Samuel
@samuel@social.nihil.ws
NOTE: Some profile statistics (followers, etc.) are purposefully not shown.
If you are an office worker of any kind please understand Copilot Recall for what it is: Microsoft wants a training dataset of _what your job looks like_ in order to _replace you_. The nepo baby your oligarch puts in charge will happily pay half your salary to Microsoft to get even most of your job done without you.
Wealth wants access to skill without giving the skilled access to wealth.
Who wants to work on the #arctic in #Copenhagen? Super postdoc job going with our friends at Aarhus University together with DMI on climate modelling:
🇺🇦 🇹🇼If you are an #academic in the #US with a position comparable to tenured or associate professor and a solid research track record in a field related to computer science (treat this in a very broad manner) and are interested in relocating to beautiful, liberal, safe, #Austria, then please reach out to me. We'd love to welcome new colleagues in the Austrian academia!
A couple of us are collecting profiles to potentially match with organizations that are looking to fund such opportunities. Full caveat: I don't yet have concrete positions confirmed, but am trying to get the funding bodies into position to do so.
Please boost!
I have 5 grand-kids. Each time one was born, I set up an email address for them. I send them random emails of things they did or said, special occasions like birthdays, etc. Things that would be forgotten in time. When they're 18, I'll give them their email address and password.
Companies are refusing to hire or even laying off plumbers because hucksters backed by massive unicorn-chasing investment money told them they can build plumbing faster and cheaper out of cardboard.
A few years from now, there’s going to be a hell of a market for people who can replace cardboard toilets with real ones.
And also for people who can replace carpets. And walls and floors.
This is a post about LLM-generated code.
Great for the environment if you’re travelling within Europe by train and great for those who want to avoid US border controls.
Curious to see how this develops.
👴🏻 Everything is terrible!
👩🏿Yes. We're all being attacked by racists.
👴🏻I don't know how to stop this!
👩🏿Again, oppose the racists and the racism.
👴🏻I don't think that's right? Maybe we should march?
👩🏿 Against racism?
👴🏻What? No! I mean, we need strong borders, and DEI has gone too far...
👩🏿*Sigh*
👴🏻Let's march for my 401k first, and then march for my job next, and then let's reassess and see if we still need any more marches.
👩🏿I... kinda feel like you'll stop marching again once your 401k is back and your job is secure.
👴🏻Rude! You're not being very inspirational! You're making me feel sad!
Since I got commit access to #Guix in January, I've made it a habit to spend some time on Saturday morning reviewing and pushing patches others have contributed. Today, I pushed the 100th.
Thanks to all the folks contributing and reviewing!
Support your fully sentient artists.
https://massivefictions.com
#stanleylieber
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sl original ink of a Sukhoi jet in a flowerpot. Inverted.
depol, Aufruf zum Handeln, dringend/heute! [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
Es heißt jetzt, dass es sehr wichtig ist, JETZT eure SPD-Abgeordnete – insbesondere den Verhandler*innen – mit einem Brief gegen das Nordische Modell anzuschreiben.
Sind dir die Rechte von trans Menschen wichtig, sollten auch dir die Rechte von Sexarbeitenden wichtig sein. Die Gegner von beiden sind die gleichen Leute. Trans Menschen sind auch überproportional in der Sexarbeit vertreten. Schreibt bitte noch HEUTE!
Bitte boostet!
https://chaos.social/@dpk/114229753928926960
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depol, Aufruf zum Handeln, dringend/heute! [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
Relevant sind die Verhandlungsgruppe und die Mitglieder der AG 7: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Teilnehmer_an_den_Koalitionsverhandlungen_zwischen_CDU/CSU_und_SPD_2025
Bitte betont, das das Nordische Modell nicht das liefert, was es verspricht. Gewalt und Menschenhandel werden schlechter unter Freierkriminalisierung. Das ist in mehreren Ländern schon belegt.
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depol, Aufruf zum Handeln, dringend/heute! [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
Email-Adressen der Verhandlungsgruppe dank @sonjdol
Time to start working on packaging a newer version again. :)
Hopefully I’ll emerge unscathed from the fight against Bazel.
Rootless #Guix build daemon merged! 🎉
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Build-Environment-Setup.html
The two-month long review process was key in making this more solid, thanks to the rigorous analyses by fellow hacker Reepca Russelstein:
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/75810
Next step is to provide a way to turn it on on Guix System:
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/77288
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If you’re running ‘guix-daemon’ in Docker and had to resort to ‘--disable-chroot’, I’d be happy to get feedback from you using the daemon from the ‘master’ branch!
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If you’d like to test it on a distro other than Guix:
1. grab the binary installation tarball from https://guix.gnu.org/en/download/latest/
2. then point the binary install script to this tarball: GUIX_BINARY_FILE_NAME=the-tarball.tar.xz ./guix-install.sh
That should give you a non-root guix-daemon.
@civodul In the on-line environment of the Reproducible Research MOOC, we run Guix in a Docker container. Building packages doesn't work there at all, but we didn't investigate why. Maybe we should have used --disable-chroot, and maybe the new daemon will solve our problems!
