Fabio Manganiello

:platypush: Creator and #developer @ [platypush.tech](http://platypush.tech )
:booking: Senior #software engineer @ [booking.com](http://booking.com )
⚙ #Automation addict
🤖 #AI builder
:linux: #Linux user since 2001
🔓 #FOSS contributor
:arch: Prone to unsolicited "btw I use #Arch" statements
🏡 #SelfHost all #tech!
🔬 Open #science and open #data advocate
🎶 #Music geek
🎸 #Guitarist + occasional composer
🛹️ #Skater
🏄 #Surfer
👪 #Dad of a small geek
🇮🇹 ⇒ 🇳🇱

🏠 Home: https://fabiomanganiello.com
:git: Git: https://git.fabiomanganiello.com
✉ Email: fabio@manganiello.email
:github: Github: https://github.com/blacklight
🔐 PGP: https://keyoxide.org/6E3F54DA3F4286D20AB4009ED90FBA7F76362774
:matrix: Matrix: @blacklight:matrix.platypush.tech
💬 XMPP: fabio@manganiello.tech
📝 Blog: Fabio Manganiello (npub1h0v…3g2k)
🎧 Music: fabio (npub19lr…ljdy)
📹 Videos: Fabio Manganiello (npub13n7…6d99)
📷 Photos: Fabio Manganiello (npub1aeq…uskj)

Public Key

npub1s9uc08n58mxqk5umvapqulwzng0sja635q86r36d8n4rr9r9ygaskjdnmu

NIP-05 Address

fabio_at_manganiello.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsgz7v8ne6ranqt2wdkwssw0hpf58cfwag6qrapcaxne633j3jjywcqrhenn

Author Public Key

npub1s9uc08n58mxqk5umvapqulwzng0sja635q86r36d8n4rr9r9ygaskjdnmu

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Published at

2024-08-08T20:58:03Z

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Last Notes

2024-08-10 14:13:24

What happened to #federation for #Threads?
It's been 5 months since the federation support was announced.
As of today, no further progress seems done. Threads media is still broken on other Fediverse clients. And federation support, for some reason, still isn't supported within the EU.
https://help.instagram.com/760878905943039

2024-08-08 10:14:43

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things like expectations of what tables/constraints exists and if exists/not exists clauses between versions are still up to the developer.

2024-08-08 09:23:52

#Pixelfed isn't mature enough to be self-hosted yet. I feel like I'm wasting my time on each single upgrade by running manual SQL statements because all the PHP artisan db migration scripts are broken (missing tables, incompatible types, broken constraints...). If you don't know how to write proper resilient db migration scripts, you shouldn't even advertise your product as ready for self-hosting.

2024-08-07 15:43:03

This is the last nail in the coffin for a company that has fully embraced mediocrity and shortsighted business strategies and has stopped listening to its customers long ago.
Over 100M #Chromecast devices have been sold in 10 years. That's more than the number of Pixel phones #Google has ever sold. Those little HDMI dongles have probably been the most successful piece of hardware ever made by Google. They have turned many old TVs into smart TVs that could show YouTube and Netflix videos, and even cast phone and tablet screens onto TVs, for less than $50.
But Google has decided that Chromecasts should also join their humongous graveyard. The devices currently in stock will still be sold, but no new devices will be produced.
The reasoning is that most of the TVs out there today are smart TVs with their own apps.
Which means a couple of things:
1. Those at Google are unaware of the millions of TVs out there that have been produced before the past decade (or more recent low budget TVs) and are still in use.
2. The Google Cast protocol, which itself is based on open standards, is very mature, and has thousands of applications and libraries developed for it, is basically dead overnight. The alternative (developing native apps for a much more fragmented smart TV market, from Android TV, to TizenOS, to Roku OS, to Apple TV, to Amazon's Fire TV etc.) increases entry barriers, fragmentation, development costs, and it's a game that everyone (TV producers, developers and customers) is likely to lose.
3. Google has suddenly decided to pivot so aggressively to Android TV that it's keen to kill one of its most successful products (an HDMI dongle), where it basically holds an uncontested duopoly (together with Amazon), in favour of a product that holds ~15% of market share, in a much more competitive and fragmented arena. This is almost the textbook definition of a corporate strategy suicide - Google is increasing the risk by reducing the diversity of its offer and putting all the bets on a single product.
There's a silver lining though. With Google out of the way, open cast protocols (Miracast and DLNA in first line) have a cumbersome closed implementation out of the way. Time to let thousands of open (and cheaper) dongles flourish.
https://blog.google/products/google-nest/chromecast-history/

2024-08-07 12:45:53

No calls for cool heads please.
Peaceful protesters in Genoa against the G8 were met by torture and illegal imprisonment.
More recently, peaceful pro Palestine protests have been met by disproportionate police charges.
In both cases, The Economist wasn't vocal enough in condemning violence.
Then a bunch of fascist hooligans destroy private property, take over the street and call for overthrowing democracy and racial violence and you call for "cool heads"? F*ck them, seriously.
Are they victims of disinformation who believe whatever garbage they read on social media? Do they believe that a murderer was an illegal immigrant who recently crossed the Channel when he was actually born in Britain? So? Am I supposed to feel sorry for them for not informing properly and feeding on social media garbage, just waiting for a piece of news to unleash their worst reactionary urges?
Are they angry for the poor economic state of their country compared to 10 years ago? So? Who voted for Brexit and plunged their own country into this miserable state - again, after listening to conservative lies spread mainly on social media?
No more sympathy for people who are simply unfit to live in this century and want to impose their ultra-conservative ignorance onto others with violence.
Show no mercy to this scum. Beat them up and let them rot in a jail - starting from the scum that stirs violence by spreading disinformation online: those should be called accountable and treated just like we would treat terrorists. Why would you treat Islamic State terrorists any differently from fascist terrorists? Just because the latter are mostly white and Christian? Time to make fascists afraid again.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/08/04/how-to-respond-to-the-riots-on-britains-streets

