Blender, the absolute powerhouse of FOSS 3d (and increasingly 2d) graphics!
We give an overview of the software's history, some personal history of
our relationships to the software, what it can do, and where we're excited
to see it go!
How do you survive in a world that is no longer optimized for making
your own clothing when you suddenly find that modern conveniences no
longer accommodate you? As a textile historian, Morgan has been
ruminating for years about women’s contributions to the domestic
economy, the massive time investment of producing clothing for a
family, and the comparative properties of different textile
fibers. These research interests were informed by a lifetime of sewing
and other fiber crafts. None of this experience, however, properly
prepared her to face the reality of needing to rely on her own hands
to provide large portions of her own wardrobe.
Guest co-host Juliana Sims sits down with Morgan to talk about how,
in the wake of a recently developed allergy to synthetic fabrics, she
now finds herself putting that knowledge of historical textile
production to use to produce clothing that she can wear.
The quote that Morgan somewhat misremembered about a woman preparing
wool before the winter:
"A thrifty countrywoman had a small croft, she and her sturdy spouse. He tilled his own land, whether the work called for the plough, or the curved sickle, or the hoe. She would now sweep the cottage, supported on props; now she would set the eggs to be hatched under the plumage of the brooding hen; or she gathered green mallows or white mushrooms, or warmed the low hearth with welcome fire. And yet she diligently employed her hands at the loom, and armed herself against the threats of winter." -- Ovid, Fasti 4.687-714
Back again with governance... part two!
(See also: part one!)
Here we talk about some organizations and how they can be seen as
"templates" for certain governance archetypes.
Governance of FOSS projects, a two parter, and this is part one!
Here we talk about general considerations applicable to FOSS projects!
(And heck, these apply to collaborative free culture projects too!)
WebAssembly! You've probably heard lots about it, but what the heck
is it? Is it just for C and Rust programs? Can you write it by hand?
(Do you want to?) And wait, how is Spritely getting involved in
WebAssembly efforts? Find out!
F-Droid, a repository of free software for your Android devices!
Christine interviews F-Droid developers Sylvia van Os and
Hans-Christoph Steiner as well as F-Droid board member and chair...
Morgan Lemmer-Webber!
In yet another deep dive into yet another weird hobby of Christine's,
we talk about how to make your own dehydrated meals!
Why the heck would you want to do this?
Well, maybe you want more consistent or dietary needs friendly travel
food!
Maybe you want to go camping or hiking!
Maybe you're sick of deciding what's for lunch and you just want to
scoop a cup of meal out of a jar on your desk every day!
Maybe you want to weird out your fellow conference-goers as you turn a
dry powder into a fully cooked meal with hot water and hot water
alone!
Links:
Making dehydrated meals overview (Christine's Kitchen 0):
[YouTube]
[PeerTube]
Twitter is burning, and people are flocking to the fediverse. Is the
fediverse ready though? How did we get here? Where should we be
going? Since Christine is co-author of ActivityPub, the primary
protocol used by the fediverse, Morgan decides it's time to get
Christine's thoughts recorded and out there... so we hop in the car as
we talk all about it!
Links:
ActivityPub, the protocol
which wires the federated social web together, of which Christine
is co-author! Be sure to check out the
Overview section...
it's actually fairly easy to understand!
Some of the implementations discussed (though there are many more):
Terminal Phase!
A space shooter that runs in your terminal!!!
Who wouldn't be excited about that?
Not to mention that it shows off cool features of
Spritely Goblins...
like time travel:
Well, Terminal Phase has been Christine's fun/downtime project for the
last few years, and one of the bonuses you can get for the reward
tiers of donating to this podcast! And yet we've never done an
episode about it! Given that a brand new (and much easier to install)
release of Terminal Phase is coming out really soon, we figured now's
a good time to talk about it!
Morgan and Christine walk through their (well, Morgan's) renovation of
a cargo van into a campervan. This is a very crafty episode, but we do
work in a few analogies to some FOSS (and open hardware) things!
Show notes at the end, but how about a quick visual van tour?
Back of the van, wide open!
A closer look...
Actually, let's move that solar panel aside...
Here's a better view of the cabinet with all the equipment attached:
Here's what the van looks like if you come in the side door:
Another, more diagonal view:
Safety first!
Window covers, custom fit! Reflectix goes out, fabric goes in.
Also also! The video recording of the Lisp/Scheme workshop
(based on A Scheme Primer) is released!
Unlock Lisp / Scheme's magic: beginner to Scheme-written-in-Scheme in one hour!
(PeerTube, YouTube, )
The What is Spritely
episode, where Morgan says "get in the car Christine you need to
talk about your project", is the first time Christine laid out the
broader (early) plans for Spritely in depth! (In that sense,
FOSS & Crafts has been here for much of Spritely's journey, as many
of our listeners know!)
Morgan's out sick! And yet Morgan is still in this episode!
And that's because this episode is the audio version of
a talk by the very same name from FOSDEM 2022,
co-presented by Christine and Morgan!