But it's too late for the next session, we won't modify the environment now because so many exercises depend on details such as hashes remaining the same.
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@sharlatan May 5th. Thanks for reminding me that I forgot to announce it here. Enrollment has opened this week!
@khinsen Yes, I haven’t tested it, but the new daemon should Just Work in Docker now.
@jas wrote a nice post on how to use Guix in Docker for GitLab-CI:
https://blog.josefsson.org/2024/12/18/guix-container-images-for-gitlab-ci-cd/
I’m curious what this would look like with the unprivileged daemon!
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@csantosb ‘guix-install.sh’ installs the unprivileged daemon on foreign distros (more specifically, distros that use systemd) if you give it an up-to-date installation tarball.
And that’s it. There shouldn’t be observable differences as a user.
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@civodul
What about non systemd distributions ? Is it feasible ?
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@csantosb It should be possible yes; it’s just that we rely on systemd’s help to set up the environment here, in particular to grant guix-daemon write access to the store as well as CAP_SYS_CHOWN so it can create /var/guix/profiles/per-user/$USER.
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@civodul I see, thanks.
I’m just thinking about the simplest use case, where several non-root users share a common storage to hold the store. And that’s it.
While downloading a paper from @biorxivpreprint, my eyes got stuck on a boilerplate phrase:
"This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review."
Certified? Certification is an act of authority. Who is that authority who can certify scientific publications?
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Clicking on "[what does this mean?]" next to that phrase, I get to @biorxivpreprint's FAQ page. Where I see on overall very good summary of the peer review process, but again the word "certified".
Also: "... information that has not yet been accepted or endorsed in any way by the scientific or medical community."
A peer-reviewed paper has been "accepted" by a few reviewers and a journal editor. That's not the scientific community. And "endorsed" by, probably, nobody.
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In my opinion, this wording exaggerates the role of peer review. Peer review is just one step in a quality control process that extends over decades. For some finding to be "accepted by the scientific community", it takes many peer-reviewed papers that point towards the same conclusion. Plus the absence of strong opposing evidence.
@khinsen @biorxivpreprint One needs a stamp in order to certify https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=AX25rKNnPe4
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@indieterminacy Ouch, I am now considered to be an AI scraping bot! Possibly because of the privacy settings in @librewolf
The link you shared gets me to a page entitled "Making sure you are not a bot!". It refers to a tool called Anubis (https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis) that scans for AI bots but is in conflict with JavaScript-related settings and plugins. It cites https://jshelter.org/, which I don't use.
It looks like the Open Web is definitely a thing of the past!
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@khinsen Dont take it personally, Invidious experiences a lot of 'reverse-engineering'.
I certaintly couldnt afford to host such platforms.
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@indieterminacy I don't take it personally, it's clear that lots of people are concerned by this. It's just sad to witness the end of the Open Web.
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@khinsen Indeed. I shudder the economic an environmental effects. Its going to make high frequency trading asymmetries look like smallfry.
I really need to return to focusing on protocols such as Gemini and Gopher (the equivalent of financial trading 'dark pools' more - to swim around content creators with expectations.
This is getting really bad: just this afternoon, three sites blocked me.
One said "There is a robot on the same network as you." That "network" covers hundreds of users of France's largest Internet access provider, Orange.
Another site just said "Verifying you are human... failed". No explanation. The third site was the same, just different wording.
Unprivileged #Guix daemon close to landing 👇
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/75810
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@civodul that is amazing news. Anything that runs apptainers will work?
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@pjotrprins Any system where unprivileged user namespaces are enabled, which is almost always the case now, even on locked-down supercomputers.
It would need a bit more work to make it easy to run as a user in $HOME.
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@csantosb That should help with CI/Docker: no need to resort to ‘--disable-chroot’ and other ugly hacks.
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A man sits confidently at a table in an outdoor setting, smirking while holding a coffee mug. The table bears a sign that reads, “capitalism is just Saw traps with paperwork. CHANGE MY MIND,” parodying the well-known “Change My Mind” meme format
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@Daojoan capitalism has also lifted the quality of life pretty much in the last century.
What is the alternative?
concept: journal of loss. accepts submissions of length between one toot and 30 pages, describing experiments or designs that did not work. post ur l's
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I’ve seen some academics start a “CV of failures” and found it amusing and inspiring.
@wingo this is not at all what you want, but it reminded me of one of my favorite journals: https://www.universalrejection.org/
The AI bots that desperately need OSS for code training, are now slowly killing OSS by overloading every site.
The curl website is now at 77TB/month, or 8GB every five minutes.
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I think users (like GitHub/MS and friends) have a responsibility to push back on the AI companies they lean so heavily on and demand they behave. But I have no expectation they will.
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@bagder This is what happens when there is competition where there should be cooperation. AI research and development could be, _should_ be a collaborative project, not owned by anybody and open to everybody, but instead it's a bunch of corporations trying to outrun each other.
The Tragedy of the Commons only exists when there is competition instead of cooperation. Competition is how we ruin everything by trying to grab it all before anybody else does. Cooperation is how we can give everybody whatever they need for free and still have enough for all of us.
