I’ve returned from the depths of The Fediverse with a reaction hover short code. The RSS version of this post should replace that reaction with a gif image link.

I’ll play around with this stolen idea for a bit. Audio reactions might also be another idea worth exploring.

WordPress has an affinity for back–doored radioactivity. If I can get my way (which is hard), a WordPress install has only 1 theme and 0 plugins.

wordpress/
|-- public
`-- wp-config.php

/* Disable installing plugins and themes */
define('DISALLOW_FILE_MODS', true);

There’s an old article from the developer of NetNewsWire (RSS reader) that questions the idea of the unread count. You can’t read all the unread — so why entertain a time consuming mythos around that number?

It applies everywhere — What narratives might people create around the programming language % numbers on GitHub? Do they waste time thinking/fretting about their mythos? Fun to think about.

No more need for npm in my personal stack! The native browser’s path comes from which.

import puppeteer from "https://deno.land/x/puppeteer@16.2.0/mod.ts";

const chrome = "chromium";  // Browser Chrome: "firefox" | "chromium" | "google-chrome" | ...
const product = "chrome";   // Product Base:   "firefox" | "chrome"

const command = new Deno.Command("which", { args: [chrome] });
const { status, stdout, stderr } = command.outputSync();
const executablePath = new TextDecoder().decode(stdout).trim();

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
  headless: false,
  executablePath: executablePath,
  product: product,
});

const site = "example.com";
const page = await browser.newPage();

await page.setViewport({ width: 1024, height: 768 });
await page.goto("https://" + site);
await page.screenshot({ path: site + ".png" });

await page.waitForSelector('a');

const url = await page.evaluate(() => {
  return document.querySelector('a').href;
});

console.log(url);

await browser.close();

deno run --allow-all main.ts

The best articles on RSS are from about 15 years ago. In hindsight, RSS was probably thrown away by influential companies and technologists because it was too hard to monetize. The great thing about RSS though is that the spec can be explained to a non–programmer in about an hour — that’s probably why it’s hard to kill.

Meta Platform’s Metaverse (Internet ≈ Facebook in my country) might just succeed. Well… not because they deliver on the “metaverse” (whatever that means) but because it sets up a hardware distribution chain for software/browsers (the only thing that actually matters).

The problem of global discoverability (in this case mmorpgs) is partly technical and human. Habbo Hotel might just make a return :-)

Squint hard enough and it sure looks like a command line interface.

Surely typing/saying the below Alpine command to install Firefox is way easier than who knows what multi–stage process other operating systems require.

apk add firefox

Google’s search box (rather tongue in cheek) is the most popular command line interface in use today. With NLP, installing and running firefox would just be a phrase equivalent that compiles to:

firefox

On NixOS, we can already do stuff like that. Of course, NixOS lacks a translation/encapsulation layer for imperative to declarative specification — so user friendliness suffers dramatically.

Larnyx/Rhasspy is an excellent/fast offline text to speech program. There’s approximately 50 voice samples.

It would be trivial to turn this into an API that reads articles/posts, but it’s on Python so packaging it “directly” (there’s a docker container) is way harder than actually using it.

Apparently we were supposed to be entering the era of web4 right about now. “Intelligent personal agents” does sound like a nice marketing jingle. Also… I just learned that web5 is a thing?