What are the practical differences between piefed.zip and piefed.social? I registered on .social because I just like the vibe, but other instances also look nice.

First thought given the title - why not cancel Palantir contract just because Palantir is what it is, namely because centralizing data about people with difficult health conditions is a very bad idea. However, from the longer text it looks like Labour is giving all that a thought in complex.

It said Palantir was “facing numerous allegations of involvement in serious breaches of human rights[…]

I vaguely understand, like plotters are for vectors (design, architecture) and inkjet printers are for raster images (photos, receipts). What other key differences are there?

That’s messed up. I find people staring at my version history a major blocker from writing anything. Unless it’s the git history that I explicitly publish, or the classes that I teach where every step is designed to be followed through, my writing or coding process has always been a highly private, personal thing.

Gentoo, postmarketOS, GNU Guix, Chimera Linux? Not seeing myself abandoning Debian because of that decision though.

default to dark mode on Linux

Can you revert this please? The change negatively affects private-mode browsing. When on GNOME, I do toggle system-wide between light and dark modes for accessiblity reasons - during blackouts after bombing, I need dark theme, otherwise light becuse reading on dark is more difficult. The environment communicates this preference well, similar to Android. If another environment doesn’t, that’s their bug.

largest providers of confidential electronic patient records

Argh! Example of a mandated intensely centralized system that shouldn’t exist. There should be standards for data exchange between clinics on patient or doctor request, but never a central registry of appointments and diagnoses.

Not that difficult to configure this by hand, but I like Debian’s dropbear-initramfs package for remote unlock.

Read how she met with Andrii Biletskyi and chatted with him for hours. She must have come to the conclusion that if White Chief became such a respectable figure here now, most Ukrainians must have views similar to her own.

Fedorov is a tech bro who oversaw implementation of hypercentralized, Russia/China-like e-ID systems, promises to put AI into everything (or rather, first blockchain, and now AI), is notorious for looking down on cybersecurity, and is sleazy enough to be on good terms with Elon Musk. For some reason this makes him quite popular with young people. And his opponent is very unpopular despite there not being much difference in their (lack of) explicit views, similar to how Poroshenko and Zelenskyi were pretty much the same right-wing liberals ideologically but had different vibes. Fedorov is very good at marketing, he was the person trusted with running SMM bots in Zelenskyi’s presidential campaign.

I think these protests are a way to have young people let off steam in a socially acceptable method. Lots of Ukrainians are upset with extremely low wages, decline of medicine, education, transport, increasing taxes on working people, mass layoffs in the public sector, increasing workloads, growing police and surveillance apparatus, and torture in the parts of the military where undesirables/“ukhyliants” end up. But grassroots protests, and in some places spontaneous riots, for these reasons are either ignored or ridiculed by centre-right media influencers; Facebook/Instagram shadowban or literally ban organizers inviting people to go there, and messages about them don’t reach Western media. Only centrist (pro-privatization, pro-“meritocracy” etc) and right-wing (anti-immigration) messages are allowed to reach wide audiences.

Yes. I actually delayed joining the Threadiverse until a viable alternative to the Lemmy ecosystem emerged. The communities moderated by Lemmy developers seem to rejoice every time anything bad happens to Ukrainians.

A couple years ago I would’ve posted about a Lviv vegan activist assaulted by boneheads, standing to fight alone against multiple attackers. The police tried to accuse him of terrorism. The Black Flag collective (Чорний Стяг) stood in solidarity with him and they backed off. The police did nothing against the boneheads though, because they never do. In fact, this is how the state “solves the problem” of leftists and “annoying” environmental and LGBTQIA+ activists here - quietly - boneheads have free pass to do anything they want, no investigation no charges. Most people who posed real street opposition to boneheads are in the military now, including the vegan activist; that’s great from the ideological standpoint but a serious tactical mistake IMO.

The same author has a nice (though unfinished) “retroism” theme, which is a synthesis of w9x and classic mac os aesthetics, at the same time not trying to closely mimic either of them. https://github.com/diinki/linux-retroism

Why is the Lore codebase itself five git repositories, not five Lore repositories?

Using feditaler, who will be able to pay whom, for what, and how? Use cases would help readers understand the concept of the project.

Not the first time I’m reading this text, and I still don’t get a lot of it. Their previous form was ASP-based, which is also server-rendered, so which developer practice exactly doubled the number of users? Doubled compared to what? Did the marketing department also get a boost at the same time, and the updated website got better advertising somewhere? How did 96% satisfaction get calculated earlier, if there were so many users whose needs were not met? Where does the “20MB of javascript before we even render a form” number come from? What does “global javascript states” mean, regarding their previous React replacement attempt, and why is it bad, because MobX singletons used to be an actually pleasant, maintainable pattern in my practice? Was the previous replacement attempt vibe-coded, and who made the decision to have developers do it like that? Given the choice of Astro as the platform, and the suggestion of Remix, what makes the developer so sure “it will still work 30 years from now”, because these are much more complex targets than just React?

Sorry for the usual annoying question but have you received my e-mail from June 12th? I sent portfolio links and some more clarification questions. I’ve just found out that Gmail has placed my letters in spam folders this month; maybe Yahoo does, too.

