@smxi@fosstodon.org
@smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

smxi

@smxi@fosstodon.org

Free software developer.

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AkaSci, to random
@AkaSci@fosstodon.org avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    smxi, (edited )
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @AkaSci I think the best defense strategy is for them to get new clients after finishing this case and to avoid worst in class clients like this one to safeguard their future careers. You'd think the legal profession would have grasped how lethal Trump is to the careers of his lawyers by now. Must be ego or hubris, as in: oh I can control him. Or maybe it's just the cash he's ripped off from his supporters to pay his legal bills. If he pays them. I assume they insist on cash up front now.

    Codeberg, to random
    @Codeberg@social.anoxinon.de avatar

    Yes, you can host Git bombs on Codeberg.

    No, we are not fond of this idea.

    We are currently looking into countermeasures to get Codeberg back on track.

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @Codeberg it would help to get rid of that stupid #github thing where they call clones forks, first of all, and second, to always make it clear that an actual fork, which I assume is what a git bomb is, is in fact the fork, not the original, and that it has been modified, and maybe to allow for relatively simple way to see how it's been modified.

    This also avoids the pointless repo clutter of script kiddies 'forking' a repo when all they wanted was to clone it.

    mttaggart, to random

    The writing is on the wall.

    Actually it's not writing. It's neon letters directly wired to a fusion reactor.

    The internet you knew? It's gone. There is no recovering it. There's too much money and incentive behind the idea of making the entire village into a strip mall run by LLMs. Your gardens are forfeit.

    I don't know if a #hardfork is possible, but even if it isn't, we gotta get to work building the intentional, human web. The one that rejects generative content, the one that verifies humanity through mutual trust, the one that takes privacy and safety of our neighbors as the highest value.

    There are many tools available, but united effort must join together around them. Carefully, intentionally, we have to start moving what matters away from the polluted land.

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @mttaggart it's called making websites. Making them discoverable. Adding fresh content pages routinely. I've done that for decades though I have gotten lazy about adding content. But trick is to avoid brochure site syndrome. That's a make then never touch again like product brochure. Stop giving your content away to social media sites.

    That's all it really takes. Like the recent hubbub about stack* sites doing what corporate sites do when everyone there feeding problem.

    #FederateContent.

    smxi, to animals
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    Roy on one of his many ledges. Looking out. And looking back at me. He's doing that cat thing where they pretend they aren't hurt but his front leg got tweaked. That's an occupational hazard for a cat this big. Something about physics and gravity and mass and decelerations sometimes just gangs up on him. But he's ok.

    You get a hint of his size when he stands like that. Which he does a lot. Sometimes he tries to help me use the door knob if I'm being slow

    #Caturday #CatsOfMastodon

    The cat Roy looking out from window while sitting on window ledge. He's a tuxedo color scheme. Black and white.

    gsuberland, to random
    @gsuberland@chaos.social avatar

    StackExchange Inc's deal with OpenAI is extremely frustrating, and users are being left without much recourse.

    the story is already hitting the tech press, but much of it is missing important details and context about how StackExchange sites are run, not to mention the history of organised protest against SEI's pro-LLM stance.

    I wrote a bunch about it here, in case anyone is interested in learning more about the situation and its impact:

    https://chaos.social/@gsuberland/112401284014892261

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @foxyoreos @soatok @gsuberland I've always been puzzled why anyone would volunteer their finite free time as a mod for a fully for profit corporate web corporation.

    I've done modding but only for free and autonomous projects. It's a thankless task. I'd never do it again.

    The really sad thing is the move from specialist run forums to single point of failure stack* type properties. #ExpertsExchange has been mentioned. #Github should be added to list of bad faith organizations.

    mikemathia, to random
    @mikemathia@ioc.exchange avatar

    Integrity is getting harder to find.
    Twenty-four ways to know if you have it:

    First, what integrity's not:

    Doing what's popular instead of what's right
    Acting differently in private than in public
    Saying one thing and doing another
    Letting fear dictate your decisions
    Taking credit for others' work
    Valuing success over ethics
    Hiding your mistakes
    Following the crowd
    Turning a blind eye
    Making excuses
    Blaming others
    Staying silent

    Integrity is:

    Transparency
    Ethical behavior
    Keeping your word
    Acting with courage
    Treating others fairly
    Owning your mistakes
    Respecting confidentiality
    Showing respect for others
    Admitting when you're wrong
    Standing up for what you believe
    Refusing to compromise your values
    Doing what's right, even when it's hard

    In a world that values success at any cost,
    #Integrity is the ultimate success.