2024-08-05 09:40:39

#Maduro must go, either peacefully or in front of a firing squad.
A revolution isn't a revolution anymore if its people no longer want it.
#Venezuela has been suffering the incompetence and arrogance of this bus driver for too long: they deserve better.
He calls on the army to squash the peaceful protests: I hope that the army turns its weapons against their naked emperor instead.
Leaders who threaten their own people if they don't like how they vote don't deserve to stay alive.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/05/nicolas-maduro-venezuela-election-crackdown

2024-08-03 12:21:08

#Israel is a terrorist State, no less than the terrorists it claims it needs to defend itself against.
Israel has a reason of existing only if it abides to uphold democratic values in the region, if it finds a way of coexisting with its Arab neighbors in two distinct States, if it stops kicking its neighbors out of their houses and territories, and if it knows not only how to avoid disproportionate reactions, but also how to deescalate.
If any of these preconditions are no longer met, it means that Israel is actually a destabilizing force in an already volatile region, that it does more harm than good, and that it has no right to exist as a State.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/03/american-israeli-soldier-videos-detonation-homes-mosque-gaza

2024-08-01 21:29:20

- reply

for Nextcloud Mail (/ maildir) support + encryption Dovecot is my pick. But before that I would use the Proton bridge, with a Proton account configured to receive mail from multiple addresses.
Caveats:
1. The bridge only works on localhost by default - it requires an SSH tunnel to be a general-purpose IMAP server
2. The bridge's IMAP implementation is a bit problematic, especially when it comes to sorting and searching - I've reported the issues to them multiple times, their response more or less was "it's supposed to be a local-only bridge tested with Thunderbird/Outlook/Apple Mail, not a general-purpose compliant IMAP implementation"
3. It's not technically 100% self-hosted - you need to trust Proton (I trust them more than many other tech companies, but that may not be the case for everyone)
If these caveats are ok for you then the Proton bridge may be a good option. Otherwise you probably want a full IMAP implementation - and Dovecot is still the best pick for it.

2024-07-30 21:06:50

I repeat my claim: those who say "vote for me, then you'll never have to vote again because I'll figure everything out" deserve to end their lives hung upside down and covered in spit and bullets.
We need a new Piazzale Loreto to stop the increasingly explicit pushes towards totalitarianism in the West before they lead us to a new world war.
Voting isn't a burden: it's what keeps governments accountable. It's a basic right conquered through centuries of blood and civil uprising. Those who want to take that basic right away (together with many other civic rights) have a name: fascists. And the only good fascist is a dead fascist.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/30/donald-trump-wont-have-to-vote-anymore-fox-interview

2024-07-29 10:03:11

Alla ministra Bernini, così come alla Gelmini e a Profumo all'epoca, va ricordato che io compito del MIUR è potenziare la scuola e l'Università italiana, che sono già poco competitive a livello internazionale.
Non di usare l'istruzione come un salvadanaio per finanziare qualsiasi programma di tagli alla spesa pubblica.
513 milioni di euro di tagli, dopo mesi di bugie al suon di "sono allarmismi infondati", sono vergognosi.
L'estensione dei tempi di precariato per post-dottorati e ricercatori è qualcosa di vergognoso. Vuol dire età media dei professori associati e ordinari che sarà sempre più elevata, dato che il loro primo contratto stabile non arriverà prima dei 40 anni. Vuol dire rendere il lavoro ancora meno attrattivo, vuol dire un'università che farà ancora più fatica ad assumere nuovi professori e implementare il turnover, e baroni che probabilmente occuperanno le loro cattedre per ancora più tempo.
Le destre odiano l'istruzione perché la maggior parte di ricercatori, dottorandi e professori non votano per la destra conservatrice. Quindi tagliare fondi a quella gente vuol dire minimizzare le perdite di consensi elettorali - i tagli all'Università in genere fanno incazzare gente che in vita sua non voterà mai Salvini o Meloni. C'è da richiamare questa classe governatrice alle proprie responsabilità: chi taglia l'istruzione taglia la competitività del Paese - non per un paio di anni, ma per decenni a venire.

2024-07-27 14:01:14

📦 #Platypush [1.2.1](https://pypi.org/project/platypush/) is out!
There's a [large changelog](https://git.platypush.tech/platypush/platypush/src/branch/master/CHANGELOG.md#1-2-0), in a nutshell:
- 2FA support is here.
- Added randomly generated API tokens alongside JWT tokens.
- Added `bind_socket` option to `backend.http` - now the Webapp can also be exposed on a UNIX socket rather than TCP.
- Support for per-plugin PWAs. You can now open `<platypush-host>/plugin/<plugin-name>` from your browser on mobile, and install the PWA associated only to that plugin view. This is similar to what NextCloud offers - if you install the PWA from the calendar page it'll install only the calendar app, if you install it from the notes page it'll only install the notes app, and so on.
- Added support for custom Redis executables on `--start-redis` via `--redis-bin` - now tested also with alternative Redis implementations, namely Valkey and Redict.
- Fullscreen video/photo support for the camera views.
- Migrated the project from `setup.py` to `pyproject.toml` (it was about time).
The backlog [is already filling up for the next release](https://git.platypush.tech/platypush/platypush/milestone/9).
As usual, feel free to report your suggestions and feature requests [on the issues page](https://git.platypush.tech/platypush/platypush/issues).

