erlend_sh

a covenant for browsers, search, and people

The Web is slow-motion collapsing for multiple reasons, but at the heart of it all is a little known system: the Search/Browser Levy. Initially designed to fund browsers by taxing search engine revenue, the levy system is indeed succeeding in putting high-quality browsers in the hands of billions free of charge, but at a steep cost. As a direct result of its organisation, the levy makes browsers enforce an artifical search monopoly for Google that in turn enshittifies search and creates a monoculture that disorganises our shared information space. This leads to a heavily distorted market in digital advertising that massively increases the funds going to search ads — including browsers' cut of that revenue — and correspondingly defunds the rest of the Web, notably news media.

There's still time to act. The Web we built is a collective system without collective action, a shared environment that dreams of being a commons but lacks the shared governance to achieve that. We need not eliminate the levy system — rather, we can reform it so that it works for the web and those who use it.

FedCM for the indieweb: https://blog.erlend.sh/indie-social-sign-in-could-go-mainstream

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has privately played down likelihood original deal will be finalized, although the two companies will continue to have a close collaboration

The companies unveiled the giant agreement last September at Nvidia’s Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters. They announced a memorandum of understanding for Nvidia to build at least 10 gigawatts of computing power for OpenAI, and the chip maker also agreed to invest up to $100 billion to help OpenAI pay for it. As part of the deal, OpenAI agreed to lease the chips from Nvidia. 

At the time, the ChatGPT-maker expected the deal negotiations to be completed in the coming weeks, people familiar with the plans said. But the talks haven’t progressed beyond the early stages, some of the people said.

Now, the two sides are rethinking the future of their partnership, some of the people said. The latest discussions, they said, include an equity investment of tens of billions of dollars as part of OpenAI’s current funding round.

Archived: https://archive.ph/iOuh5

Anti-fascistic software is made possible by pro-labor licensing.

Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/115549403577231766

Anti-fascistic software is made possible by pro-labor licensing.

I've been trying to write this piece for years. Every time I get started I'm just overwhelmed with paralyzing visions of the FOSS commentariat accusing me of WrongThink, more so here on the fediverse than anywhere else.

But I'm scared and tired and we urgently need to get our shit together.

Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/115549403577231766

Anti-fascistic software is made possible by pro-labor licensing.

I've been trying to write this piece for years. Every time I get started I'm just overwhelmed with paralyzing visions of the FOSS commentariat accusing me of WrongThink, more so here on the fediverse than anywhere else.

But I'm scared and tired and we urgently need to get our shit together.

Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/115549403577231766

If you're a regular internet user the Personal Data Storage paradigm won't move your data from the cloud to your personal computer. Most people will still rely on an institutional cloud service, but instead of data-banking with a shareholder-controlled corporation people’s data can be entrusted to the equivalent of member-owned credit unions for data storage.

..without informed consent.

This post takes a look at ATProto from a different angle, and explores the value of some possibly less-noticed pieces of it.

The "Login with Google" button has been so useful and yet so horrible for the freedom of the web. Why does google get to be the gatekeeper to all of our web logins?

We need an alternative, but it also needs to be easy, and by making handles domains, and making it so that normal people can use and understand it, they have made it possible for an actually decentralized social login button.

Linking Identity to your Personal Data Store and using Domains as Handles is a crucialcombination that is really starting to unlock web freedom.

A lot of what I'm trying to get at with this post is that there is more than one way to leverage ATProto, and that there are some pretty major things it has started to do right that we really need right now.

We're used to the idea that there's more than one way to make a web app, and the same is true even if you are building it on ATProto. It hasn't set a lot in stone, it's just given us some bricks that we can all share.

The "AppView" is a component of the ATProto architecture that you are given nearly free rein on. It can be any kind of thing you want, and I think there's all kinds of unexplored possibilities there.

You might even be able to make an AppView with a meaningful ActivityPub integration, or possibly borrow ideas about inboxes and outboxes as an alternative to relays.

Our v0.3 mvp is finally done after a year of development and many more spent pondering cozy community design.

Today it's a minimalistic personal site generator. Before long it'll be a social network made of people's personal websites.

Nerdy web weirdos unite ✊❤️‍🔥

Mastodon: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/113794326443596401

There are endless debates online about Rust vs. Zig, this post explores a side of the argument I don't think is mentioned enough.

Intro / TLDR

I was intrigued to learn that the Roc language rewrote their standard library from Rust to Zig. What made Zig the better option?

They wrote that they were using a lot of unsafe Rust and it was getting in their way. They also mentioned that Zig had “more tools for working in a memory-unsafe environment, such as reporting memory leaks in tests”, making the overall process much better.

So is Zig a better alternative to writing unsafe Rust?

I wanted to test this myself and see how hard unsafe Rust would be by building a project that required a substantial amount of unsafe code.

Then I would re-write the project in Zig to see if would be easier/better.

After I finished both versions, I found that the Zig implementation was safer, faster, and easier to write. I’ll share a bit about building both and what I learned.

As written, the proposed remedies will force smaller and independent browsers like Firefox to fundamentally reexamine their entire operating model.