Why train so many machine learning models that aren't all that different, which are owned and run by private enterprises, when we could instead train much fewer models that aren't owned by anybody and can be used for free?
@bagder honestly I'm surprised no-one has suggested litigation. In the civil avenue the damage is clear. And you could make the case for penal, which would be enough to ID the people behind this. Standard IANAL disclaimer
@bagder corporately owned organizations have all bought in the AI marketing, so very little chance they'll do anything about it. But would like to see AI countermeasure developed because this is out of control.
@bagder time for a tarpit ...
@bagder Block the location they are from, collect evidence and take them to court or simply send them a bill to start with… using bandwidth is not free…
@bagder
And alllllllll those genAI scrapers are using curl to download everything! Damn you, daniel steinberg!
*shakes fist theatrically*
It's a shame that the only best defense available is to essentially make AI even more resource intensive with the tarpit concept. One of the biggest problems with AI already is how astronomically destructive it is going to be for the environment.
@bagder Linux developers already make great use of PGP keys if they're producing installers and stuff.
Maybe we should all be required to use such a key to retrieve open source code. Keys could gain rep by appropriate use from all forges (whitelisted maybe?). Start out super painful so nobody wants to have to start over with a new key or re-gain rep. Good rep gets you standard use.
Sucks, but wtf.
Every now and then I think about how communities produce manners of speech, and how for us, non-native speakers, our use of language is primarily shaped by our online interactions.
I think this has an overall negative effect to the use of language, because people pick up patterns from things like forums (e.g. constant hyperbole clichés, everything is either "blazingly fast" or "painfully slow"), and they never had the experience of using other registers, e.g. speaking English to their mother.
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This is not intended as a diss on non-native speakers (I'm one of them, of course!).
But it is intended as reminder to native speakers, to help them empathize to those who had a less-complete experience with the language, and to non-native speakers, to help bring awareness to one's own use of language.
via @asb , i have actually managed to reason about time zones next week thanks to https://everytimezone.com/. pleasant interface, no cookie dialog.
So, can ATProto scale down? Have Bluesky's "scaling towards decentralization" issues been fixed?
Not fundamentally. There have been advancements in self-hosting efforts, and they're good, but my fundamental analysis of Bluesky and ATProto scaling quadratically have not changed, despite recent efforts being good. 🧵
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Context on my previous blogposts:
How decentralized is Bluesky really? https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/
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However, every now and then someone posts an advancement with someone experimenting with self-hosting ATProto infrastructure. I think those experiments are good, but they still don't change my fundamental analysis, and the recent changes if anything reify that my fundamental analysis is true: Bluesky/ATProto/the shared heap pattern still scales quadratically, and is expensive to run.
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The first post which came up which a bunch of people asked me to comment on is "Can atproto scale down?" https://bsky.bad-example.com/can-atproto-scale-down/
It's a positive effort, the author is working on testing self-hosting, but the conclusion given at the start is too strong and leaves out the middle
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I like this post! I want to make it clear. And it's also very positive about my writing. I'm glad the author of the post is experimenting with things and I'm happy to see people try to host more of ATProto's tech pieces. That's great!
But! It's still a stripped down AppView. Very stripped down.
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But I think the key paragraphs are towards the end:
> I'd like to think of this as a bottom-up approach to scaling down. Can it get us to decentralization? If we scale to millions of copies of micro-AppViews, it will burden the relays.
This highlights point one
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Point two:
> If we approach content hydration heavy fetching against PDSs, it could overload them. If you self-host a viral skeet will you get a surprise bandwidth bill?
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Point three:
> That's a silly thought experiment, because operating and orchestrating all the little services is not within reach for many people even if it is cheap. It will probably be a tiny number. So then is this a meaningful contribution to decentralization?
(I don't think it's silly)
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One of the big hopes pinned at the end points at Free Our Feeds, and the hope that there will be a *second* big player hosting relays, and this will approach decentralization.
See my original blogposts critiquing having just a few instances by big players be "decentralization".
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But the other suggestion for saving things is, maybe there will be a different relay approach?
Well there's been some work on that too, so let's examine of that changes the game https://bsky.app/profile/bnewbold.net/post/3lkpdjgj5pk2i
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What's being looked at is lightweight relays that are effectively relay *mirrors*.
But what's making them avoid the world-sized growing database is that they're dropping data older than 72 hours.
Given that Bluesky's major argument is "no missed replies!" this isn't a fundamental solution to the shared heap challenge.
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And none of this even remotely challenges my primary original argument: if there is no central source of authority and things are really decentralized, the network scales towards decentralization *quadratically*.
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These efforts are still good. It's good to see them!
But every now and then someone points me to them and says "see! all those decentralization concerns are over." I still don't think they will be without an architecture change to message addressing.
The extractive tech playbook:
1. Target an industry where people create actual value
2. Build an app that makes transactions marginally easier
3. Burn billions in capital to subsidize artificially cheap services & kill the competition
4. Bleed everyone dry
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-great-tech-heist-how-disruption-became-a-euphemism-for-theft/
🚨 What happens if the Internet Archive goes dark?