2024-07-25 11:18:48

It's good to see the liability principle enforced.
The "no liability clause" makes total sense for open-source software.
If the software was developed by a bunch of unpaid volunteers, if it's free and its source code is available for everyone to inspect and modify in case of errors, then it makes sense that the maintainers don't want to have any responsibility in case of problems. You get something for free, you get the ability to modify it to your liking, don't expect any kind of warranty.
But when you take money for your product, when you ask your customers to accept contracts before they can use your product, and when you don't release the source code (or, worse, you run some service in the cloud, hidden away from its users), so you're basically the only one who can fix things if something goes wrong, then you must accept legal liability.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Either your software is free and open, or you're liable for any damage it ends up causing.
https://thehftguy.com/2024/07/25/crowdstrike-will-be-liable-for-damages-in-france-based-on-the-ovh-precedent/

2024-07-22 07:20:57

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this looks good! I've been using the [News](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/co.appreactor.news/) app for a while with my #Miniflux server, and although it does its job it's also basically unmaintained.
I'll definitely give this one a try once they add Miniflux support.

2024-07-19 09:30:47

#Platypush + #WebPush loading.
I've taken quite a deep dive in these days into the WebPush implementation and the details of the #VAPID specification for authenticated push notifications through #PWA.
I'm now testing things in the Platypush web app - aiming to support custom notifications providers too, so dispatching notifications to your mobile devices through your ntfy or NextPush server can also be supported.
The next release of Platypush may finally include native Web notifications through the PWA layer.
You should then be able to get notifications for all the media playing on your devices, and control them just like you would do with a Spotify/YouTube media notification. Or get mobile notifications for the interactions with your custom voice assistants. Or create your custom push notifications (e.g. on your event hooks, custom procedures or crons) and dispatch them securely to your mobile devices through your own ntfy server. All (hopefully) without the need of a native Android app - power of Web pushes!
---
I only wish that the tools to implement WebPush/VAPID in #Python applications were as mature as those available for the JS ecosystem. [py-vapid](https://pypi.org/project/py-vapid/) seems reasonably well designed, but it's still a bit of an early project and it's not even available on any major package managers (which is a big no-no for core Platypush features). And it only takes care of signing VAPID claims, not of packing and delivering WebPush requests end-to-end. I've eventually resorted to doing my own implementation with `ecdsa`, plus `jose` to take care of the JWT encryption boilerplate.
https://git.platypush.tech/platypush/platypush/issues/417

2024-07-15 09:16:28

- reply

this is actually an interesting problem also from a technical implementation point of view.
If you want to share aggregated/fuzzied data with downstream pipelines, then at some point in your data flow (probably as close as possible to the generation of the raw data) you'll necessarily need a system that collects the raw records and aggregates them.
Differential privacy by definition destroys information. You may be clever and introduce noise in the original records in such a way that they are not uniquely identifiable, while preserving the value of the aggregated information.
I'm curious if other implementations have found other clever ways around this problem. But it may as well be the case that distributed aggregated data networks just can never be 100% private - for the same reason why a Tor network can never be 100% private: in both systems you'll always need a node that can access the raw information in some format.

2024-07-12 20:35:25

This is probably one of the most surreal issues I've seen in a while.
I've recently purchased a Motorola Edge Android phone. Installed the #Jellyfin client on it and all. Today I wanted to cast a video to my Chromecast, and surprisingly got a _Google Cast unsupported_ error in the client.
Weird, since Google Cast support has been working flawlessly on all my other Android/Jellyfin Web devices.
I dug through the web, and found [this issue](https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/issues/4747).
Jellyfin Web, like many other Web-based services, does some fuzzy regex matching of the user agent header to understand what browser it's talking to.
In particular, Google Cast support is only available on Chrome-based Web views, so it'll show an _unsupported_ error on any other browser.
(Btw [I proposed a while ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/jellyfin/comments/sultqe/comment/hxb7t3x/) to support cast support on the server level as well, using server-side mDNS discovery to detect cast devices on the same network as the server, which would probably solve the problem of relying on Chrome's proprietary implementation).
Guess what? Edge (the Microsoft browser, not the Motorola phone) is also among the unsupported browser regexes. That regex just so happens to be matched before the Chrom* one, and unfortunately Edge phones export a user agent string that contains `Motorola Edge`.
So, if you use a Motorola phone, Jellyfin will think that you're using Microsoft's browser and cast support won't work.
The fix? Well...just move the Chrom* checks before the Edge check.
A reminder that relying on user agent strings to build your application's logic is _always_ a bad idea that will _always_ lead to unintended consequences.
Even if you have meticulously gone through all the possible popular combinations of user agents, nothing prevents in the future a new HTTP client from advertising a user agent string that will start matching your regexes and lead to all kind of weird issues.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/issues/4747