But since Morgan isn't here, Christine fills in, and also gets
a bit silly.
HACK AND CRAFT SCHEME TUTORIALS!
The last live scheme tutorial went really well!
And relatedly, Christine and the Spritely Institute just published
A Scheme Primer,
which is more or less the text version of that presentation!
The next live verison of the sheme tutorial will be hosted at
Hack & Craft!
Come this Saturday,
July 16, 2pm-4pm ET (6pm-8pm UTC)!
We're planning to record this one!
The amazing Sophie Jantak joins us to
talk about how she makes pet portraits (including one she made for us!)
using Blender'sGrease Pencil.
Hear about Sophie's process, why Grease Pencil is the right tool for her,
and what her collalboration process is like on pet portrait commissions!
(And yes, you can commission Sophie tool!)
BONUS FREE CULTURAL SOURCE CONTENT!
We've collectively decided to release this artwork's source
code as a free cultural work!
Get the .blend (CC BY-SA 4.0)!
HACK AND CRAFT SCHEME TUTORIALS!
Also a reminder, we'll be hosting two versions of a "Intro to Scheme"
tutorial during the two Hack & Craft
meetings this month!
July 2nd, 8pm-10pm ET (12am-2am UTC): First trial run of Scheme tutorial!
July 16, 2pm-4pm ET (6pm-8pm UTC): Second version, we're planning to record
this one!
There are a lot of good Grease Pencil tutorials online...
we'll let you find them, but this
Grease Pencil Random Tips and Tricks
is a nice thing to know about!
This episode is all about the
Lisp
family of programming languages!
Ever looked at Lisp and wondered why so many programmers gush about
such a weird looking programming language style?
What's with all those parentheses?
Surely there must be something you get out of them for so many
programming nerds to gush about the language!
We do a light dive into Lisp's history, talk about what makes Lisp
so powerful, and nerd out about the many, many kinds of Lisps out
there!
Announcement: Christine is gonna give an intro-to-Scheme tutorial
at our next Hack & Craft!
Saturday July 2nd, 2022 at 20:00-22:00 ET!
Come and learn some Scheme with us!
William Byrd's
The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written
demonstrates just how easy it is to write lisp in lisp, showing off the
kernel of evaluation living at every modern programming language!
M-expressions (the original math-notation-vision for users to operate on) vs S-expressions (the structure Lisp evaluators actually operate at, in direct representational mirror of the typically, but not necessarily, parenthesized representation of the same).
Lisp-1 vs Lisp-2... well, rather than give a simple link and analysis,
have a thorough one.
MIT's CADR was the
second iteration of the lisp machine, and the most influential
on everything to come. Then everything split when two separate
companies implemented it...
Lisp Machines, Incorporated (LMI),
founded by famous hacker Richard Greenblatt, who aimed to keep
the MIT AI Lab hacker culture alive by only hiring programmers
part-time.
Symbolics was the
other rival company. Took venture capital money, was a
commercial success for quite a while.
These systems were very interesting, there's more to them than
just the rivalry. But regarding that, the book
Hackers
(despite its issues)
captures quite a bit about the AI lab before this and then its
split, including a ton of Lisp history.
There's a lot of these... we recommend Guile
if you're interested in using Emacs (along with Geiser), and Racket if you're looking for a more gentle introduction (DrRacket, which ships with Racket, is a friendly introduction)
The R5RS and R7RS-small specs are very short and easy to read especially
Common Lisp...
which, yeah there are multiple implementations, but these days
really means SBCL with
Sly or SLIME
Clojure introduced functional
datastructures to the masses (okay, maybe not the masses). Neat
stuff, though not a great license choice (even if technically FOSS)
in our opinion and Rich Hickey kinda
blew up his community
so maybe use something else these days.
Calling all programming language nerds! Distinguished computer
scientist Mark S. Miller (presently at Agoric)
joins us to tell us all about distributed object programming languages
and their history! We talk about actors, a bit of Xanadu, and little
known but incredibly influential programming languages like Flat
Concurrent Prolog, Joule, and E!
Actually there's so much to talk about that this episode is just part
one! There's more to come!
Links:
The actor model
(the core of which is sometimes distinguished from modified variants
by as being called "the classic actor model"). Long history;
Tony Garnock-Jones' History of Actors
is maybe the cleanest writeup
The
Agoric Open Systems papers
by Mark Miller and Eric Drexler are a good background into the
underlying motivations that got Mark into distributed objects
Xerox PARC, which is where the Vulcan group happened (which is hard to find information on, sadly).
Mark mentions some of his colleagues who worked with him in the Vulcan group, including Dean Tribble (who worked on Joule, see more below) and Danny Bobrow who is famous for his groundbreaking program STUDENT (Natural Language Input for a Computer Proglem Solving System is an incredible read, detailing a program (written in lisp!) which could read algebra "word problems" written in plain English and solve them... in 1964!).
