Four short links: 6 January 2020

1. An Excess of Operating Systems (Jean-Louis Gassée) — Fuschia exists for technical reasons, but Samsung’s, Amazon’s, Huawei’s, etc., are all for business reasons (not wanting to tithe or be tied strategically to Google).
2. Redshirt — The redshirt operating system is an experiment to build some kind of operating-system-like environment where executables are all in WASM and are loaded from an IPFS-like decentralized network. […] There exists three core syscalls (send a message, send an answer, wait for a message), and everything else is done by passing messages between processes or between a process and the “kernel.” Programs don’t know who they are sending the message to. One person’s dream is another’s nightmare.
3. Mediating Consent (Renee DiResta) — essay on manufacturing consent in the social media age. The path forward requires systems to facilitate mediating, not manufacturing, consent. We need a hybrid form of consensus that is resistant to the institutional corruption of top-down control, and welcomes pluralism, but is also hardened against bottom-up gaming of social infrastructure by malign actors.
4. Synopsis — a suite of open source software for computational cinematography—tools that help the creation of visual media. Synopsis is built to help editors, artists, indie film makers, A/V developers, and creators do what they do best—tell stories, make experiences, and build amazing tools.

from Radar https://ift.tt/2SWmh4U