    ➟ It's always doing the right thing.
    ➟ Not because someone is watching.
    ➟ But because it's the right thing to do.

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @mikemathia good list.

    I'd add: believing morality, which is always relative and regional, is the same thing as ethics. There's a reason Spinoza's masterpiece The Ethics was called that. Ethical behavior is fundamental. Core. Morality is a thin veneer that all too often hides something nasty.

    It's been noted that it's a profound error to believe small acts of good, or of bad, do not matter because they are small.

    No sage ever has been unethical. Many religious types are.

    lauren, to twitter
    @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

    I've been using social media since long before the term "social media" was coined (e.g. Usenet, the earliest ARPANET mailing lists, etc.) I've avoided Facebook all along, used quite a bit in its heyday (and maintain an account there that I keep locked now), and I used Google Plus quite heavily. I have accounts on Post (which is about to go dark, apparently), Bluesky (rarely look at it), Threads (hardly ever visit), etc.

    Of course the scale of these can be vastly different. An ARPANET mailing list on the subject of wine tasting with a few hundred members was enough to trigger a Pentagon colonel coming out to sites to remind us all about appropriate usage of a Defense Department funded network.

    That didn't change anything of course, and eventually DOD realized that such lists were pushing the evolution of email tools rapidly in very useful ways.

    Did you know that the very first ARPANET mailing list Digest was for SF-LOVERS (science fiction discussion, obviously) and was created quickly as a "temporary" expedient because the direct (immediate) distribution list had gotten "too large" (probably still just hundreds) for available resources? The digest format created for that situation has remained largely unchanged since then and is still widely used on the Internet today.

    I mention all this because in some ways is a throwback to those very early days (with Usenet being perhaps the closest parallel, given the Mastodon topological model). And Mastodon still manages to be quite "low pressure" in significant ways, even as your follower count goes up (which is the exact opposite of the situation on Twitter, even before Musk took over).

    That is, when I check here in the morning, I don't usually feel the need to steel myself for a deluge of potential nastiness.

    And that's a good thing, especially these days.

    That's all. -L

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @lauren don't forget the very early #GratefulDead lists that thrived in early labs. Some of earliest uses. 1973 Stanford university artificial intelligence lab started distributing dead list. A lot of eatly deadheads went into early computing work. So they were all over it. Huge mailing lists. @sail (chapter 3: Beyond Whole Earth Catalog, in Heads)

    AkaSci, to random
    @AkaSci@fosstodon.org avatar

    Meta’s AI chief: LLMs will never reach human-level intelligence.

    “Most of human knowledge is actually not language so those systems can never reach human-level intelligence — unless you change the architecture."

    In Yann LeCun's proposed “objective-driven AI," rather than being raised on a diet of pure text, they learn about the physical world through sensors and training on video data.

    “Eventually, machines will surpass human intelligence… it’s gonna take a while.”

    https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-yann-lecun-ai-behind-human-intelligence

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @AkaSci only someone with zero understanding of cognition could ever believe LLM could lead to AI let alone AGI. As Chomsky has noted the field dropped the quest for artificial intelligence in favor of rapidly monetizable advanced pattern matching. This is why musk can't solve twitter bots and failed to understand what social media is.

    Current systems are little more than fallback to failed blank slate models which can be run on compute but can't lead to AI.

    Concepts, grammars as innate.