On capabilities and actors... we'll get to this more in the next episode,
but for now we'll leave the
Ode to the Granovetter Diagram
paper here (it's a truly amazing document!)
We mentioned
RSA,
which is the first publicly published algorithm for public key
cryptography. These days most public key cryptography uses
elliptic curves
instead. It's possible that in
the future, something else will be recommended instead!
Playing around with GnuPG can be a great way to learn about
cryptography as a user, but... it's also not the easiest thing to
learn either, and we don't personally believe that GPG/PGP's web of
trust model is a realistic path for user security. (But what we
recommend instead, that's a topic for a future episode.) Still,
a useful tool in all sorts of ways.
Mixing and matching these things at a low level can be tricky,
and unexpected vulnerabilities can easily occur.
Cryptographic Right Answers
has been a useful page, but the cryptography world keeps moving!
Guix turns ten!
We celebrate Guix's first decade
by highlighting ten great things about Guix!
Hear all about functional package management, time-traveling operating systems,
and why "Composable DSLs" are great!
This week we’re talking about Repetitive Strain Injuries
(RSI). Christine and Morgan tell their stories bout over-using their
wrists from programming (prodded along by an injury) and writing
academic papers respectively. We discuss what you can do to treat or
minimize the effects of these injuries then cap it off with a
discussion of RSI gloves including Morgan's
Free Soft Wear RSI glove pattern.
Christine finally overcomes her fear of the
sewing machine
and we talk about Christine and Morgan's respective experiences
learning it, and how you can pick it up too!
Links:
Morgan's article on
Basic Sewing Patterns.
Includes pictures of the dicebag and skirt!
(More tutorials coming soon!)
You probably know what a
sewing machine is,
but isn't there always more to learn?
Morgan finally overcomes her fear of Emacs
and we talk about Morgan and Christine's respective experiences
learning it, and how you can pick it up too!
On Guix: (keyboard-layout "us" #:options '("caps:ctrl_modifier" "shift:both_capslock")) in your system configuration both makes capslock a ctrl and allows you to press both shift keys at once to enable capslock behavior (should you want such a thing)
mu4e, ERC, crdt.el (video)… many more emacs tools mentioned,
not all linked! Trying to be comprehensive would result in a
trip to the M-x doctor for sure…
Morgan and Christine talk about the skills they’ve learned in their
humanities backgrounds and how those have translated into their work
within FOSS communities and projects. They’ll then discuss the
benefits of seeking out varied skillsets within your communities, the
value of looking at problems from multiple lenses, and how to use all
of the tools we’ve got to promote our projects.
(This episode is the audio from
our SeaGL keynote of the same name!)
Oh yeah, and as we said in the intro, the
TinyNES campaign is going strong (see our last episode)!
We met the minimum goal which means it's happening!
Still a couple of weeks left (at time of writing) to get yourself
an open hardware NES, but over half of the "genuine chip" ones are
now sold out, so get yours while you can!
Dan Gilbert of Tall Dog joins us to talk
about the
Tiny Nostalgia Evocation Square (or TinyNES for short)!
The TinyNES is an open hardware system compatible with the compatible
with original Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom cartridges and
controllers.
Instead of being just an emulator or FPGA-based implementation, the
TinyNES uses the original 6502-derived chips and a custom circuit
board, preserving and carrying forward computing history!
Oh yeah, and it's also running a crowdfunding campaign,
so you can order your own
and support open hardware in the best way possible: by playing video games!
By the way, we mentioned that FOSS & Crafts Studios would be launching
its first collaboration... we're helping to run the crowdfunding
campaign on this one (and couldn't be more excited about it)!
It's time for some updates on Spritely, the project Christine founded to advance decentralized networking technology! A lot has happened since our episode about Spritely from last year (which is really where Spritely got its main public announcement)! Most notably, Jessica Tallon has joined the project thanks to a generous grant from NLNet and NGI Zero! But there's a lot more that has happened too, so listen in!
ALSO! As mentioned at the end of this episode, starting with the NEXT episode, we'll begin signing off every episode by thanking donors to FOSS & Crafts Studios' Patreon! By donating you both support this podcast AND Christine's work on Spritely!
Spritely Brux, Spritely's identity and trust management framework, which Jessica is working on (and Morgan dressed as for the costume contest)
Goblin-Chat (mostly a prototype to demonstrate the underlying networking tech)
Spritely Goblins, Spritely's distributed programming environment framework (and which Christine dressed as for the costume contest) (code, documentation)
Wm Salt Hale joins us to talk about his
dissertation on resilience in FOSS communities (especially after
crisis events), the kind of impacts founder decisions can have on
long-term community development, especially as seen through reactions
to software vulnerabilities and license decisions.
Also! Salt mentions that we're
keynoting
at SeaGL this weekend! It's an online
conference, so maybe we'll see you there!
Lightning round! Morgan and Christine blast through a bunch of
snack-sized topics they're currently interested in, ranging from an
actual FOSS video game made for the NES, to "Free Soft Wear" clothing,
to compiler towers!
