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be

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@be@floss.social avatar be , to random

What the ruling class calls "progress" is not inevitable! 🎉

As far as I am aware (please correct me if I'm wrong), this is the first rebuke these sidewalk vehicle companies have received from any municipal government. Hopefully the first of many.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2026/02/10/logan-square-wicker-park-neighbors-say-no-to-more-delivery-robots/

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I get mad
whenever I see
the autonomous delivery robot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o1c1MJb_Oc

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I went to the meeting last week that the alderman hosted which was discussed in the article. There were representatives from Coco and Serve at the meeting. They made highly the highly questionable claim that they were taking cars off the road and used this to say their sidewalk vehicles are safer than cars, so they are making the city safer. I asked why they are comparing their vehicles to cars rather than ebikes considering deliveries in dense cities are largely done via ebike...

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... They couldn't provide any data to back up their assertion that deliveries are done by car in Chicago. They said Uber might have that data but that data is private. This concerned the alderman's staffer who said they needed that data to evaluate the impacts of these sidewalk vehicles and figure out what policy objectives these sidewalk vehicles might impact.

Their arguments fall apart so easily from even the slightest scrutiny.

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Here is what I put in the feedback form for comments after the meeting:

'These vehicles bring all harms and no benefits to the community. They only benefit the companies inflicting them upon us. The people of Chicago are under no obligation to accept or accommodate them in any way.

The company representatives explained how these vehicles are only used for short distance deliveries. These are the trips that are easiest to walk, thus these delivery vehicles don't have a reason to exist...

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... Even if local restaurants earn revenue through this, we all lose something much more important: public spaces where we interact with other people. If we normalize getting restaurant food through these delivery vehicles instead of walking a few blocks to local restaurants, eventually we won't have local restaurants; we'll just have ghost kitchens where robots go in and out and all human interaction is removed. That would be a miserable city to live in...

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... I strongly disagree with the suggestions to get something out of these companies by having them pay for sidewalk maintenance. I appreciate the alderman fighting for funding safe streets. The city should be funding sidewalk maintenance. Funding sidewalks by leasing them to companies would be form of privatization that would leave us so much worse off in the long run, much like the parking meter deal...

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... We must not trade short term budget relief for normalizing privatization of public space and forever cluttering sidewalks with these obnoxious vehicles.

Revoke these companies' licenses ASAP and don't let them come back.'

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The alderman was interviewed by a local news outlet today about sidewalk vehicles:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/chicago-alder-weighs-backlash-over-151020301.html

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I intentionally refuse the "robot" language these companies want us to use and call them "sidewalk vehicles" instead. The supposedly autonomous operation is a charade. They are driven remotely by humans.

https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/299_silicon_valley_doesnt_know_what_makes_a_good_city_w_joanne_mcneil

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Want to get these sidewalk vehicles out of your city? Organize! All it has taken to get to this point in Chicago is some guy registering a domain name, making a Google Form, and spreading it around. https://nosidewalkbots.org/

@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar aeva , (edited ) to random

for all you beautiful hard working professional computer touchers out there:

"my day job has me making the world a ____ place"

(be honest, don't just repeat what your CEO says)

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@aeva Option 5: I have no job.

@kde@floss.social avatar kde , (edited ) to random

is going all

After nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on , the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release (due early 2027) will be Wayland-exclusive.

Read the FAQ below to find out what this means for you and the future of KDE:

https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/

The Wayland (a yellow circle with a W in the center) rises over green pastures where Konqi frolics happily.
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@kde Woohoo!

@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar aeva , to random

anyone here know how to use "linux"

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@aeva Fedora documentation still mentions booting live media in BIOS mode for a BIOS installation. https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/creating-and-using-a-live-installation-image/

To clarify, is the GRUB menu you see from the USB drive or the internal drive? If it gets to the GRUB menu of the USB drive and fails to boot from that point, I have no idea. If it's not booting GRUB from the USB drive, there might be something in the firmware settings to get it to boot.

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@aeva That would explain booting the USB drive's GRUB then failing to load the kernel.

@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar aeva , to random

I saw one of those automated delivery robots for the first time while I was out running errands yesterday. The googly eye looking head lights did a lot to quell the urge to tip it over.

It politely waited for the people around it to get out of the way before moving, but that meant it was sitting in the curb cut while it waited for me to go past. That is likely to be problematic for wheelchair users unless it somehow is able to get out of their way reliably.

Another view, this time of it crossing a street. It has something resembling brake lights. It's using the cross walk and is halfway across with 4 seconds left on the light.
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@aeva We gotta shut this shit down before we have Waymo cars killing people. https://nosidewalkbots.org/

@kde@floss.social avatar kde , (edited ) to random

announces desktop machine and goggles powered by KDE's desktop.

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamframe

But this is. A cool looking set of black VR goggles with two futuristic looking controllers lay on a beige surface.
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@kde It would be cool if this results in more KDE applications that work well from across the room.