    AkaSci, to random
    @AkaSci@fosstodon.org avatar

    When republicans say "America First", they really mean "Right Wing Billionaires first".
    The House Freedom Caucus wants to hold funding to rebuild the Key Bridge in Baltimore hostage to their pet demands like offset the costs by cutting for pro-people programs, waive environmental rules, trash labor agreements and to approve more LNG export terminals.
    1/n

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @AkaSci I view it more as them saying Feudalism first, because you can't have feudalism without serfs who want feudal lords to lead them. This of course is also the logical outcome of the entire libertarian view, which may account for some of the non insane support base for maga and trump, their interests are aligned. Freedom is hard. Same thing happend in roman empire, the people clamored for 'strong leader', they got the caesars, and the republic died, and never returned.

    tripplehelix, to random
    @tripplehelix@fosstodon.org avatar

    is such a cool tool, it has local and external IP information on inxi -i, it has weather information in inxi -w. I used to think it was just a great fetch tool, but it literally does everything!

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @tripplehelix I laugh every time I see someone utterly clueless say, oh, is bloated, I could do that in a 100 line shell script and it would be 100x faster. Every significant feature requires massive amounts of work, raw data collection, and unfortunately, the most boring, matching table updates, which there are no single data sources for so those are basically manually generated, using some backend tools for some. Recent complex features only work because users interested.
    1/

    smxi, to github
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    It continues to strike me that now, almost 4 months after last commit on any project, including , gh users keep starring my gh repos, even though all of them clearly state that the code is migrated to @Codeberg in the README, which is why I got sick of gh users, they don't read as a whole, and tended to post annoying issues. The users who read, tend to post good issues. that's what I see on codeberg smxi repos now. Not perfect, nothing is, but better. So happy with switch.

    veronica, to TikTok
    @veronica@mastodon.online avatar

    What I don't get about the whole TikTok spying on Americans argument is that why this is different than what Meta and Google et al does? I mean, can't China (which the accusation is directed at) just buy the data from any of the numerous data brokers anyway?

    Norwegian investigative journalists have show how easy it is to piece together detailed info about random individuals from so-called anonymised tracking data you can just buy.

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @veronica I would say for starters find out what is really going on. Not from generally tech ignorant mainstream media but from more reliable tech sources who can translate political posturing to technical realities.

    With this said an obvious difference is that china is a communist (yes they still use that silly term to refer to their classic chinese top down managed society) dictatorship. Totally opaque. Impossible to separate private/gov entities. That's a massive real difference.

    aral, to accessibility
    @aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

    Q. “I am blind, and I have been since 2021. I have grown very accustomed to using NVDA on Windows, which is a free open source screen reader. It's great… my question is, does Linux have good support for screen reading software?”

    A. “As someone that deals with this on a daily basis: The short answer is 'no' … The best advice I can give you is to not bother investing too much in Linux and keep with Windows, or move to macOS.”

    https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/13rym2j/linux_and_scren_readers_for_the_blind/

    #accessibility #linux #wayland #a11y

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @aral Standard desktop #Linux just broke 3% global market-share. Almost nobody pays a cent for their non-commercial Linux. There is a constant theme I find that "oh they should do this or that", as if there were thousands of developers just itching to donate time worth often north of $200 an hour for a lifetime payback of often 0, or very close to 0.

    Because of this reality, free desktops (free as in liberty) remain largely engineer built and oriented. Not right choice for everyone. Can't be.

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @aral vast bulk of funding goes to server #linux kernel features, which is why the kernel is incredibly robust compared to in particular OSX's kernel. Right now, for example, #Pop_OS is building their new #Cosmic desktop/compositor, with a team of 7 developers. MS, Apple, Google field 10s of thousands, and can assign any group of them to any feature, that's their job.

    I'd say if you interact with Linux, desktops, compositors, tools, and go YES!, it's for you. If not, maybe not best fit.

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @aral Every Apple and MS user pays for the base OS install, usually as part of a hardware bundle, always in the case of Apple. This is what pays for the features and development. You have to wrap your heads around the fact you are NOT comparing apples to apples, I have never paid more than 0 for any Linux or desktop or window manager. So I contribute what I can back to the larger free software ecosystem as my way of doing my part. Free desktops don't have the luxury of dropping millions on x, y

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @aral when I was doing active #linux forum and IRC distro support, there was a specific type of user, who never stayed, never contributed anything, yet was the most loudly vocal in demanding x or y feature, with a certain sense of entitlement that could only come from using apple or MS products their whole lives, never realizing the true cost they were paying. Chromebook similar issue re google.

    I no longer do that type of support, thankfully. Ask yourself: what did you pay? who did the work?