2024-07-11 13:08:33

- reply

should probably elaborate a bit more, since there's no silver bullet in databases and all pros and cons come with ifs and buts.
Concurrency is a problem mostly if no constraints other than the primary key are enforced. If an individual's primary key is supposed to be unique, but there's no unique constraint on their SSN, then a record with `User(ssn=1234)` published both on `stream1` and `stream2`, and consumed by `db_service1` and `db_service2` respectively, can easily result in data pollution / duplication.
Same goes for the upsert issue - if I get `Employee(ssn=1234, job=engineer)`, and later `Employee(ssn=1234, job=manager)`, and no constraints other than the synthetic primary key are enforced, how do I know that the second record is probably an update on the previous one rather than a new one?
The obvious solution would be to have a `UNIQUE` constraint on `ssn` besides the one on the synthetic primary key. And then have an `INSERT INTO...ON CONFLICT UPDATE` or equivalent logic to ensure consistency/causality/idempotency. But then such a constraint would functionally behave like a primary key (in E/R theory it would be called "alternative key"), with the same issues described in the article (i.e. burden of proof of uniqueness) but without the benefits of a real primary key (i.e. free indexing and efficient joins).
Another solution would be to let the application prehemptively fetch potential duplicates before the insert/update (e.g. by querying any employees with SSN in a certain list) and then perform insert/update accordingly. But this would move storage logic to the business logic, with all the attached downsides - you need to lock the records or the table while you do a read+write, followed probably by another read to get the IDs, and this can cause serious performance degradation on write-heavy systems.
The insert+fetch issue instead happens if you have primary keys as auto-increment integers or random UUIDs defined as db column defaults. In that case, you'll have to do a SELECT after your INSERT to get the inserted ID (again, performance overhead). The mitigation in this case is usually to generate the ID in the application logic rather than on the db. But then we come back to the concurrency issue - having a centralized mechanism for generating IDs has its benefits, and removing that often means having to create an external central service that does the job that the db should do.
And sharding becomes an issue only if the primary key is completely random. Keys generated in e.g. UUIDv7 mitigate that issue, as UUIDv7 is time-sortable and good for sharding, but that means reducing all the possible sharding dimensions to time alone - which is the same thing you would have with an auto-increment.
All these trade-offs are the reason why I usually prefer deterministic primary keys. Which doesn't necessarily mean natural. Most of the times I actually use UUID keys, but those UUIDs are often hashes of the columns that I know to be "immutable" - calculated through flexible-length hashing algorithms like e.g. FNV-1a. If there aren't enough columns in the table to guarantee uniqueness, I usually synthesize my own (e.g. event time, creation date, namespace...) until I'm reasonably confident that the chances of conflict are low. Sure, if any of the "immutable" columns turns out to be mutable (e.g. a CF/CPR that changes after a change of name/gender), then the application has to deal with the creation of a new record + rewiring + invalidation of the old record. But in my experience this is usually a rare exception, not the norm. In my experience is better to have migration procedures in place to handle with these cases, but leverage all the benefits that come from deterministic keys and atomic transactions, than doing the other way around.

2024-07-11 11:27:04

- reply

1. Concurrency: if you have two services which concurrently consume two records that are logically the same (e.g. the records of a person having the same SSN), but such "natural" constraint isn't enforced (neither on the primary key nor as a unique column), then you get duplication.
2. Performance: if you have an API that creates a record and then returns it to the user (with the generated ID), then you'll probably have to do an insert-and-select for each inserted record. Unless you generate the ID itself in the application - which comes with another set of issues.
3. Upsert: if the primary key doesn't depend on any natural identifier, then it's hard to tell when you should insert a new record or update an existing one, and mechanisms such as INSERT...ON CONFLICT UPDATE can't be leveraged.
4. Sharding: especially if the primary key is auto-increment or random, sharding on it becomes challenging.

2024-07-11 10:17:40

In principle, I agree with the statements made in this article.
Natural keys (social security numbers/BSN/CPR numbers for people, chassis numbers for cars, names+locations for restaurants etc.) sound like perfect candidates for database keys. But have one person change their name/gender, or a car getting a new chassis number because of a data entry mistake, or a restaurant changing name, and everything falls apart. Not to mention the uniqueness problem - can we always be able to prove that a key always identifies one and only one record, and the other way around?
That's why synthetic keys come to the rescue.
But, as a seasoned developer who has spent two decades working with databases, I've seen too many things go wrong with synthetic keys too.
Auto-increment integers and random UUIDs are great only as long as you are in a single-threaded environment where you don't have the risk of duplicate records concurrently processed by separate services/processes/threads, where the database is small enough that you don't have to worry about sharding by key, and where performance constraints are lax enough that you don't care of the cost of doing an insert-or-update-and-select in order to retrieve the ID of the record you've just inserted.
In my experience, the best of the two worlds can be achieved when you have deterministic synthetic keys generated on an immutable subset of the attributes.
If you can prove that a subset of columns is really unique and immutable, there's nothing wrong with generating a UUID/hash out of them, and using that as the primary key. That solves the insert-and-fetch and the consistent upsert problems basically for free. It's an approach that I've been following for the past few years in my jobs, and that allowed me to write software that can work on huge shard-friendly databases with nearly no data pollution and high read+write efficiency.
If anything actually changes on those columns, it's ok to create a new record. Just have a procedure in place to explicitly deal with those cases if needed, so anything wired to the old record can be rewired to the new one. But, in my experience, cases where you have to modify what's supposed to be an immutable set of attributes are a (very uncommon) exception, not the norm.
Your database should be optimized for the norm, not for the exception.
https://blog.ploeh.dk/2024/06/03/youll-regret-using-natural-keys/

