Link: SourceHut's 2022 Financial report

In summary, SourceHut continues to be sustainable, profitable, and growing. We continued to grow YoY between 2021 and 2022. We were able to make some significant investments, particularly in establishing a new datacenter presence in Europe, and we intend to expand this investment over the course of 2023 and 2024, and we have plenty of capital to invest in this and other business initiatives.

I’m happy to read this, sourcehut is a pleasure to use and I love its simplicity and how it goes against modern maximalist software trends. (not to mention the gemini support :P)

Users who contribute to projects owned by others are not expected to pay, and users who wish to own resources but cannot afford the subscription fee will be offered financial aid.

This, and the current honor system billings where you’re expected to pay according to your means while still getting the same experience is one of those things that make sourcehut a nicer project.

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I really hope sourcehut has another successful year, and you should consider it if you’re looking to move out of github (either because of their problematic relationship to policing and immigration[1], or their turn to proprietary software[2])

Incomplete thoughts on cognitive diversity

I'm currently reading about the ways in which cognitive diversity leads to better problem solving, and methods through which we can make this effect larger.

One of the results that I've found more interesting is by Kevin J. S. Zollman [1]: limiting information can lead to more accurate results. "Bad Information" tends to spread less in networks with more restricted connections, while networks that are highly connected tend to be much faster.

I can the slow-but-accurate model is preferable in long-term foundational projects or strategic decisionmaking, while the highly connected one works when we want to address experiments quickly (even converging multiple times and testing different hypotheses).

I'd like to try some of these networks and see how well it works in practice.

Introducing Page, a website generator

Do you have a static gemini website that you just wish was a static http website? run `page` on your gemini directory and see `page_html` emerge, rsync both to your static host and you're done!

If you're on mac you can install easily with:

$ brew tap rbdr/apps git@git.sr.ht:~rbdr/homebrew-apps
$ brew install rbdr/apps/page

How we got here.

I've gone through many variations of how I host my personal website, and since the apocalyptic year of 2012[1] I've been using jekyll to build it and nginx to serve it.

A couple of years ago, while learning how to use pulumi[2] and aws, I decided to migrate all of my personal infrastructure to s3 + cloudfront. While this was satisfying and edifying, it ended up being too much complexity for what now amounted to a bunch of html files with a shared layout.

More recently than that, I discovered the joy of gemini[3] and started maintaining my website as a capsule instead. In fact, I spent more time tending to the gemtext than the htmls, so it seemed even worse to have to go back, update some HTMLs, sync the bucket, invalidate the cloudfront cache, ew.

With all that going on, I decided it was time to let jekyll rest, learn some rust, and build a static site generator that takes a bunch of gmi files and a layout to create my website. After a few days of trial and error, here we are.

What happens next?

Well, the odd one out is now my blog generator. So i'm pretty sure the next step will be to also replace blog with a rustier version that does much less. If it does come to that, you can read all about it in your favorite online publication: this here gemlog.