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @aral That's why I specifically excluded those. That constitutes I'd guess a tiny fraction of 1% of real world desktop installs. But IBM's Redhat division probably uses 99% code that they did not write, despite their absurd complaints about people using their code for free.

    The closest you'll come to significant numbers of realworld RHEL users are Fedora users, who pay nothing.

    In #FreeSoftware, real question is what have I done? Not they, or you, or someone else, but I. Confuses consumers.

    smxi, to ubuntu
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    And with a whiz bang, 3.3.33 goes out the door, a quick bug / point release to get the fixed version out before the LTS package freeze happens, which is pretty soon, a week or two I believe.

    Managed to squeeze in nice use of the new PsData tool, for a network service/daemon report, and also, to add in nice consistent printers that generate white spaces if certain rules are met in the field values, which allows those values to then wrap to the next line.

    Anyway, should be it..
    1/

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    I'm also happy to report that @Perl continues to not get in my way, and in fact, the more strict I make my use, the faster it gets, though you can't see the speed increase because there's a lot of new features added at the same time, result being that the new code runs roughly the same speed as the old code, only does more.

    Cutting down on copies, increasing use of references, and in particular, anonymous references, thus avoid creating a variable at all in the first place in a sense.

    3/

    smxi, to random
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    Initial testing of the udevadm based system RAM report in / are now running well. Most of the logic from dmidecode mapped pretty closely to the udevadm output, though the udevadm output requires one further processing step, but it's pretty similar.

    This is a first, showing non root, non dmidecode based system RAM info.

    There's one udevadm data glitch, it shows RAM module voltage as 1 always, which looks like a bug, so added a note about that if it's the case.
    1/

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    Testing calls now out for (next ), it will be exciting to see if this one gets enthusiastic attention or not, in theory it should since this is one of the longest standing weak spots, not being able to get decent ram per stick and array data.

    Getting testers used to be a lot easier, now it's hit and miss if a specific feature will catch anyone's attention. My bet is on forums, those guys tend to really like core hardware stuff, they were massive help for CPU refactor.

    4/

    smxi, to random
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    And now onto more fruitful and useful endeavors than trying to fit square pegs into round holes, an effort I already know from long experience is pointless, it's why you will never see me on certain distro forums for any reason, I already know it's a waste of time. Nothing against individual users, who are always welcome, but the overall culture is unpleasant to interact with. Yes being vague, lol.

    The issue re udevadm sourced raw basic ram data is a far better way to use my time.
    1/

    smxi, to fedora
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    More / CPU issues, it looks like / have changed a default standard path in /sys for unknown reasons, thus breaking inxi cpu speed collection. This tripped need to do more refactors, this time to the fake cpu data debugger logic, it was not complete.

    Also, a new codeberg issue pointed out that in many I can get basic RAM/RAM array data from udevadm, which appears to dump some dmi data into itself, available to user.

    Still tracking down root causes.

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @adamw @mjgardner @Perl this isn't about packaging, apparently this concept is just not registering, the bug was the original sin, which was breaking @perl install, the only fix that should have been carried out was fixing that bug, apologizing to perl users, and going on, like all the other distros do. All this stuff you are talking about is bandaids and fixes that have nothing to do with inxi. And it's not about inxi, it's about any perl script or program. Anyway, give up is my advice.
    2/

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @adamw @mjgardner @Perl inxi can't run without the core perl module dependencies on top, if those are not there, there's no point in even bothering since the perl install is totally broken. Thats' the bug, not inxi, or any other perl program. For some reason you can't seem to get your head around this baxic reality, which I have to assume is a side effect of having used #fedora / #rhel too long.

    This is so simple, and again, my only concern is for sys admins stuck admin'ing a rh system.

    smxi,
    @smxi@fosstodon.org avatar

    @adamw @mjgardner @Perl while I did not fully document my recent rh/fedora based distro vm tests, I know I had to install modules to get the debugger running, since as soon as I get the stuff running, I fire off a debugger dataset so I have it in storage for future reference.

    To me when basic things like this are not understood, that's a huge red flag about something more fundamental in the model one is using to view the landscape.

    The problems of for profit os vendors have zero value to me.

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