This episode's title was inspired by Ian Bicking's 2009 PyCon talk,
"Topics of Interest", but it's bitrotted off the internet so we
can't link you to that one. Boooooo!
Eat the Weeds is a great resource to learn about what kinds of weeds you can eat, and which ones you can't, but even then, be careful. Really, seriously, be careful. Poison hemlock looks almost just like its more innocent cousin Queen Anne's lace except that it will kill you quickly and painfully. There's lots of great wild stuff out there, but be careful, and maybe take a class or instructions or help from someone who knows what they're talking about, or only eat the stuff that's generally agreed upon as "there's nothing dangerous you could mistake this for". And even then, be sure!
In Part 1 of Women and Wool Working in the Ancient Roman
Empire,
we discussed the practical matters of textile production in domestic
and commercial contexts. In this second episode, we look at the
performative ways that textile production was used to construct
women's identities. This includes the incorporation of textile tools
and production into rites of passage such as marriage, childbirth, and
death as a symbol of the virtuous matron. We further discuss
religious use and association of textile production through the
stories of the Fates, Arachne, and the Virgin Mary. We then come
around to weave the rest of the narrative together: could the piece
that fits in the women-shaped hole of textile production in ancient
Rome be... women?
This episode is dedicated in loving memory of Laura Callahan-Hazard
and Sigrid Steinbock, both enthusiastic supporters of Morgan's
dissertation, themselves both textile artists, and who both had wanted
to read Morgan's dissertation but left this world too soon.
Roman version of the Arachne Myth by Ovid, The Metamorphoses VIContent Warning: suicide, oblique mentions to rape, gods being jerks to mortals
Roman description of the three fates or Parcae by Catullus, 64, scroll down to line 305.
Roman version of the Europa Myth by Ovid, The Metamorphoses, II, 833-875Content Warning: abduction, gods taking other forms to seduce women, gods being jerks to mortals
A summary of the mythology of Leda and the Swan, very brief Roman summary in Hyginus, Fabulae 77, scroll down to § 77. Content Warning: rape, gods taking other forms to seduce women, gods being jerks to mortals
Roman version of the Danae Myth by Hyginus, Fabulae 63, scroll down to § 63. Content Warning: rape, gods taking other forms to seduce women, gods being jerks to mortals
In the first of two episodes on
Morgan's dissertation
we introduce the topic of women and textile production in the Roman
Empire. Scholars have often viewed the domestic and commercial divide
in textile production along gendered lines, associating domestic
production with women in the context of the ideal of feminine virtue
and commercial production with men working in centralized production
centers. Here we use the cottage industry model to contextualize the
role of women’s labor in the Roman textile industry, exploring the
links between domestic production and commercial distribution.
Another instance of a woman's labor from Ovid, this time a more
modest country woman who must weave cloaks etc before winter to
protect her family from the cold:
Ovid, Fasti 4.687-714.
Hitchner, Robert Bruce. 2012. "Olive Production and the Roman
Economy: The Case for Intensive Growth in the Roman Empire." In
The Ancient Economy, Taylor and Francis. Partial text available
on Google Scholar.
Barber, Elizabeth. 1994. Women’s Work: the First 20,000 Years:
Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. New York : Norton.
Lena Larsson Lovén
has written extensively on both the iconography of textile
production and the performative relationships between women and
wool work in the Roman Empire.
In this episode, we discuss "bikeshedding" (also known as the
Law of Triviality),
the famous proposition that complex contributions and ideas (such as
plans to build a nuclear power plant), often of high impact and
importance, move forward with relatively little interference, whereas
simple contributions and conversations (such as which color to paint a
bikeshed) get caught up in committee and high-volume debate, and how
this tends to impact FOSS communities.
We do a (slightly dramatic) reading of the original email, hold a
conversation about it, and then come back to the topic with a twist
right after everyone (including ourselves) thought the episode was
over.
Steel Wagstaff joins us to talk about
their work at Pressbooks, a FOSS based book
publishing suite particularly focused on
Open Educational Resources
(OER), as well as talking about OER generally, open access, and
education as a fundamental human right!
Inclusive Spectrums ("This exhibition presents the preliminary major research project ideas of OCAD University’s Inclusive Design 2019/2021 cohort.") (CC BY!)
On this episode, Chris talks about being nonbinary trans-femme and
Morgan talks about being demisexual (and briefly about both being
pansexual) and how they have both navigated these experiences in their
lives and relationship.
Links:
There are a lot of resources on the internet about being
transgender and nonbinary, and opinions about most of them tend to
run strong. That said,
Transgender Map has good
resources explaining many concerns for those who are transgender
or nonbinary, are trying to figure out if they are transgender or
nonbinary, and support materials for family and friends.
WebMD article on demisexuality.
Note that despite what Chris says on the episode, the page itself
does not mention narrative components of demisexual attraction, but
rather emotional ones. The extrapolation of application to narrative
aspects came more from Morgan and Chris talking through Morgan's
manifestation of those aspects.