2024-07-11 09:31:56

Technically, Open Source won. Politically, it lost.
Every megacorporation is now built on top of free software. But they managed to make it effectively proprietary by hiding their code behind web interfaces.
When publicly distributed, the open-source code is hidden behind layers of indirection bypassing any packaging/integration effort, relying instead on virtualisation and downloading dependencies on the fly.
Thanks to those strategies, corporations could benefit from open source code without any consequence. The open source code is, anyway, mostly hosted and developed on proprietary platforms.
Due to the original open-source utopia paradigm, every time developers push free code on Github, they feel like they're contributing to the commons.
But, effectively, they're pushing code into production in hundreds of exploitive corporate projects.
When a problem occurs, per corporate tradition, pressure and blame fall on the maintainer. Even if that maintainer is not on the payroll.
paying the contributor/maintainer a dime is not the solution. It worsen the situation. It acknowledges the responsibility of the aforementioned maintainer and legitimises the exploitation.
We need to remember that most (if not all) free software is provided, "without liability". That rule should be enforced. We should not care about corporations. If there was no support contract prior hand, let them burn. Trying to force corporations to pay the maintainer is like trying to force landlords to pay firefighters only if their house is burning. Or agreeing that a factory should give a small tip to volunteers cleaning the river it is polluting.
Paid and unpaid open source developers are pressed into providing a support they never promised in the first time. So they ask companies for mandatory contributions, something they explicitly refused when they licensed their code.
If you care about the commons, you should put your work under a strong copyleft license like the AGPL. That way, we will get back to building that commons we lost because of web services. If someone ever complains that a web service broke because of your AGPL code, reply that the whole web service should be under the AGPL too.
In the long term, the root causes of most of our problems are the monopolistic corporations. Without them, we would not have this discussion.
There’s a generational divide here. Brilliant coders now on the market or in the free software space have never known a world without Google, Facebook and Github. Their definition of software is "something running in the browser". Even email is, for them, a synonym for the proprietary messaging system called "Gmail" or "Outlook". They contribute to FLOSS on Github while chatting on Slack or Discord, sharing specifications on Google Drive and advertising their project on Twitter/X. They also often have an iPhone and a Mac because "shiny". They cannot imagine an alternative world where monopolies would not be everywhere. They feel that having nice Github and Linkedin profiles where they work for free is the only hope they have to escape unemployment. Who can blame them? They cannot imagine a world without monopolies. They don’t search, they Google. They don’t shop online, they go on Amazon. They don’t read a book, they read a rented version of a book on a Kindle. They don’t take a coffee, they have a Starbucks. For them, politics is only a source of conflicts, a naughty word.
As they start to understand that they are exploited by those omnipotent deities, they see only one way to make it acceptable: ask, through one of those deities (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), to be paid. They understand that they are two classes of coders in the world: those who are exploited without being paid and those who are paid to be exploited. A bit or even more in some cases. While a few hands keep all the power.
What elderly should teach them, is that there are many alternatives. We can live without Google, Facebook Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. We can write code which is not on Github, which doesn’t run on an Amazon server and which is not displayed in a Google browser. We should also insist that every piece of technology is, by essence, political. That you cannot understand technology without understanding the people. And you cannot understand people without understanding politics. Every choice you made has an impact on the world.
The lesson we learned is harsh: we can never trust corporations with anything. They destroyed our oceans, our atmosphere and our politics. There’s no reason to trust them with our software, our privacy and our daily lives.
@ploum@mamot.fr @programming@a.gup.pe
https://ploum.net/2024-07-01-opensource_sustainability.html

2024-07-11 06:02:16

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paying in advance probably makes sense. The principles would be simple:<li>Headlines are free: opening a home page shouldn’t prompt me with a paywall nor a subscribe-or-ok screen.</li><li>Articles should have three options:<ul><li>Subscribe</li><li>Accept cookies (but a cap on the number of data brokers should be in place)</li><li>Pay-as-you-go - either for individual articles or one-off bundles</li></ul></li>

2024-07-11 05:40:07

I purchased a #Xiaomi #Android phone as an emergency backup when my OnePlus 6 screen died a few weeks ago.
That’s probably been the worst mistake I’ve made in a while.
I was initially impressed by the robust hardware, dual SIM card + SD card support for a very competitive price. Now I see what price you actually pay for it.
The stock ROM is a nightmare. MIUI was still kind-of decent, but as soon as you configure the phone you’ll get an upgrade to HyperOS. And that’s literally the worst Android ROM I’ve ever seen. Laggish animations. Laggish scrolling. I’ve literally had to disable all animations from developer settings, and even after that the phone would still be barely usable. Plenty of background network requests are done even when you open the apps drawer. And even a factory reset doesn’t fix anything.
I then tried to unlock the bootloader and flash a custom ROM. Guess what? Xiaomi has managed to introduce as much friction as possible in the process.
Enabling several developer options requires you to be on a Chinese IP address because the phone will try to connect to IP addresses available only within China. Or you’ll get a network error even by trying to check the bootloader lock status. I’ve managed to make it work only by connecting to a Hong Kong VPN.
It’ll also require you to associate a Xiaomi account to your phone, and that account must be at least 30 days old.
It’ll also require you to have a SIM card on your phone, and be on a mobile data connection - it won’t work on WiFi, I guess that they *REALLY* want to know your IP address given by your mobile carrier.
It’ll also require you to submit a bootloader unlock request to Xiaomi for your phone’s IMEI, then wait 7 days, then download a Windows-only exe to unlock your phone.
Also, each Xiaomi account can unlock at most one device per month, and 3 devices per year.
I can’t think of any greater level of friction to discourage people from running their own software on a phone, even on a system like Android that in theory is easy to tinker with.
I’m not sure if I want to jump through all these hurdles to finally have a usable phone with LineageOS, or even just a vanilla Android ROM. It’s really a shame because Redmi devices are great hardware that just happens to be ruined by Chinese crapware/spyware, and they could perform great with a decent OS. But right now I’m tempted to just sell it away. Also because I’m not sure if, given all these Xiaomi-specific steps, I’ll actually ever manage to have a spyware-free device even after flashing a new ROM.

2024-07-11 02:11:04

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the problem is that right now the pay-or-ok screen often opens *as soon* as you open any page of a website. Increasingly often, you can’t even consume a single page as a one-time user without getting what’s basically a new strict paywall.
The other thing that concerns me is the increasing number of 3rd-party partners that get your data after enabling cookies. Just a few months ago I would be outraged by 200-300 data brokers that get your data after enabling cookies. Now it’s easily in the order of 800-900, often even >1000. There should probably be something between a you-can-checkout-any-time-you-like subscription and publishing my data to basically all data brokers in the world if I want to read a single article. The whole point of GDPR was to allow users to select who they want to share their data with, but these pay-or-ok packages don’t even give that freedom anymore.
Of course everyone needs to make money, but I’ve often advocated for alternatives that would give users more choice - because that freedom has currently been stripped out of us:<li>Micro payments: pay-as-you-read is the third way between subscribe-for-everything and let-data-brokers-feast-on-you. How much is a single article read worth? Probably $0.01 for a tabloid and $0.50 for an Economist report? Well, let the market decide and let new pricing models flourish. I’d be happy to pay to read a single article, or maybe purchase a one-off 10 articles bundle, than paying a fixed amount every month to a news outlet from which I may consume at most 10 articles per year. It would even be fairer to journalists - those who write the most interesting articles bring in more payments, so performance can be rewarded in a much more granular way. The only reason why this model isn’t common (outside maybe of overpriced scientific journals) is that managers are rewarded on the basis of metrics such as recurring annual revenue, and they’ve become that guy who learned to use a hammer and thinks that the whole world is made of nails.</li><li>Bring back the 5-10 free articles before you get a paywall model. Very occasional readers shouldn’t be forced to decide between subscribing and compromising their privacy the very first time they open a website.</li>