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run avatar hipsterelectron , to random

i love this post but would slightly disagree: https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon/115466119015272521

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@hipsterelectron Out-of-touch nerds love to hate Signal and suggest "alternatives" that don't even come close because they've missed the point of why people use Signal.

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@aeva @hipsterelectron Do you know there's a Signal desktop client? I use it all the time to type with 10 fingers.

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@hipsterelectron @aeva @operand as do Flare and Whisperfish

@be@floss.social avatar be , to random

we had to go to work, had to pay our rent and our bills, and no matter how often we wondered before "how did people just let Hitler come to power?" we learned the answer, by having to work for the people who want him to, by having to pay rent to the people who want him to, by spending our waking lives making profits for and paying the very people who plan to destroy us, by not having the time or the energy to fight something so banal to this world as a fascist takeover.

https://all-cats-are-beautiful.ghost.io/work-will-set-you-free/

@be@floss.social avatar be , to random

'For those of us in the West, we must make sure that the world does not return to normal. We cannot be lulled back to sleep by the temporary cessation of air strikes while the occupation continues. Israel cannot continue as if it did not commit the gravest crime of our generation. The hundreds of thousands of martyred and maimed Palestinians demand justice that cannot be denied.'

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/10/9/celebrate-the-ceasefire-but-dont-forget-gaza-survived-on-its-own

@be@floss.social avatar be , to random

Oh no I have encountered a Google build system

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It's libwebrtc, and it uses Chromium's build system. 😱

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Wondering if it would be easier to rewrite the entire build system than try to get it to build...

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https://webrtc.googlesource.com/src/+/main/docs/native-code/development/

'The checkout size is large due the use of the Chromium build toolchain and many dependencies. Estimated size:

Linux: 6.4 GB.
Linux (with Android): 16 GB (of which ~8 GB is Android SDK+NDK images).
Mac (with iOS support): 5.6GB'

You have got to be kidding.

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Has anyone got libwebrtc to build without Chromium nonsense? Surely Firefox and WebKit don't download gigabytes of Google stuff just to build libwebrtc? Does WebKit use libwebrtc?

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It's downloading a Debian sysroot??? Dafuq?

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and that Debian sysroot has libpipewire 0.3 aaaaaaaaaaaaa

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oh maybe someone has saved my ass https://github.com/livekit/rust-sdks/pull/648

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layers and layers of fragile bespoke tooling with minimal/no documentation. lovely.

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LOL, it needs a build option is_clang=false to build with the system's clang instead of Chromium's bundled clang 🙃

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Chromium has its own bespoke package manager 🙃 https://chromium.googlesource.com/infra/luci/luci-go/+/master/cipd/

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After 3 days of yak shaving, I got this monstrosity of a build system to function! https://github.com/livekit/rust-sdks/pull/730

Now let's see if I can get the Rust bindings to build the C++ from source instead of downloading a prebuilt library 🫠

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First I'll have to get it to build with out the 9 GB of junk from Chromium's "third_party" repository.

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bluhhhh, I don't think this is feasible. I can get those 9 GB down to 1 GB pretty easily, but crates.io has a size limit of 10 MB for .crate files... sigh...

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I guess the libwebrtc source code could be provided in an archive that gets autodownloaded by build.rs, with an option to specify a path to the source archive with an environment variable. Ugly, but I think would make it feasible to build this crate on systems that don't provide network access during builds.

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I wrote a script that gets the 9 GB of junk down to 689 MB of source code, which compresses down to a 101 MB .tar.xz file. Still not great but way better than 9 GB googleware

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The built static library is 79 MB!

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I hate build systems. That's why I make them work.

@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar aeva , to random

turns out switching from gnome to KDE on fedora is really easy https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/switching-desktop-environments/

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@aeva @rrika That sounds like a fuck up in the distro packaging side.

@be@floss.social avatar be , to random

I'm looking for a job writing code that isn't evil. I'm looking for remote work hiring for US timezones. I have 10 years experience, primarily with crossplatform (Linux/Windows/macOS, but especially Linux) desktop applications in C++ and Rust. Recently I've been getting into embedded MCU programming. I'd like to focus on Rust, but am willing to touch C++ and/or C for money. My website has a list of projects I've worked on: https://be.place/code

:boost_love:

@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar aeva , to random

avx 5.12 surround sound

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@aeva quality shitpost

@be@floss.social avatar be , to random

Cloud storage? You mean the sky?

@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar aeva , to random

thinking of learning how to play the subwoofer. such a beatuiful instrument

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@aeva wubwubwubwub

@be@floss.social avatar be , to random

Looking at the sky feels good. Would recommend.

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@aeva out the window. Or get outside and look up

@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar whitequark , to random

personally i'm not planning to migrate from github any time soon. the people who i'd've lost on ethical grounds have self-selected out long ago, i have basically no lock-in besides very heavy reliance GH Actions (which have no viable replacement besides gitlab maybe) and i'm counting on the process of corporate death to take a few years until it starts to cause actual immediate problems

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@Codeberg Is that implemented with yojo?