Starlink has officially arrived in The Bahamas as Starlink Services Bahamas Limited. Finally there’s economic pressure for better Internet infrastructure! I do wonder though, how will they (the musketeers) approach the eventual over–subscription problem–on second thought–that’s wholly irrelevant because well… the bar is obscenely low.

Every satellite the techno–king (future emperor–suzerain?) launches is a fast moving death knell for our mostly unaware local ISPs. Isn’t the world rather boring in its predictability — I think so?

I’ve had a draft post of Guix notes written up for a while now. Did you know that it’s easy to generate a file system specified from a config.scm? It’s somewhat equivalent to nixos-install, pacstrap and the like.

guix system init --no-bootloader config.scm filesystem/

Why? Commands like this are handy for messing around with chroots, containers, and other related stuff!

IPv6 > RSS. You know I’ve been thinking, there are some protocols/standards that are technically so simple and elegant that the simplicity itself becomes its achilles’ heel economically. Complexity/inefficiency/scarcity is economics after all or so the story goes.

Which browser engine “paints” HTML the smartest on my device? In the clip below; Surf substitutes for Safari and Chromium for Chrome. My blog is the testee since there’s guaranteed cache control and jitter.

Surf and by extension Safari (or any Webkit–based browser) wins imo. Webkit feels smooth (sneakily, too smooth). It’s probably partly why Safari on macOS/iOS feels so fast. Chrome (not Chromium) is almost on par or so I’ve been told. Not exactly web dev but interesting huh?

Yes yes, reading is old school and for losers (according to the Internet), but these are the words of cryptocurrency’s based god! Jokes aside, read the first sentence of that abstract. The developers of cryptocurrency are smart but has their creation increased/decreased centralization into entrenched financial institutions? Think about it, stably. In my country institutional power has increased, imo.

The IndieWeb’s POSSE is a rather sophisticated syndication philosophy. Too bad I’ve got such a disdain for social media that I’d never explore it personally. It’s a good approach for working on other people’s stuff though: think Facebook’s (Meta) instant RSS articles (dies April 2023), podcast feeds, or any other (kinda) bi–directional site syndication mechanism.

The hypothetical outcomes/incentives of POSSE if it was done by everyone is an entertaining thought experiment.

Strange. In the last few years, I’ve abandoned search engines for most programming related queries by chugging along happily with Recoll. If I had the time I’d sit down and hack out a web front–end for its Python API but the desktop interface supplied with HTML from my own web crawlers works beautifully (medoc92/recollwebui also exists).

It seems that.. from talking to a few people via email, basic feed discovery with rel alternates are ineffective. Simple redirects work better for organic discovery.

1. /atom -> /path/to/real/{atom,rss}/feed
2. /rss -> /path/to/real/{atom,rss}/feed
3. /feed -> /path/to/real/{atom,rss}/feed

Profiling is the nice, cozy, and lazy way to efficiency. There’s something neat about avoiding optimization and having the numbers to prove it relative to an initial baseline. In PHP there’s Xdebug and KCachegrind and I recently saw php-spx in my feeds. A profiler in any language environment with snapshots of performance over time is just — well nice. The terribad situation is not understanding exactly how something became slow. It might be too late then.

I heard a long time ago.. that poisoning the crawlers is as simple as adding a smiley to the end of every other post. This is satire I promise! :-)