2024-07-10 17:08:36

I’m questioning the legality of this new #GDPR bypass trend.
The EU doctrine is that privacy is a right that comes for free for everyone, and that the user is always in control of what should be shared with 3rd-parties.
This new “accept all cookies or pay for a subscription” trend seems to be the absolute negation of this doctrine.
(cc [@EC_Commissioner_Vestager](https://social.network.europa.eu/@EC_Commissioner_Vestager ) [@FRA](https://social.network.europa.eu/@FRA ) [@EDPS](https://social.network.europa.eu/@EDPS ))
https://s3.nl-ams.scw.cloud/manganiello-social-media/b334dcffe411d4fa6e270980220f0139d0e65e8db100bbe3d38d9d9264365252.png

2024-07-06 01:26:35

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a good example is Unite. A very popular extension to customize the windows behaviour, mentioned all over the Web, which is basically broken - both because it hasn't been updated in three months, and because it relies on X.Org-specific tooling.
Pano clipboard manager is another one. Sound Input & Output Device Chooser too. And Multi Monitors Add-On. In general, if you just go to [extensions.gnome.org](http://extensions.gnome.org ) and try to install some random extensions from the first two pages of results, there's literally a >50% chance that the extension won't work on the latest version of Gnome Shell.
I understand that the "power" of Gnome extensions come from customizing the source code of Gnome itself. But I wonder if a better extensions model is possible. The current model basically requires developers to be very proactive and release a new version of their etensions as soon as a new version of the Gnome Shell is out, even if technically nothing has changed either on the Gnome side nor the extension side.
If the Gnome Shell has a Web-inspired design, I wonder if it wasn't easier for extensions to just override (without patching) the current CSS style, or for Gnome itself to emit events that extensions can listen to in order to modify the WM just like you would modify a DOM.
Probably it wouldn't be as powerful as patching the Gnome code itself, but it'd definitely be less brittle, it would require less maintenance efforts from the developers side, and it would probably results in less extensions being broken if a developer was on vacation when a new Gnome version came out.

2024-07-06 00:27:38

I boot #Gnome every now and then on my system.
Every time I hope that its extensions ecosystem has finally become usable.
And every time I log back into i3/Sway after realizing that it still sucks. And badly.
How’s it possible that one of the two mainstream desktop managers for Linux has such a bad extensions ecosystem that, at any point in time, 80% of the available extensions are broken? And some only work when all stars align?
How’s it possible that more than a decade down the line the Gnome Shell ecosystem is still stuck on extensions that are basically just patches for JavaScript files that only work if the code on your machine is exactly the same as the code on the extension developer’s machine?

2024-07-05 18:18:32

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#Slackware has been my main Linux driver from 2003 until 2010, but I eventually abandoned it out of frustration - Patrick's benevolent-dictator-for-life approach, combined with his "I only include the packages that I like" approach, his "I don't need a package manager, therefore nobody needs it" approach, and his "a new release will be ready only when I have enough time and I decide that it's ready" approach, gave me the impression that I was using some random dude's side project as my main driver.
Are there any reasons why someone would still want to use it in 2024?

2024-07-04 01:50:02

The #AI bubble is already starting to deflate.
Like with all other tech bubbles, it doesn’t mean that the technology itself is pointless. AI assistants are now widely used to get coding suggestions/completions, search complex codebases, control home devices through simple voice commands, generate stock cover images for blogs, add effects to Instagram posts, help analysts detect potential cases of fraud, perform sentiment analysis of text content, recognize dogs in pictures, etc.
But these are all tools that augment existing activities - they won’t revolutionize them, let alone replace existing workers in whole industries, any time soon.
I agree 100% with The Economist’s analysis, but I’m also baffled: this is the same newspaper that just two years ago wrote that 80% of the workforce was at risk of being replaced by AI - contributing to fuel one of the most inhumane and dumb seasons of layoffs that mankind has memory of.
As I predicted a while ago, the same employers that until recently fired large chunks of their workforce will soon have to come back to the market to hire them back at a higher price, after harming their own reputation - and the ones who actually benefited from this hype are the employers who didn’t buy into the hype, who held on their workforce, and who hired laid off top-notch Twitter/Google/Microsoft/Amazon talent at a discounted price.
I wish that progress didn’t have to always work this way. I wish that innovation could be gradual, and new technologies adopted responsibly once their benefits and limitations were understood. I wish that people who ask “but does your product have AI?” before deciding whether to buy it/fund it were pushed outside of my industry - those are clueless sociopaths who belong to gambling dens, not to technology.
Unfortunately, behind the invisible hand of the market there are many stupid, irrational, cynical, selfish and despicable human beings who are just waiting for smart people to build the silver bullet that makes them disgustingly rich, keeps printing money for them without any external intervention required, and makes everyone else unemployed and miserable in the process. And those are ready to bet absurd amounts of money on whatever unproven bullshit gives them the illusion of getting one step closer to this repugnant scenario.
So what’s supposed to be gradual progress that benefits humanity as a whole ends up being a continuous sequence of gold rushes and hype bubbles that do more harm than good, fueled by sociopath venture capitalists. And these are folks with a goldfish memory who apparently never learn from their past mistakes.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/02/what-happened-to-the-artificial-intelligence-revolution from The Economist

2024-07-01 21:40:00

After yesterday’s wedding, we’ve apparently become kind-of relatives…
(Don’t worry, I’ll keep bitching about Microsoft when they screw things up)
https://s3.nl-ams.scw.cloud/manganiello-social-media/f8b314b95959a0d7449159ed17248eacec86914891d4a1f905d69eed13241c61.jpg

2024-06-30 23:51:04

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the downside is that this alternate reality is dangerous for young people, especially those who haven’t yet received sufficient exposure to history. It makes them believe that colonial societies were much more equitable than they used to.