From KQED's new podcast, Close All Tabs, digital librarian @brewsterkahle talks about the challenges of preserving digital history, and why the Internet Archive’s mission matters more than ever.
🎧 Listen now: https://www.kqed.org/news/12031980/what-happens-if-the-internet-archive-goes-dark
We should all be ashamed seeing what vulnerable students who haven't even started their lives are putting on the line and comparing it to what we're doing.
pt_BR.po que pode ser copiado do repositório para o subdiretório lang dentro do diretório de dados do SNAC. Após esse tipo de arquivo estar no local e o serviço reinicializado, o usuário pode escolher o idioma da inteface Web entre suas definições.Acabo de solicitar a integração de mais uma versão do arquivo com novas sequências de caracteres traduzidas.
Estou escrevendo isto para incentivar você a também contribuir com o que puder para com os projetos de software livre que utiliza. O senso de comunidade nos permite fazer parte da construção de um mundo melhor a cada linha de código.
It's a travesty that people are regularly unironically recommended "clean code" and "design patterns" as good beginner resources for programming.
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@dotstdy I once asked someone more experienced about the why of design patterns. His response was that they are used to jumpstart junior devs into complex* code bases, where they can operate on well-defined interfaces between black boxes.
*) complex, as in "nobody knows how they operate, overengineered, doing simple things in way too convoluted ways".
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@samuel ultimately I don't think it matters that much, it's not like learning that stuff is going to make you a worse programmer forever. The part that makes me sad is just that it's such a pointless diversion to go via some weird misogynistic racist dude's snake oil routine. Feels like you're more likely to turn people off the whole subject, which is the one true sin.
it suddenly occurs to me that the free software movement is an extremely inept attempt at a strike. the idea of copyleft is that you attach conditions that preclude profiteering users of the output of your labor from performing certain actions that you view as objectionable, in order to maintain equitable access to the means of production. but of course this is such a roundabout, convoluted and ineffective way of doing this that open source garbled it into meaninglessness immediately
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@glyph really? I thought it was clear that copyleft was very specifically about preventing people and corporations from attaching onerous conditions that prevent free distribution. Permissive licenses are *not* copyleft licenses.
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@aeva corporations cannot attach any conditions at all to *your* work in any case, so the conditions being attached apply only to the corporations who use the work they're attached to. I suppose "onerous" is a bit of a charged term
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@glyph sure they can. I write WidgetMonster, and release it under the HypotheticalPermissiveLicense which allows legal entities to what they like with my life's work and give nothing back. BigCorp adds Sinister Features to WidgetMonster in their own proprietary fork, which they sell for millions leaving me to die in obscurity because for reasons, only the fork sees significant adoption. I hold the seed, but it is functionally nothing as the software has been unfreed or whatever
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@glyph or so the stallmanites say, I guess
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@glyph in my experience what happens instead is I write WidgetMonster, I GPL it, nothing happens. Nobody gives a shit. I write WidgetMangler, the sucessor to Widget Monster, I LGPL it. My friend Baz likes it, but it fails to materialize into something greater. I lose interest. I write NonsenseName which is a complete rethinking of WidgetMangler from first principles, and release it under Apache2 I think it was? Nobody gives a shit because it is a solution in search of a problem.
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@glyph and then a friend calls me a scab for putting code nobody cares about on the internet under the wrong license 😎
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@aeva okay clearly I wasn't expressing myself very well here because you are purporting to disagree with me here but narrating my point :)
The Stallmanite framing of the "reasons" you die in obscurity is like…force majeure. some phenomenon they cannot understand and thus cannot be understood, and it's regarded as secondary, that BigCorp now "controls the software" for some reason ancillary to events and *if only* copyleft had constrained them, they would not be able to do that. thus: licenses
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@aeva my point is that this is a jumbled understanding that is glossing over the *actual* reason for the unequal power relationship, which is to say BigCorp has access to capital, control over the means of production, etc. basic economic stuff, nothing special to do with software. but Stallmanism reclassifies software labor as special and unique and disconnected from other labor movements
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@aeva thus hyperfocuses on this licensing thing which turns out to be useful for *other* reasons (the ones I think really work well are more related to analogies to academia and scholarly cooperation rather than to worker self-determination), but is mostly irrelevant in the context of preserving the dignity & agency of customers ("users") and workers ("hackers")
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@aeva also yes all that stuff you said about nobody ever actually using your stuff and licensing a magnet for interpersonal strife and internecine ideological conflict rather than practical activism :)
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@glyph would you say that your broader point was meant to boil down to something along the lines of stallmanism fucked up because it deliberately conceptualizes actually supporting the people doing the work as some kind of frivolous externality (the glorious leader literally said if you can't figure it out yourself go work in food service instead)? because if so I agree
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@glyph or "we already had a failed radical labor ideology it's called communism we didn't need a new one", i'd agree with that too
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@glyph it's a shame rms didn't have mob connections or we could have brought back "break the boss's knee caps" that one kinda worked for a while. it's unclear if capitalism figured out how to efficiently suppress unions, if unions don't work as well without hired mafia goons, or if we're just not chanting the word "unionize" hard enough because we're lazy bad people who think we're all temporarily inconvenienced bosses.