Chris's "Alpha Release" post about being nonbinary trans-femme with
pictures,
on the fediverse
and
on Twitter
(and laterupdate).
(These were the first pictures Chris took in a more directly "femme"
gender expression and do not reflect the current state of the
development branch.)
Any skillset has basic foundational elements or building blocks. In
this recording of Chris and Morgan's
talk at ÖzgürKon,
we discuss the way that access to those basic elements is limited in
modern society.
This can be seen in any number of fields from actual building blocks
increasingly being sold in sets to make specific toys as opposed to
generic buckets of blocks that allow kids to develop their creativity
to the way that access to the source code and hardware in our
technology is increasingly restricted.
Also! In this episode we announce
Hack and Craft,
a new companion "stitch and bitch" style usergroup to FOSS & Crafts.
(Any crafting is welcome... including computer programming, as long
as it's a fun project!)
Feel free to bring your own project and hang out at inagural meeting
on June 19th!
Elana Hashman (Python Software Foundation
Fellow and open source hacker) and Katie McLaughlin
(Python Software Foundation Fellow and crafter) join us to talk about
F(L)OSS meets embroidery and cross stitching (FOSS stitching?)
including a significant conversation about FLOSS vs embroidery
floss.
Much is also conversed about ih, a
project started by Katie with contributions from Elana, a python
project which helps generate embroidery patterns from images.
Steve is back, talking with Chris about viewing social systems through
the lens of game design.
How do game mechanics, uncertainty, and narrative map onto governance,
society, and citizen participation?
Thanks to Kate and Ricky for participating in a pre-show discussion
which generated many of the ideas explored in this episode.
Apparently the game about the soldiers gaining PTSD and getting drunk was called "Clockwork Empires" (note, another proprietary game and we haven't played it; it's an empire-colonialist-expansion game, but maybe a bit more consciously so... we don't know really though). This is the closest article we could find about the behavior but it doesn't seem to be the full interview Steve remembered. Note that Steve had a followup email saying: "Also, a detail I apparently forgot is that the alcohol helped them forget (temporarily?) their lost friends, which feels important..."
Remember how we've been saying the entire run of this show "Morgan's
hard at work at finishing her PhD dissertation?"
Well guess what!
She finally got it handed in and defended it...
Morgan is now officially Dr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber!
(She still has to wrap up a few edits but hey it's official now!)
Morgan walks us through her experiences of the graduate school
process, from applying (and re-applying) to schools, to a masters
program, to a PhD program, and the many fun steps, bumps, and
adventures in-between.
Not much in terms of show notes this episode, but here are some
pictures!
What story does an institution tell about itself?
To whom does a governance structure and its leadership serve?
To what degree are leaders within a governing institution subject
or exempt to the rules of the governed?
We use this framework to discuss the unexpected announcement of Richard
Stallman's re-appointment to the FSF board, by the FSF board.
Content warning: depression and sexual harassment are both mentioned
in this episode.
Morgan returns from handing in her dissertation! Very topically,
Morgan and Chris talk about organizational systems which can help you
stay on track... even when you're working from home or trying to
finish your PhD during a global pandemic.
Org Mode, the world's greatest
organizational and outliner system (or so claims Chris), if you're
an Emacs user anyway
(honestly, Org Mode is a great reason to pick up Emacs)
Locating purveyors of excessively priced office supplies left as
an exercise for only a very particular kind of reader.
Morgan is in the final crunch of finishing her dissertation draft, so
Chris's brother Steve Webber joins us for a special "nerdout":
analyzing the dual nature of fuzzy vs crisp systems! From physics to
biology, from programming languages to human languages, the duality of
fuzzy and crisp is everpresent.
Yes, this really is what Chris and Steve sound like whenever they get
together...
Lisp 1.5 programmer's manual, which also now has a lovely reprint for sale (see Appendix B for Lisp in Lisp, albeit in m-expression rather than s-expression format... m-expressions never took on)
There's all sorts of reasons to pursue historical crafting
techniques: for the experience of recreating them or learning new
techniques, for education, or for entertainment and immersion.
Morgan and Chris explore these paths under the terms "experiential
historical crafts", "experimental archaeology", and "historical
reenactment".
What is important, useful, and fun about each of these?
What pitfalls might we want to avoid?
What can be gained by what we might find, how might we bring more
people in... and what do we risk by what (or who) we might miss or
leave out?
Twitty, Michael. The Cooking Gene : a Journey through African
American Culinary History in the Old South. New York, NY :Amistad,
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2017.
Outram, Alan K. “Introduction to Experimental Archaeology.” World Archaeology, vol. 40, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–6.
Stephens, Janet. “Recreating the Fonseca Hairstyle.” EXARC, 2013/1, https://exarc.net/issue-2013-1/at/recreating-fonseca-hairstyle
The journal EXARC is a peer-reviewed online journal for experimental archaeology with articles released under CC BY-NC-SA
Strand, Eva B. A, Marie-Louise Nosch, and Joanne Cutler. Tools, Textiles and Contexts: Investigating Textile Production in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2015.