2024-06-30 18:45:45

I’m starting to believe that the “racial correctness” of some #Netflix series does much more harm than good.
New generations raised on series that show 18th century white aristocrats hanging out with blacks, or even a black queen, will probably believe that colonization and imperialism weren’t that bad, that they built an equitable society, and that the crimes against the indigenous populations were exceptions, not the norm.
In a society where history curricula in schools often get watered down, or worse where any references to the crimes of white imperialism are opposed by racist, ignorant and scumbag parents, Netflix’ racial correctness is nothing but a sophisticated form of whitewashing.

2024-06-30 03:46:28

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at first glance they look like silicate-rich rocks - silicon gives nice glass-like geometric shapes even to rocks and single-cell organisms on earth.

2024-06-30 03:43:58

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s/Mastodon/Pleroma|Akkoma/ and Lemmy

2024-06-30 02:48:46

I’ll never get how people can get used to living in America, let alone like it.
I asked my wife’s aunt how to get to the nearest supermarket, and got an “oh, it’s just 3 miles away, you’ll be there in a blink of an eye”.
*Only* 3 miles to get to the nearest grocery shop?? You know that I could be on the other side of Amsterdam if I drove 3 miles from my home - and on the way I’d bump into at least 30 different grocery stores?
And I’ve heard folks say “my office is actually quite near, just a 20 miles drive”. If I drove 20 miles I’d be nearly in Belgium or Germany! I guess I’ll make sure not to complain anymore about my 5 minutes cycling commute to my office…
And the state of public transport is something indecent even for a developing country. I’ve seriously seen better train and bus connectivity in Bangalore and Kyiv than between San Jose and San Francisco.
And let’s not even get started with the cycling infrastructure. Sometimes you see these barely 1 meter wide bike lanes pop out of nowhere, and disappear a few meters later, and on the way they may be dangerously crossed by turning lanes for vehicles. No wonder that I haven’t seen a single cyclist so far.
And how can you ever get used to having your neighbourhood’s mall as the only place to go and meet people, with no parks, bars or public spaces within a walking distance? I’ve asked some friends where they usually like to hangout with their mates, and got answers like “we like to go to this place 15 miles from here”. That’s approximately the distance between Amsterdam and The Hague! I can’t even imagine having to pick up a car and drive so long just to have a beer with friends.
Sure, there are exceptions too. Namely, downtown Manhattan, San Francisco, Washington and Boston. But those are all cities built before 1900 and the car tyranny. Everything else is just so badly designed, so badly isolated, so dull and so alike, and every place requires to replace your legs with wheels and tires, that I really struggle to see anything that even remotely looks like an American dream.

2024-06-28 14:29:29

I administer ~100-200 domains, and I’ve never had certificate issues in the past years. certbot run in a from does all the job for me.
It appals me that the 2nd most valuable company in the world struggles so much with certificate renewals instead - a problem largely solved even for small administrators.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/28/microsoft_security_certificate_expires/

2024-06-28 13:58:23

Yesterday’s presidential #debate was the saddest show I’ve seen in ages.
Any other candidate would have wiped #Trump. For his lies, his convictions, his attacks against democratic institutions, his empire built on tax fraud, his flirts with white supremacists and neo-Nazis (and porn stars), his efforts to dismantle reproductive rights, his big mess up with the Covid response, and so on.
And to be fair, even though Biden’s presidency hasn’t probably been the most stellar in American history, he’s been a quite decent president. His Covid response was competent, the economy thrived under him, unemployment hit one historical low after the other, more Americans than ever have become eligible for healthcare, inflation control was slow but steady and it worked (after overshooting with the initial Covid relief plan), the bruised relationships with European allies were recovered, and, except for the chaotic retreat from Afghanistan and the unconditional support for Israel despite evidence of genocide, his positions have been sensible and haven’t caused further international frictions in many delicate moments.
#Biden could have just clearly exposed what his presidency achieved, how his opponent is an unreliable narcissistic and serial liar who wouldn’t be fit to be president again, and today we would be talking of a smart strategy that pushed one of the greatest dangers to democracy in a defensive position.
Instead, I saw an old man who struggled even to complete his own sentences, who stammered and stumbled multiple times, who struggled even to defend his strongest arguments (like abortion rights, economic recovery and low unemployment), who couldn’t walk off the stage without some help, and who basically confirmed all the concerns about the current president being an old man in full cognitive decline.
Biden yesterday may have just paved the way to a second Trump term. The time to contain the damage and replace him with another candidate is NOW. And please no Kamala Harris. She’s been the biggest uncharismatic absent of these 4 years. It may be unrealistic to push forward someone like Sanders or Cortez in the current political climate, but get me at least Whitmer or Lady Obama.
Biden promised to be an experienced transition president that was supposed to raise a new democratic leadership. Not only he failed at it, but his unwillingness to let someome else run despite his mental decline may eventually make him the biggest responsible for throwing America into the arms of fascism for the next 20 years. If you were shocked by the 6th January attack against Congress, imagine what an emboldened Trump legitimated by a big political victory could do to American democracy. The Putinization of America is scaringly closer than many of us thought.