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@glyph this is a cynical way to put it, but I really do think unions could work they just need to bring back the mobsters
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@aeva I dunno maybe the goons are coming back. I keep hearing that gen Z is 'gooning' all the time. I have to assume that means that they are robustly strengthening the labor movement
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@aeva okay but … seriously …
I don't think we need to bring back the mobsters. But I do think that we need to understand that conflict is necessary. I see the FSF as an extension of the technocratic neoliberal apparatus built from the 80s onward. you see it in democrats deciding that maybe they'd win if they could just be republicans instead, in books like "nudge" where every policy is this quiet consensus paternalism, in the desperate search for content-neutral approaches to content moderation
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@samuel Hard to say in a crisp quantitative way, but in some sense, yes.
As a case-study, consider the conflict between Hashicorp and Amazon. (This is simplified, I'm not going to cover every part of it.)
Hashicorp is a software company. They are small. They are struggling because they made some free software and Amazon is eating their lunch. They adopt the Business Source License to try to combat this market imbalance. Free software fans get mad at the betrayal of principle.
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@samuel The issue here is that the principles of free software dictate that the labor that produces hardware (high cost of entry, capital intensive, tends to disproportionately reward the already-wealthy) should be valued, because hardware is "scarce", whereas the labor that produces software (low cost of entry, low capital requirements, tends to allow for new breakout entrants) should be devalued, because software is "infinitely copyable". Through that lens, free software is regressive.
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Is free software still regressive in that case? I don’t see now how to isolate those two fronts, but perhaps I’m being shortsighted.
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@samuel Yep. Same dynamic: storage media manufacturers and internet service providers control physical infrastructure and are enriched by people having access to unlimited data and equally unlimited need to store and transfer it. musicians and filmmakers are relatively smaller players, with less physical infrastructure, who rely on copy control to be profitable. this is a … slightly deliberately inaccurate framing to make a point, but it's not *totally* wrong.
Resistance can be as simple as using certain terms:
"online video" instead of "YouTube video".
"online search" instead of "Google Search" (or "do a search" instead of "google it".)
"music playlist" instead of "Spotify playlist".
Do not give these company any free advertising by using their names.
Do not make them the default term for something.
after a decade of avoiding learning emacs, i've actually dedicated time to doing so. after a few days, "it" finally clicked, and now i understand why emacs users are like that.
Microsoft is introducing ads into a free version of Office, which seemingly only lets users save to OneDrive.
In other news, LibreOffice is also free, doesn't have ads, and lets you save your documents wherever you want. I use it every day for my work. It is available here:
I believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Please get interested in RSS.
Please write cute little tutorials on how to make feeds out of any sort of page, handmade or otherwise. Please write little apps to read them that are stylish or lush and beautiful instead of dark and spare.
Please share feeds, and show screenshots of you using your reader to view articles about science and design and literature and someone's thrift haul.
Are there still atom feeds? If so, pretend I said this about atom. I like fedi, but I don't want to live in a world where everything is inherently social rather than accessible based on affection, passion and curiosity.
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@pamela Are there any RSS things that are:
1. Not web based (because I don't want to add yet another soon-to-be-enshittified host to my list).
2. A good UX for a non-technical user.
3. Not so ugly they make me want to tear out my own eyeballs.
I've tried RSS here and there over the years, but never went very far because of the issues above. Usually #2.
I like the idea of it, it's just been uphill work to find it. (And I haven't tried again in years, to be honest. Maybe a decade even.)
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@ZDL with me it's usually 3. And I'm still looking for these, the selection is just too small! I'm hoping to encourage people to share what works for them, and make more tools.
Hmm, there ARE standalone browser extensions you can use, now, maybe you'd like that? One called Feedbro might be a good place to start. It can identify feeds on pages you visit (click and select "find feeds in current tab") and will use your toolbar to indicate there are new posts.
I'm not set up on browser right now but I tossed in a few feeds so you could see the general layout. There are a few more themes and layouts, including a nice card-based one. I haven't played with any fancy bits like rules and filters (and won't) but I liked the different display options. It tries to separate out attachments on shortened posts, which I find strange, but right-clicking a feed in the list lets you change the properties to make it just load the full entry instead.
Now we just need like 25 more projects somewhat similar to it for enough diversity to make everyone happy XD
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Large view of a pretty red astronomy photo with a timeline bar of entries to the left, and on the far left a settings drop-down is open.
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Changed to an infinite scroll view that creates horizontal bars with previews of entries sharing a thumbnail of their first photo on the left. You can click these shortened entries to expand them.
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@pamela Feedbro is a browser extension that when I first looked at it only worked with Chrome. Now it seems they also support Firefox, so I'll definitely give that a try!
Thanks for the pointer.
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@pamela *sigh*
And as usual something that looks intriguing breaks straight of the box. If I try to open feedbro it says that it can't run in private browsing mode.
I'm not in private browsing mode.
And as a test I went into the settings and allowed it to run in private anyway.
It still complains that I'm in private browsing mode.
Oopsie!