Special note here: we aren't saying Townsends is bad; we enjoy the
show and from a standpoint of production, what it does present is
very good. But it does seem like the show makes an intentional dodge
on important issues or chooses to only present a limited and fun
subset of history... which can be disappointing at the least and at
the worst can result in a kind of nostalgia that erases real problems.
All history is suffused with things to celebrate and things which are
disturbing and disappointing, but recognizing only the former sets us
up to repeat the latter.
We're joined by Vicky Steeves, a
hyper-talented librarian specializing in data management, open and
reproducible research, and the overlap between FOSS, free culture, and
library sciences!
We dive into all of that... plus a bit of crafting... and
even... what's this?
A discussion of what the FOSS world can learn from the world of game
modding (and vice versa)!
Chris and Morgan, driving in the Covid-19 pandemic, reflect on lessons
of hygiene and a separation of concerns from the past (seen through
the retroactively surprising struggle for handwashing acceptance)
while analyzing how to bring safety to today's computing security
pandemic via object capability discipline.
As said in the episode, there's a lot of research and evidence for
the object capability security approach!
Please do scour the links below (with significant commentary attached).
POLA Would Have Prevented the Event-Stream Incident, by Kate Sills. Examines how malicious code inserted into a library designed to steal programmers' private information/keys/money could have been prevented with capability-based security.
Ka-Ping Yee's PhD dissertation, Building Reliable Voting Machine Software, demonstrates the difficulty of finding intentionally obscured security vulnerabilities through code review (see "How was PVote's security evaluated?"). This demonstrates that FOSS is necessary but insufficient on its own for security.
A backdoor which was inserted into the official Linux kernel source code (and actually distributed on the official CVS server, briefly!) all the way back in 2003. Note that the vulnerability was initially discovered not through code review, but through discovering a server intrusion. The code is well obfuscated in a way that might be difficult to observe through visual inspection of a significant body of code.
So why are ACLs / an identity-oriented approach so bad anyway? ACLs Don't explains the problems caused by an identity-oriented authority model:
Ambient authority, ie "programs running with too much authority"... think about the "solitaire running 'as you'" part of the podcast (and contrast with the POLA/ocap solution also explained in-episode)
Confused deputies, which are notoriously kind of hard to describe... Norm Hardy provides a capsule summary which is fairly good. But also:
An example of a confused deputy attack against the Guile programming environment (which Chris helped uncover): Guile security vulnerability w/ listening on localhost + port (with fix). Note the way that both the browser and the guile programming environment appear to be "correctly behaving according to specification" when looked at individually!
Another way to put it is that identity-oriented security approaches are also generally perimeter-based security approaches and (I'm paraphrasing Marc Stiegler here): "Perimeter security is eggshell security... it seems pretty tough when you tap on it, but poke one hole through and you can suck out the whole yolk."
Capabilities: Effects for Free shows nicely how capabilities can also be combined with a type system to prove constraints on what a particular subset of code can do.
What we haven't talked about as much yet is all the cool things that ocaps enable. A great paper on this is Capability-based Financial Instruments (aka "Ode to the Granovetter Diagram", or "The Ode"), which shows how, using the E distributed programming language, distributed financial tooling can be built out of a shockingly small amount of code. (All of this stuff written about a decade before blockchains hit the mainstream!)
You might need to know a bit more E syntax to read The Ode; Marc Stiegler's E in a Walnut is an incredible resource, and has many insights of its own... but it's a bit more coconut-sized than walnut-sized, in my view.
An enormous amount of interesting information and papers about object capability security on the E Wiki's Documentation page page (snapshot). Honestly you could just spend a few months reading all that.
In particular, if you're mathematically minded and say "yeah but I want the proofs, gimme the proofs; I mean like real math'y proofs!" there's a whole subsection on Formal Methods (snapshot)
But maybe you're worrying, is it possible to build secure UIs on top of this? Not One Click for Security does a lovely job showing how ocap principles can actually result in a more intuitive flow if done correctly... one smooth enough that users might wonder, "where's the security?" Surprise! It was just smoothly baked into the natural flow of the application, which is why you didn't notice it!
Finally, have we mentioned that Chris's work on Spritely is pretty much entirely based on extending the federated social web based on ocap security principles?
With computing technology becoming integrated with every aspect of our
lives, many issues are simultaneously human rights issues and
technical issues.
Thus, how are organizations concerned with human rights and social
justice engaging with technological authorship and policy-making?
Mallory Knodel, presently
Chief Technology Officer
for the Center for Democracy and Technology,
explains her work as a Public Interest Technologist.
Mallory is also heavily engaged in a wide number of technical
standards-making organizations, and explains not only how technical
standards are of interest to human rights organizations, but how
the origin in work to define human rights overlaps with the emergence
of standards-making efforts.
We're joined by Sumana Harihareswara,
a FOSS advocate yes, but also a person of so many other talents!
