NotAwfulTech

I know copyright isn’t the way to address what’s wrong with tech, but this here is a great way to poison the well for medium-to-large enterprise companies leeching off open source: if your software requires the work to function, it’s entire source code needs to be published.

Considering using this for my more polished stuff just to irk the companies that would otherwise be happy to use it.

Building on the completed decompilation of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and the Gamecube/Wii compatibility later Aurora, another unofficial port's come to the PC.

(announcement post - release trailer)

Hi folks, I'm making another tech-stack recommendation. Previously, on Awful, I noted that below 87.5% availability, whether a service is up is effectively random chance. We've reached that point for GitHub's Platform, which includes components like Actions, Copilot, Pages, and the core API of issues and PRs. I do not have confidence in GitHub's owners or operators to remedy this situation, so I cannot recommend it professionally nor to neighbors. As a bit of nuance, note that Pages seems to have relatively decent availability and is often up even when the rest of GitHub is down, so static content hosted on Pages can be deprioritized for migration.

The thread is open on Lemmy. I'm interested in your thoughts, particularly around alternative forges, alternative paradigms for forges, community-driven plans for migration, strategies for migrating, and tools that ease the burden of maintaining many git repositories.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/49511045

Generative AI, namely LLMs, image and video diffusion models and especially the companies that make them plague the tech industry.

We got tired, so we decided to take things into our own hands and curate a list of projects that aren't complicit in the devaluing of labor by these companies.

Unlike projects that came before us, we want to highlight software that values the labor that goes into creating and not call out projects that use LLMs or Image/Video Diffusion models.

I'm not gonna dig up the links since I'm sure y'all're already tired of talking about quantum computing. I am going to insist that, while I professionally disagree with Filippo about plenty of things, I do not see any mistakes in their analysis here. Please start thinking about post-quantum cryptographic tooling today.

stumbled over this in my feed earlier, looks interesting

A crossover between Godot and Blender was not on my bingo card for 2025, but I'm still pretty happy to see - not just because we got a cool little game out of it, but because interop between the two got a major boost.

seen via this

might be a cool thing some here may enjoy contributing to

Good news: a portable version of the LEGO Island decomp just came out, meaning ports to other OSes or devices are now possible.

Hell, there's even a browser port now, available at https://isle.pizza/. If you wanna learn more about the decomp, check out the video I linked.

Just ran across this and figured I’d link to people, looks interesting

“Not awful” is maybe a bit suspect, but at least they’re entertaining :)

I forgot to post it here earlier but it's revision weekend!

That ain't clickbait, Xe Iaso's personally-made anti-scraping measure (originally made to deal with Amazon overloading their git server) has ended up being used by the literal United Nations.

I recommend reading the full blogpost, its a wild ride.

This video was recommended to me and I found it quite sweet. Ben is a non-verbal quadriplegic who requires 24 hours care. His brother and caretaker created a custom software for him that can be controlled with two buttons. It has quite a lot of features by now, there is a keyboard with text-to-speech, movies and even some simple video games.

in the spirit of this post, but from the other side

I have a shitdroid that I can't root because the vendor sucks, but google can go fuck themselves too. combined with that I haven't androided much for about a decade and know nothing about the current ecosystem.. I'm looking for good alternatives to a few things. free/foss preferred but I'm pragmatic over picky - if there's a good paid option I'm willing to consider it

immediate known requirements include contact sync, calendar (more business than personal but either works if it's good). maybe also other things I should know about?

judicuous preference to things that support open protocols and self-hosting (i.e. anything that has to use their service to operate - no go)

tell me about good apps! I know about syncthing and photosync

For anyone not in the know, EasyRPG is a free and open-source reimplementation of the RPG Maker 2000/2003 engine. Its a pretty cool little community project, I recommend checking it out.

Fun fact: somebody managed to pull off deferred rendering on the Nintendo 64. And its let them show off impressively high-res textures at pretty solid framerates.

I didn't think this is techtakesworthy, nor is it a sneer, more a airing of perspective, as wanky as that sounds

The gist: Software, or generally computation, can be categorised as a type of building material rather than a type of product in itself.

This framing opens up the view that design within the software industry begins with an assumption that software was the best means for the supposed purpose.

Foundationally, design is the deliberation over the best means to satisfy a given purpose. In reality most design projects begin with limitations to the means available.

Regardless, the knowledge that software is one of many possible means should not be ignored.

To accept "software is eating the world" as a positive movement is to skip the most important choice of any design process. The means that best satisfies the given purpose at that point in time.

The same ignorance of that choice led to plastic eating the world as well.

The means for satisfying a purpose are not limited to building materials. It can be any effort that influences a situation rather than building a thing, physical or virtual.

The goal is to have as open a design process as possible to allow for the most appropriate means to be discovered.

Also audio available here: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/63b3904b/software-as-material

Just a guy making desktop software that solves a problem. Its 2025 and what used to be normal, selling software without subscription that you run locally on your computer, is now a unique feature.

Another banger video from f4mi, showcasing some pretty creative ways to sabotage slop summarisers/scrapers.

Sidenote: I was right - anti-scraping measures would make use of feeding false info to scrapers.