@pamela I made this to turn the most frequently posted links in one’s mastodon timeline into an rss feed! https://masto2rss.gedanken.uber.space/
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@gedankenstuecke oh, this is nice! I've always appreciated fun things operating at the personal timeline level, used to enjoy queuing up the things tagged nowplaying from my friends' posts about music
New blog post:
I'm constantly distracted and I need to do something about it
https://82mhz.net/posts/2025/02/im-constantly-distracted-and-i-need-to-do-something-about-it/
error: the configured Python interpreter version (3.13) is newer than PyO3's maximum supported version (3.12)fundamentally unserious industry
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@khm (nevermind, deleted a toot that talked about the maintainer of PyOxidizer stepping down[1], which TIL is NOT what PyO3 means........ >_>)
[1] https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2024/03/17/my-shifting-open-source-priorities/
mechanical keyboard switches - advice sought [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
With the federal RTO mandate, I'm back to a cubicle farm. I have a cranky neighbor - the latest issue is that my typing is too loud.
tbf, I have a mechanical keyboard with "blue" clicky switches, because my hands don't hurt at the end of the day with it.
Does anyone have recommendations for switches that have a similar feel but less noise? Are "brown" switches close enough and actually quieter? Or is there another type I should look at?
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mechanical keyboard switches - advice sought [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
I have two conflicting recommendations:1) Topre switches.
2) aim at your existing keyboard a Shure SM-58 microphone plugged into a Shure A95UF line-matching transformer and then into a 5-watt Fender '57 Custom Champ amplifier aimed directly at your coworker's face. After several weeks of this, you can remove the rig and the coworker will never hear your unamplified keyboard again.
mechanical keyboard switches - advice sought [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
I am prefacing this with "this is only my humble opinion".As a brown switch lover, I tried out the MX Silent Reds coming from a similar place of being too loud with typing. I honestly can't go back to MX Browns/Blues now. The sound absorption mechanism significantly affects the typing experience and in my opinion for the better. Everything feels super smooth, as if there is butter inside the key stems, but with the typing feeling only Cherry-like switches can offer.
It felt weird in the beginning having both silencing and lighter actuation points, but the lighter actuation point also helped a lot with fatigue.
I gave a talk, a week ago today actually, at the 25th annual FOSDEM conference. It was about Org mode and Emacs. If you want you can check it out here:https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2025/talk/review/VXLS7N38XBT3CWR3QD8PXWCPNJXN9JXN
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@amy this public link also has a convenient video player https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5139-org-mode-witchcraft-at-spritely/
The reason that Haunt is the best static site generator is that it's the one that most clearly recognizes that a static website is just a program that, once compiled and executed, results in a rendered website
(and also it's in scheme)
Edit: link to Haunt https://dthompson.us/projects/haunt.html
politics: united states of america edition [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
figured I might as well go on record that I think elon musk is a fuckwit and a charlatanjust want to make it clear this is my opinion regardless of how badly he ratfucks the federal government research funding
you know, so it doesn't just sound like sour grapes when his mission to destroy American scientific leadership affects me professionally
The declarative & minimalistic computing track is the one track where ‘org-tree-slide-mode’ is the standard tool for presenters.
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Related to ¹ let's please take a moment to appreciate the hilarity of the historical perspective here, where emacs was once considered absurdly profligate with computer system resources and performance and is now considered to be minimalistic
¹: https://toot.aquilenet.fr/@civodul/113934442061942103 / @civodul @dthompson
@civodul Too sophisticated and distracting ... 😀 !
A collegue of mine got a permanent position, after a 20 min talk, hands in his pockets: this is minimalism.
Nice talk, by the way !
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@samuel i thought snac didn't implement a mastodon-like API, but i was wrong: it has "Mastodon API support, so Mastodon-compatible apps can be used".
in that case, it should work, roughly. i think it has a different feature set, but obviously the basics should be similar. I'd be happy to smooth out any minor annoyances.
maybe @pkw would try it out for us and report back? :)
@samuel ah, perhaps you are also running snac? (i tried to view your instance details and got a 404, so if you are, that'd be an example of something in need of a little tweaking)
but feel free to try it out with mastodon.el and @ me about the issues you run into.
edit: I patched mastodon.el so now it works to view snac instance descriptions. that's the kinda things usually that need to get done to tweak it to work with other fediverse servers.
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develop branch as I saw your patch there.I set up the necessary variables (I believe):
(setq mastodon-active-user "samuel")As I run
(setq mastodon-instance-url "https://social.nihil.ws/")
M-x mastodon, I still get the error:json-read-from-string: JSON readtable error: 60However, I am prompted for username (already pre-filled) and password if I change
mastodon-instance-url to "https://social.nihil.ws/samuel/"! I still get the same error after entering the password, but that is progress, I guess. I have a feeling a few more URL tweaks might do the trick. Let me know if I can do something to help debugging this.EDIT: Apparently, this was all my fault. By setting mastodon-instance-url to the initial value without a trailing /, it worked! Now let's see what I can/cannot do. :)
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@samuel glad you made some progress! i'm keen to see how things work or don't.
the patch i added is to take account of the different URLs that snac uses. for a user, mastodon uses something like https://instance.com/user/@thisuser, while snac has https://instance.com/thisuser (no @).
such differences might lead to minor breakage in certain things where the more masto-like (or other type) url is assumed. (the snac user URL is a bad decision i think, as we can't regex check for a snac-like url as it is so generic. various apps do such checks, eg to open a link inside the app via webfinger rather than in the browser. i learned it from tusky, a very popular fedi app for android. its meant to be simple but it makes other things more complicated...)
it's very cool (and sensible) that they implement the API though, it should(TM) mean all the timelines and such should just work or only need minor adjustments.