We talk about sketching, standup comedy, and maintainership for the
long life of free software projects.
(Did you know you can hire Sumana to help on your FOSS project
maintainership btw?
Sumana runs Changeset Consulting!)
We also talk about representation in the FOSS community within the arts
(especially narrative arts), and about learning new skills within
"no big deal" contexts.
We're joined by our friend Tristan to talk about gardening
experiences, from newbies (us) to the wise (Tristan and others who are
not us).
We (Morgan and Chris) have just started seriously gardening this year,
and have learned a lot about what works and what doesn't.
And it turns out that people who have been doing it for years (such as
Tristan) still have a lot of successes but also a lot of failures.
But those can be fun too!
Bassam Kurdali
(Fediverse, Twitter)
talks about using Blender
(a free and open source software suite for making 3d artwork)
for open movie projects such as Elephants Dream
(the world's first open movie project, which Bassam directed!)
and Wires for Empathy,
as well as use in teaching it to college students studying animation.
Morgan and Chris talk about the
Scribble
document authoring format, with Morgan talking about authoring her
dissertation in it and Chris talking about writing an
OpenDocument Format (sometimes
shortened to "ODF" or "ODT") exporter.
(That code is now a merge request
which will hopefully become part of Scribble itself!)
Clarification: At one point we talk about whether or not Scribble
includes support for "image lists". It has the relevant building
blocks with support for images and figures, we were talking a bit more
specifically about fitting a particular document formatting and
organizational pattern used in art history papers.
We have a few more recordings related the petnames discussion and the hackathon demos to link here, but we'll have to wait until they're ready to go up to link them here!
On this episode of FOSS and Crafts Theatre, we continue the
What Goblins Saga.
The What Goblins saga continues as the characters continue to learn
about themselves and their ever-changing environment.
If you haven't listened to
Chapter 1,
maybe stop reading now to avoid spoilers from that episode!
Having discovered that they are are sapient beings emergent from a
networked video game, and having accidentally stumbled into
administrative powers, the What Goblins discover the consequences of
using those powers without knowing how the world around them might
react to that.
Chris and Morgan discuss an ethical framework Chris has been
workshopping for the last few years, "An Ethics of Agency", with the
foundation of maximizing agency "for you, for me, for everyone" and
minimizing subjection.
CW:Note that Chris talks about an incident involving them experiencing suicidal depression at one point.
Peter Singer's book
Animal Liberation,
and the argument for
Equal consideration of interests.
(Note that Peter Singer gets criticism from some disability circles;
this is a good summary.
In general it's our position to focus on "raising up" rights,
including those of animals; pitting animal rights vs disabled rights need
not be done in a society with as many resources as ours presently is.)
Amartya Sen, whose book
Development as Freedom
had a bigger background influence than Chris probably realized in
its treatment of the agency of people as the primary index by which
we measure a country's development
The GNU Manifesto.
Search for "Kantian ethics" on the page.
(Curiously its preceding sentence is described in
an example that appears consequentialist! By the way, pretty much
every decent ethical system claims that its foundation is the
"golden rule", this isn't unique to Kantianism.)
On this episode of FOSS and Crafts Theatre, we begin exploring
"The What Goblins Saga".
While the claim of
"our goblins are different"
is hardly new, these goblins seem to stand apart more than most...
even their fellow goblins seem to think so.
What is the nature of goblins, and what about The What Goblins in
particular?
Through little planning or foresight, our motley crew is about to find
more answers than they expected... which only opens up more questions,
of course...
What is this Spritely project that's
taken up most of Chris's time for the last several years?
Something about advancing distributed/decentralized social networks,
but what does that mean?
Chris and Morgan talk about it while they drive to the bank!
We are extremely excited to have on our first FOSS & Crafts guest:
Stefano Zacchiroli!
(Also known on some corners of the FOSS world as just "zack".)
Stefano has a long history of FOSS advocacy, most famously for
his role in Debian
where he served three well-regarded terms as Debian Project Leader.
These days zack works on
Software Heritage,
an archival institution for software source code.
We talk about how Software Heritage plays a role in common with other
GLAM institutions
(which stands for "Galleries, Libraries Archives and Museums").
. o O (Could we possibly have a more appropriate FOSS & Crafts first
guest episode?)
Leaving off from
part 1,
the office demons of Styx, Hexia, and Gummy Bear (or is it
Gerumphy or perhaps Gzeumphi Behr?) track down and confront the
mysterious lampmorel creature directly. What dangers await them?
And just what secrets are the corporate overlords of Demonstrative
Industries and Plentimint Industries both keeping (perhaps even
from each other)? Find out in this thrilling conclusion!
On the first ever episode of FOSS and Crafts Theatre (a new subshow of
FOSS and Crafts), Chris and Morgan are joined by veteran role playing
game players Nick and LP to bring everyone a story of three demonic
employees of the international conglomerate, Demonstrative Industries.