Regarding hardware, I didn’t ask because I assumed that if hosting is handled by administrators, they will take care of assessing and renting a capable server. My apps usually start on a €10/m Hetzner VPS and as they grow, admins upgrade plans or move it where it’s convenient for them. For media content, one client added a CDN later to an existing project, while others found a dedicated server provides enough bandwidth for their needs. Best experience with Debian and Alpine servers. One client wanted Windows, their IT staff took care of managing it so I’m not familiar with deployment to that platform. With GNU/Linux, musl and FreeBSD servers I had different levels of involvement, from sending the manager a Docker image or a repo and having their staff install and run it on their own, to full root, hosting and DNS access and me being paid for installation, documentation and a few hours of support every month.

The primary interesting thing about your project is for me that nobody’s going to mess up my code with unreviewed LLM patches, and that it’s supposed to help indie artists who I assume are politically progressive and curious about free software.

Correct, I am registered as a sole proprietor and pay all the taxes. I have no health insurance and will receive almost no pension; this is how the economy is organized here. With the U.S. rate that I asked I can actually earn more than at two of my Ukrainian day jobs combined… So I honestly didn’t see a strong need to include that into the quote.

EDIT: Other quotes I’ve gotten are $5,000 / $14,000 / $15,000 / $38,000 so the $7,000 estimate actually seems really low by comparison. Clearly the amount of features I’ve requested are quite challenging.

Interesting, do estimates of hours also differ a lot? Do responders who have more senior qualifications estimate particular tasks as more difficult, according to their experience? I’m fairly confident that my estimate matches the tools I’m familiar with, but at the same time I’m neither still junior nor yet senior and might have underestimated some tasks, particularly those related to communication inside the team, because I’m used to working solo.

Thanks for the outline! Some follow-up details:

Versions and categories. Does a category mean a comic, and a version mean a language? Are files uploaded in bulk?

Blog and news. Is news meant for a specific creator, while the blog is for the website itself?

Achievements. What should be tracked for a user to gain an achievement?

Access control. To unlock a chapter, either: a user enters an access code; an administrator types their name into a form; or a Patreon monitoring script unlocks it automatically for a group of users according to some logic?

Email server. Can you tell more about this part? What do automated responses involve?

Appearance. Do you have mock-ups, particularly for the landing page and the about-us page? Maybe a design system? I can use generic daisyUI or Bootstrap components to make it look okay, but I’m not a designer myself, though I’ve taught an introductory design course for teenagers.

Notes about requirements:

Filesystem. I can store images outside the document root, and deny a file to a reader unless access control allows their signed-in account.

JavaScript. I’d like the front end to be a server-rendered SPA, using Preact and Vite. This means the reader pages will load and be usable without client-side JavaScript. But some JavaScript will be used for interactivity, especially in the admin section.

Mobile and Firefox. I daily-drive Fennec on Android, Firefox on Windows and Falcon on Debian, so these are the platforms I can ensure it works fine on.

No-AI. You can and should review that anything I code for your project does not include anything LLM-generated; btw, I’m interested in what tools you use for that. However, the bundle returned to the client will include code of dependencies, and I know that developers of many libraries and tools do allow AI contributions, for example it’s in Valibot and Vite, to which I don’t know good alternatives. I will ask you to plan the contract in a way that doesn’t hold me responsible for LLM usage by other people.

Maintenance. I do write documentation for every project that I author. It’s not very extensive, usually a README about installation, structure and some usage tips. Developers whom I onboarded to projects of my employers told me they appreciate it, but they rarely update my initial documentation on their own later. I’ll be interested in your experience with improving this.

My ballpark estimate is 120 hours for the initial release with the features you mentioned. Programming further updates to the website can be negotiated as needed. From what I found $58/hour is an average wage of full-stack developers using my preferred technology in the USA in 2026, so this is what I’ll ask.

Note that with my availability (day job, university, other clients) I can only allocate 10-20 hours per month. I use Kanboard, make periodic reports about what’s ready, and we can monthly discuss the priority of what features should be ready next.

In case the website ever shuts down, can you then release the code with a free software license? I haven’t yet worked on a project with a policy like that, but I saw this the idea on fedi more than once, and I liked it; this is how Firefox and LibreOffice came to life.

For further contact, do you have Delta Chat or XMPP, or how is it better to chat with you and other project members? What’s your timezone, and are you ok with not very fast responses, because I don’t spend much time on social media? I’m from Ukraine, EET/EEST (UTC+2/3).

What’s your project, and are you comfortable with implementations based on Node.js and/or WordPress? I’m quite busy until the end of summer, but open to taking a project later if it sounds interesting. Regarding the quote, what’s your country? I believe people from the U.S. should pay me the same they would their own countrymen, while for my Eastern European neighbors my rate is different. I still haven’t ever used AI for coding, but I use it as a summarizing assistant when writing university notes - it hallucinates a lot but helps me fight procrastination; a skeleton with mistakes that I can correct after carefully reading the sources is better than a blank page endlessly waiting for a good first sentence.