Meet #Guix at #FOSDEM!
https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2025/meet-guix-at-fosdem-2025/
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Image showing "Guix Days" flags and the date, 30-31 January 2025.
lol @fosdem actually inviting fucking Jack Dorsey to give a keynote, sounds like I accidentally picked the right year to not be able to come.
btw if you do plan to go I encourage you to join Drew DeVault's planned protest: https://drewdevault.com/2025/01/16/2025-01-16-No-Billionares-at-FOSDEM-please.html
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It's proper to be suspicious of billionaires. But they aren't all bad actors. Consider Julian Rosenwald, who returned $21 million of his personal wealth to Sears (about half a billion now) to keep the company going through the Depression. Not a single employee was laid off.
And he was famous for his philanthropy. By all accounts, a truly good person. (We need more of them...)
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@agreeable_landfall @fosdem @jwz damn if only you'd read the article full of examples of why your Not All Billionaires argument absolutely doesn't apply here, could have saved yourself a fedblock.
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@delroth @agreeable_landfall @fosdem Not All Kardashians, some of them are on the teevee!
I try to not use my title too much but in response to Zuck's recent speech:
As Queen of the Fediverse I officially declare Threads EXILED from our land
You are not welcome here, get the fuck out
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(JUST IN CASE YOU DIDN'T KNOW I don't actually consider myself Queen of the Fediverse this is a long-running joke because people started calling me that)
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Meta may NOT, in fact, have a little ActivityPub, as a treat
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Is it time for an Isolate Threads campaign
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Get the fuck outta here Mark Muskerberg get the FUCK OUT
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Meta, 5 years ago: "Boo hoo you gotta let us control all the social medias you couldn't trust anyone else to do it. Please regulate us, please make regulations that literally only we could comply with"
Meta 2 years ago: "Oh we're gonna join the fediverse"
Meta today: "We're 4chan now. We can't let Elon Musk have all the 4chan fun"
Get them outta here GET THEM OUT
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Here's more info on Zuck's speech in case you need it https://social.coop/@cwebber/113788266953239523 #contextpatrol
@cwebber Dog save the queen!
@cwebber Let us rightfully condemn and ridicule Zuckerberg shit ,but insure we all boycott all his operations and any corporations that support them. His corporations main value comes from ad revenues from his platform users: deny.
@cwebber "Don't Threads on me." (Shirt)
@cwebber I've been looking all over. I'm Pretty Sure the Fuck IS out of here
One of my papers got declined today by the journal I submitted it to, with a polite letter saying that while they found the paper interesting, it was not a good fit for the journal. In truth, I largely agreed with their conclusions, and the paper is now submitted to a different (and hopefully more appropriate) journal.
Rejection is actually a relatively common occurrence for me, happening once or twice a year on average. I occasionally mention this fact to my students and colleagues, who are sometimes surprised that my rejection rate is far from zero. I have belatedly realized our profession is far more willing to announce successful accomplishments (such as having a paper accepted, or a result proved) than unsuccessful ones (such as a paper rejected, or a proof attempt not working), except when the failures are somehow controversial. Because of this, a perception can be created that all of one's peers are achieving either success or controversy, with one's own personal career ending up becoming the only known source of examples of "mundane" failure. I speculate that this may be a contributor to the "impostor syndrome" that is prevalent in this field (though, again, not widely disseminated, due to the aforementioned reporting bias, and perhaps also due to some stigma regarding the topic). So I decided to report this (rather routine) rejection as a token gesture towards more accurate disclosure. (1/2)
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With hindsight, some of my past rejections have become amusing. With a coauthor, I once almost solved a conjecture, establishing the result with an "epsilon loss" in a key parameter. We submitted to a highly reputable journal, but it was rejected on the grounds that it did not resolve the full conjecture. So we submitted elsewhere, and the paper was accepted.
The following year, we managed to finally prove the full conjecture without the epsilon loss, and decided to try submitting to the highly reputable journal again. This time, the paper was rejected for only being an epsilon improvement over the previous literature!
(This paper was also submitted elsewhere, and accepted; and I have subsequently published in that highly selective journal since. Being an editor myself, and having had to decline some decent submissions for a variety of reasons, I find it best not to take these sorts of rejections personally, and move on to other journals, of course after revising the paper to address any issues brought up by the rejection.) (2/2)
all signs point to 2025 as the year of the linux desktop
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@lritter this is it!