Something has escaped from the Demonic Z.O.O.O.O. to the human realm,
and its up to our demon heroes to clean up the mess before anyone
finds out. Can they succeed in their mission and keep their corporate
overlords pleased with them, or will things get dramatically out of
hand... or perhaps something in-between? Find out on today's episode
(part one of two)!
Links:
If you haven't already, perhaps listen to
FOSS & Crafts Episode 1: Collabortive Storytelling with Dice
which introduces the idea of narrative RPGs.
(That's also where we floated the idea to listeners of doing live RPG
episodes as a way of generating new free culture content, to which we
got an enthusiastic response, leading to this new sub-show!)
See also Freeform Universal (the
RPG system used for this episode, explained in depth in Episode 1)!
Chris's journey of making the intro music is used as a backdrop to
explore how to make music in Milkytracker,
a FOSS program for making tracker music, as well as to explore a bit
of sound theory, what chiptunes and tracker music are, and even a bit
of exploring what it's like to learn something new even when you
aren't necessarily very good yet.
c64.com, an archive of Commodore 64 games/programs
(pretty much all proprietary though).
Many of these have interesting cracked demos that are as interesting as
the programs themselves.
Morgan and Chris look at the domains of FOSS and crafts
from the lens of the
Eight Kinds of Fun,
traditionally used to analyze game design.
What kinds of ways do different people enjoy participating in creative
activities?
How can examining those help us understand how to grow our communities
to accomodate different participants with different styles of interests?
These days textile production is mostly automated aside from some
niche markets and craft production. Craft production of textiles
today taps into a vision of a nostalgic past, often evoking memories
of a time the audience member wasn't there for. It turns out this
potent imagery has been used not just for inspiring hobbyist crafters
everywhere to pull out the drop spindle and knitting needles, but also
by political participants going back all the way to (at least) Ancient
Rome to try to steer a particular narrative. Follow some of that
history from past to present, and hear from Morgan about how the whole
process of textile production works starting from raw
materials... from sheep to sweater!
Links and references:
Suetonius, Life of Augustus;
scroll down to section 73 for the secton on his humble furnishings and
home-made clothing.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. New York: Vintage Books, 2001.
Or a shorter
article
sourced from this book.
Trivedi, Lisa. Clothing Gandhi's Nation : Homespun and Modern India.
Bloomington :Indiana University Press, 2007. Or a shorter
article
sourced from this book.
The results from machine learning have been getting better and better
and the results seen so far from OpenAI's
GPT-3 model look stunningly
good. But unlike GPT-2 (which was
publicly released under a free license), so far
GPT-3 is accessible via API-only.
What's the reasoning and possible impact of that decision?
For that matter, what kind of impacts could machine learning advancements
make on FOSS, programming in general, art production, and civic society?
Three Panel Soul's
Recursion comic
(cut from this episode, but we also
originally mentioned their
Techics comic which
is definitely relevant though)
Surrealism,
Abstract Expressionism,
Impressionism,
and the Realism movement
(Obviously there's also a lot more to say about these art movements than just
lumping them as a reaction to photography but... only so much time on an
episode.)
AI Dungeon 2 (nonfree, though you can play it in your browser)
You've probably heard of "tabletop Role Playing Games" (or, tabletop
RPGs) before, but what are they?
In this episode, Chris and Morgan introduce a subset of RPGs called
"Narrative RPGs" whose mechanics are focused primarily around
storytelling (as opposed to tactical combat).2
Hear about how narrative RPGs can be used as "collaborative
storytelling with dice", some of the narrative RPG systems that exist,
as well as an in-depth look at one particular RPG system,
Freeform Universal.
Freeform Universal is so simple and easy to pick up that by the end of
this episode, you should have enough information to use it for weaving
stories with your friends!
Dark Dungeons (CW: 1980s religious satanic-panic propaganda... but for a fun time, find the 2014 live-action film somewhere)
Rory's Story Cubes (we called them "Rory's Story Dice" on the episode, oops)
Donjon RPG tools (Don't have enough time to come up with your own materials? You can use these as long as you don't mind leaning into a lot of auto-generated tropes.)
Still reading this? Wow, okay, some bonus content...
We mentioned that Morgan did a class assignment for her intro-to-German
class about needing to make a German fairytale... here's the assignment,
as turned into the class:
Hilda die Hexe
(be nice enough to remember this is an intro-to-German class).
Additionally, Chris simultaneously wrote a slightly-more-elaborated-upon
version called
The Witch and the Carriage.
The process of playing the game and then writing up both of these took
about an hour and a half so set your expectations accordingly.
Still want more?
Okay, not claiming this is a "great" story, but here's a kind of fun
writeup of a session called
Santa's Little Uprising.
(Not very serious, could use more polish.)
Maybe we'll take up our own advice and more seriously publish some of
the stories we've constructed together sometime!
Here it is, the very first episode of FOSS and Crafts!
Co-hosts Chris and Morgan introduce themselves, their backgrounds,
and give some sense of what to expect from the show.
