PodQueue

How SteamOS is Contributing to the Linux Ecosystem - Alberto Garcia, Igalia

SteamOS is the Linux-based operating system that runs on Valve's Steam Deck. SteamOS is based on existing open source components, and follows an approach of contributing as much as possible to the upstream projects that it uses. This presentation will cover some of the improvements that the development of SteamOS has contributed to the Linux ecosystem in areas such as graphics, the kernel or the desktop.

The No State Solution: A Dialogue with Palestinian sociologist Mohammed Bamyeh and Israeli political scientist Uri Gordon

How can anarchist perspectives contribute to Palestinian liberation?

Join Palestinian sociologist Mohammed Bamyeh and Israeli political scientist Uri Gordon as they consider this question.

Professor Mohammed Bamyeh, Department of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh, is author of Anarchy as Order: The History and Future of Civic Humanity (2009)

Dr. Uri Gordon, author of Anarchy Alive!: Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (2007), is an Independent scholar now based in the UK.

This event took place on the unceded Territories of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt in Victoria, BC Canada, and in the U.K. via Zoom on January 28, 2024.

Servo Web Rendering Engine Reboot - Manuel Rego, Igalia

Created by Mozilla Research in 2012, the Servo project is a Research & Development effort meant to create an independent, modular, embeddable web engine that allows developers to deliver content and applications using web standards. Servo is an experimental browser engine written in Rust, taking advantage of the memory safety properties and concurrency features of the language. Stewardship of Servo moved from Mozilla Research to the Linux Foundation in 2020, where its mission remains unchanged. After some slow years, there's now renewed activity on the project, with a roadmap focused on improving the engine’s CSS 2 conformance, exploring Android support, and making Servo a practical embeddable rendering engine. In this presentation we'll review the status of the project, the recent developments during 2023 and the plans for the future to become Servo an alternative web rendering engine for the embedded devices industry.

Lin Clark joined the show to talk about Code Cartoons, her work at Mozilla in the emerging technologies group, Rust, Servo, and WebAssembly (aka Wasm), the Rust community’s big goal in 2018 for Rust to become a web language (thanks in part to Wasm), passing objects between Rust and JavaScript, Rust libraries depending ...

Director of the Media Economies Design Lab and author of Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life., Nathan Schneider shows us how the styles of governance embedded in our online platforms change the way we understand governance in real life.

📕 Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life is now available.

About Nathan Schneider

Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab. His most recent book is Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life.

Keep up with Nathan Schneider

LinkedIn | Website

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In 1968, the infamously grumpy computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra published a polemic called “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” in which he made a striking argument: GOTO, a programming language feature widely considered essential at the time, was such a bad idea that not only should programmers stop using it, but it should be removed from high-level languages altogether. A decades-long fight ensued, but Dijkstra essentially won the day: new languages now rarely support GOTO, and even when they do, programmers largely pretend they don’t.

The idea that removing features can make programming languages better is both surprising and exciting. What programming language features that we consider essential today might be the next GOTO, withering and vanishing from high-level languages of the future?

In this talk, we’ll look at several candidates: raw memory access, inheritance, reference types, and null. Drawing on examples from several programming languages, we’ll look at some of the problems with these features, the alternatives, and the tradeoffs.

This talk will be accessible to anyone with beginning programming experience. It will have some tasty tidbits for hard-core programming language nerds, but if you have some idea what variables, loops, and objects are, then you’ll be fine!

Paul Cantrell

Paul fell in love with programming at first sight on an Apple ][+ and never looked back. He teaches computer science at Macalester College and is a freelance software developer (often with the fine folks at Bust Out).

Living a secret double life as a classically trained composer and pianist and artistic director of The New Ruckus, he brings a musician's passion for aesthetics and nuanced detail to the craft of writing software, thus making his bio sound all fancy.

Aboriginal scholar and author Tyson Yunkaporta illustrates how deep time thinking, born of an intimate relationship between a place and its community, can radically reshape our relationship to the cosmic order.

Linus emphasizes the challenge of finding and retaining maintainers due to the complexity of people's relationships.

Summary:

The conversation covers the vision for Zed and the technological choices made, the importance of owning the full stack, and the trade-offs of building everything in-house. The conversation covers topics such as gold-plated parts of Zed, rewriting and learning, technology and user perception, and choosing the tech stack.

Takeaways:

- The vision for Zed is to create a lightweight, powerful, and extensible editor, and the technological choices, such as using Rust and GPUI acceleration, were made to achieve this vision.

- Owning the full stack allows for greater control and flexibility in building the editor, but it also requires more effort and onboarding for new team members.

- Balancing the need for building the perfect abstraction and moving fast is achieved by focusing on building what is needed and continuously improving it over time.

- Building everything in-house provides the ability to tailor the codebase to specific needs, but it also requires more time and effort to develop and maintain. Building a mission-critical system requires a deep understanding of the domain and careful consideration of the technology stack.

- Gold-plated parts of a software project are the areas that have been extensively refined and optimized.

- Rewriting code can be a valuable learning experience and an opportunity to improve upon previous implementations.

- The choice of technology stack can impact the ease of contribution and the perception of the product by users.

- Future topics of discussion include collaboration in software development and company culture.

Science fiction authors Becky Chambers and Annalee Newitz discuss "cozy science fiction" -- stories of the future that feature goodness.

From the Conversation at The Interval, “Resisting Dystopia” by Becky Chambers and Annalee Newitz.

Watch the full talk here: https://youtu.be/88Dl4orviC0

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation between two Hugo award-winning science fiction authors, Becky Chambers and Annalee Newitz. Known for challenging classic science fiction tropes such as war, violence, and colonialism, both authors create vivid and immersive worlds that are filled with non-human persons, peace, and a subtle sense of hope. The authors will discuss what it means to take these alternative themes seriously, delve into their writing & world building process, and explore how science fiction can help us imagine new futures that can make sense of our current civilizational struggles.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their novel Autonomous won the Lambda Literary Award, and their nonfiction book Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age was a national bestseller. The Washington Post called their latest novel, The Terraformers, “a dazzling look at the distant future.” They are also the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. With a focus on the social and political implications of technological change, Newitz has become one of the leading voices in contemporary science fiction.

Becky Chambers is a Hugo-Award winning science fiction author of the Wayfarers series and the Monk and Robot novellas. Her writing is characterized by a deep empathy for her characters and a keen sensitivity to the ways in which our relationships with others shape who we are. Through her novels, Chambers has crafted richly imagined worlds that challenge our assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality, and explore the possibilities and perils of technological progress.

"Resisting Dystopia" was given on April 18, 02023 as part of The Long Now Foundation's “Conversations at The Interval” Salon Talks. These hour long talks are recorded live at The Interval, our bar, cafe, & museum in San Francisco. Since 02014 this series has presented artists, authors, entrepreneurs, scientists (and more) taking a long-term perspective on subjects like art, design, history, nature, technology, and time. To follow the talks, you can:

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