If you're getting ready for #38c3, this is a gentle reminder to pack your devices, charger, EU adaptor, and... a good dose of parentheses:
Hey! I’ll be giving a talk at #FOSDEM about the #Shepherd and I can tell you I’ll be in good company!
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/declarative/
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@civodul very true :)
the declarative/minimalistic devroom at fosdem is absolutely stacked this time around. schemers will be eating good.
If folks want to support a member/community-controlled infrastructure that helps free & open software, @Codeberg is currently doing an end-of-year fundraising drive here: https://donate.codeberg.org/ 
And if you're enjoying the tools they provide, you should consider becoming a member instead of just donating, that way you even get a vote in the decision making of the organisation. 🗳️
One funny quote in the Half Life 2 documentary is where they talk about trying to grab a diverse range of people to cover their facial capture needs... Idk fellas is HL2 woke???
Libreboot recently added U-Boot as a payload option on x86_64 machines. The photos below show a ThinkPad X200 running U-Boot.
U-Boot provides a 64-bit UEFI environment. With it, I was able to successfully install and boot OpenBSD via UEFI method on a ThinkPad X200; the original vendor firmware doesn't do UEFI!
New Libreboot release coming soon. It's the free/opensource coreboot distro I maintain, replacing proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware.
My other coreboot distro will *also* be getting U-Boot.
The mask comes off at LWN, as *two* editors (jake and *corbet*) dive in to frantically defend the honour of Justine fucking Tunney against multiple people pointing out she's a Nazi who fills her projects with racist dogwhistles
EDIT: Should have opened with this, but here it goes anyway. Fuck every company collecting and profiting from personal data collection and using machine learning for that end.
I do apologise for the unnecessary aggressivity in my reply, though.
we should reconsider software altogetherHi, glad to see yet another person finally reaching that conclusion. :)
It is well-known that the best code is the one that didn’t need to be written.
I welcome you to reconsider what a privilege it is to be able to sit down and write code and please stop writing like a spoiled royal child that just found out their privileged life actually costs a lot to maintain.
Tentei a variante com ligaduras, mas não consegui me adaptar. Me pegava o tempo todo apagando um caracter e colocando de novo só pra ter certeza do que tava escrito.
What better time than a week-end to try out the first 🐑 #Shepherd 1.0.0 release candidate?
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2024-11/msg00114.html
No offense, but the more I hear of what has been done in the name of being “socially conservative” in the US, the more it seems to be bigotry with a bow on it. Racism, misogyny, homophobia and now transphobia.
And it feels infuriatingly disingenuous to call clinging to hate and subjugation as “trying to conserve” anything.
If all you want to “conserve” is your systemically enforced supremacy, then you’re just an oppressive asshole.
Ok, fine, I’ll take back the “no offense”.
*** PSA ***
Three things to do today:
a) Make a backup.
b) Verify your backup.
c) Find out how long it takes to restore your backup.
3-2-1 is a good backup policy.
Non-Americans watching the US struggle to decide between electing a professional career politician or a racist serial sex offender with 34 felony convictions and the IQ of a spoon
What a relief.
Now that the annoying Covid pandemic is firmly behind us 🙄 we can all get back to Business As Usual.
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As the world emerged from the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, many countries promised to rebuild their economies in a climate-friendly fashion, amid hopes the recovery effort could accelerate the global journey to net-zero emissions. In reality, the opposite has happened.
Instead of a “green recovery”, global greenhouse gas emissions are rising much faster now than they did in the decade preceding the global pandemic. Emissions rose 1.3 percent to 57.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023. That is a far faster annual rate of growth than during the decade 2010-2019, when emissions grew on average 0.8 percent per year.
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FULL STORY -- https://www.newscientist.com/article/2453198-carbon-emissions-are-now-growing-faster-than-before-the-pandemic/
#Politics #Economics #Climate #ClimateChange #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual
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Screenshot from top of linked article. Headline says: "Carbon emissions are now growing faster than before the pandemic." Below this is a photo of a fossil fuel power plant spewing emissions into the air.
If you ever find the time, look up what musl is. Then try to connect the dots here.
As someone who’s contributed to GNU, promoted it, and also spoke up in the past, I feel like I should publicize this report by @report_press:
https://stallman-report.org
Many of these things were described in 2019 (some of which I was unaware of at the time) but this report is thoroughly documented and has it all in one place.
It’s also a reminder that leadership must be held accountable, for the common good.
🧵
with regards to RMS. he is a creep. did some good things in the past. built the fsf around himself, not around free software; there was overlap in the past but not any more, for a decade at least, as the fsf is just an ineffective advocacy org that does no work. i no longer think about rms or his org and you should not either. shun and let wither.
But in 2024 it has to be possible to be against a genocide while not being antisemitic. There has to be a position where one believes in the humanity of everyone.
#curl is just the hobby
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/04/22/curl-is-just-the-hobby/
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curl is just the hobby of some guy that has no business providing a service to a billion people
Reposting a link to my blog about role models from a few years ago. It is as relevant as ever. Things aren't improving, and the tech bros (ever hear the term "tech sis"?) rise to ever greater, unstoppable power and influence.
https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-power-of-role-models.html
rare personal blog post: Just fucking use paper, man