Narrations (1st AD)

Dictys Cretensis (4th AD)

Dares Phrygius (5th AD)

Malalas’s Chronography (6th AD)

St.Jerome’s Chronicon (4th AD)

Eusebius’s Chronography (5th AD)

Philostratus the Athenian’s Heroicus (3rd AD)

Seneca Plays (1st AD)

Suda (10th AD)

Tzetzes (12th AD)

Duris of Same (4th BC)

Ptolemy Hephaestion (2nd AD)

More Sources:

WordHoard

(Software/Java Document for Scholia on Homer, commentary on the Odyssey & Iliad)

About This Book – Euripides Scholia: Scholia on Orestes 501–1100

Scholia on Euripides

LacusCurtius • A Gateway to Ancient Rome

Roman Sources and History

https://web.archive.org/web/20050625081727/http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/Hesiod/iliad.html

Little Iliad Fragments

Most of these places have older translations for the epics, poems and hymns (with older language), places like Poetry In Translation and https://www.gutenberg.org often have newer translations available for free, though…with a bit of digging most translations even recent ones can be found online :)

Comparing several translations is also good if you want to make any arguments about what a text says without being able to read the text in the original language, does the text really say that or is it just this translation?

It also doesn't hurt to research a little about the author of a work as well to get context for which time and sociopolitical and personal situation they were writing in (it helps to do a quick search into the history of ancient greece too, i.e. epic writers writing during the 7th century BC had different agendas than playwrights of the 5th century during the persian wars, athenians during the conflicts with sparta, or later hellenistic writers after Alexander the Great)

Wikipedia: CAN be used, it's a good starting point, but check the sources cited as much as you can, rather than believing what the page itself says

Links to Maps

Ancient Greece Maps – Ancient Greece: Φώς & Λέξη

User:MaryroseB54 - Wikimedia Commons

Cyowari - Professional, Digital Artist | DeviantArt

Some of the Realms of Greece in the Heroic Age by Yaulendur on DeviantArt

Late Bronze Age Mediterranean Trade, c. 1400-1200 BCE: Empires, Merchants, and Maritime Routes of the Ancient World - World History Encyclopedia

Translators:

Translate to Ancient Greek Online

https://logeion.uchicago.edu

Wiktionary

Ancient Art 

Resources

Harvard Art Museums

Family Tree: 

(Compiled by a friend, not exhaustive) - Note that there are often various different versions of lineage for many characters, so this only represents ONE of many possibilities)

Family Echo

Books

Oxford classical dictionary.pdf

Brief History Of Ancient Greece.pdf

168679208-Ancient-Greece.pdf

Complete Greek Drama

The Ancient Epic Cycle and it's ancient reception A companion.pdf

Final Note

These things should not be gatekept, its time to share them freely

I wish I could offer even more sources via academic books and papers but I fear this would exceed my abilities considering the vastness of the topic of Greek Mythology! But this is a starting point :D Have fun! 

Google Scholar has a lot of secondary sources (scholia commentary & theories), books about history, society, politics, flora & fauna, religion, culture, etc. of the time both of history and mythical history…if you have a friend in academia with university access (if you don’t have it yourself) you can ask them to check if they have access to the papers/books otherwise hidden behind insane paywalls, because a LOT of them are available as pdfs!

I also wish I had more visual/audio sources but this is smth I cant change :") I'm sure there's some good videos on youtube out there...somewhere x)

Feel free to contact me if you have more sources you want to add or any links don't work

Here is the Post as DOCs to share outside of tumblr