2024-06-21 23:36:54

It happened to everyone.
Your municipality inadvertedly the fiber cable that serves your block.
Your son watches Netflix while your wife is on Zoom and you’re gaming and the modem starts choking.
Your federated Mastodon server running in your cabinet starts saturating your upload rate (ok, maybe this is a bit less common).
For all the times when you wondered “*can’t my modem just restart by itself when the connection drops?*”, there’s now a simple Platypush script.
https://notes.fabiomanganiello.com/s/YL0Vfze8Q#

2024-06-21 13:17:15

A brief summary about the EU Chat Control:<li>End-to-end encryption only works if nobody other than the two parties in a conversation (including the government and the provider of the service itself), under no circumstances, can ever decrypt the encrypted traffic.</li><li>You can’t violate encryption only for a handful of use-cases without weakening it for everyone. Anyone who tells you otherwise, and tells you that a government backdoor or private keys signed by government agents are safe, is either a complete ignorant about math or technology (or both), or is acting in very bad faith.</li><li>If you break end-to-end encryption for one use-case, you break it for everyone. It’s like leaving your house key in the fob of your door and expect only your trusted friend to use it.</li><li>Every time someone says “but it’s to protect the kids” / “but it’s to protect you from terrorists”, be aware that they’re using an over-abused argument to convince you that degrading privacy for everyone is a requirement to keep you safe. And it’s a shitty argument because if I say “actually I’d rather keep my conversations private, without the government or companies with a business model based on surveillance snooping on them”, then someone will promptly react with “then you don’t want to protect the kids / then you support terrorists?”</li><li>The first time a government tried to make the argument that end-to-end encryption is a crime was in 1991, when Zimmermann first developed PGP and gave military-grade encryption to the masses. Not knowing what he should be incriminated for, the US government prosecuted him for terrorism and arms trade. These arguments have remained nearly the same for the past three decades.</li><li>“The government needs to protect you from criminals and abusers, and in order to protect you it needs to be able to access everybody’s digital content” is an argument as weak as “the police needs to protect you, and in order to protect you it needs to get a copy of everyone’s house keys”.</li><li>Just like police forces have many means to investigate criminal activities other than breaking into everybody’s houses, they also have many ways of investigating online crime without breaking everybody’s privacy.</li><li>If you say “I’ve got nothing to hide” about unauthorized actors spying into your email and messages, would you also say the same about strangers breaking into your house without your authorization? Privacy is all about deciding what you share with others.</li>
The simple truth is that governments don’t like encryption in the hands of citizens, they’ve never liked it, and they’ve spent the past three decades looking for ways of breaking it.
The persecution against Zimmermann and Snowden, the NSA backdoors, the deals under the table with the developers of large tech products, the anti-encryption legislation regularly pushed “to protect children from potential abusers” / “to protect citizens against terrorists”, are all actions that point to one single, simple truth: governments think that it’s their right to spy into everyone’s lives, and will keep fighting for that right, and they’ll keep trying to make you believe that it’s for your own good.
The EU Chat Control may have been temporarily withdrawn, but it’s far from dead. It’ll go through another round of consensus-seeking negotiations. And in July Hungary will start its 6 months turn at the head of the EU Commission. Orban is a deeply illiberal and despicable human being who would love to snoop over political opponents, and he’s already made it clear that he’ll try to get the Chat Control draft approved whatever the cost.
It’s our job as European citizens to keep protesting against this awful piece of legislation, to invite everyone to join the fight, and not to cast our vote for anyone who doesn’t explicitly oppose widespread institutional surveillance.
Sign the petition here https://stopchatcontrol.eu/ and keep applying pressure on our elected representatives.
If a legislation like Chat Control were to be approved, I’ll be more than happy to start publishing guides on how to use alternative methods to still get end-to-end encryption - the takeaway is that WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc. would no longer be safe, and you’ll have to get back to emails signed with PGP keys generated by yourself.
https://stackdiary.com/eu-council-has-withdrawn-the-vote-on-chat-control/

2024-06-20 12:18:08

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I could understand the criticism against Linux audio 20 years ago, when the only available solutions were OSS and ALSA and Jack still required some black magic to work properly. Or even 10 years ago, when the mutual incompatibility between OSS, ALSA, Jack and Pulseaudio was a source of nightmares.
But today? Pulseaudio is quite mature, and Pipewire provides a drop-in compatibility layer with basically any existing audio systems. IMHO today Linux audio is in a much, much better shape than even Windows and MacOS.

2024-06-18 10:55:24

for ... range = function() may be the construct that finally makes Go a slightly more interesting language to me.
I’ve never liked Go. First, because I’ve never trusted its affiliation to Google. Second, because it reduces expressivity below the minimum acceptable bar for a 21st century language. Programming in Go feels like programming in C, and having to write again and again the same boilerplate, without even functional or proper object-oriented paradigms to make the boilerplate less ugly and more reusable. It was supposed to make code safer and simpler by reducing the options available to developers, but it achieved the exact opposite: developers have to take care of errors handling every time, deinitialization, and more. Programming in Go feels like describing all the nuances in a Shakespeare play using only the vocabulary available to a toddler.
The new function generator + iterator paradigm however seems to fix one of the biggest problems: emulating what Python implements through context managers - initialization of the context, generators / mappers and deinitialization.
Which means that Go takes one more step towards becoming a modern language.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/GoIteratorsAndAvoidingMistakes

2024-06-17 14:42:42

Common sense is a set of claims that sensible people agree with, and sensible people are those who possess common sense.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/01/17/common-sense-is-not-actually-very-common

2024-06-17 14:26:17

In theory, I wouldn’t mind big tech using #AI to scrape my content at all.
From its very inception, the Web was meant to be open and machine-accessible. In the lack of proper widespread Web 3.0 semantic constructs (whose adoption was limited by big tech itself, as they would have democratized content extraction, and removed the need for services like Google’s), scraping is an inalienable part of such freedom.
But do I have the same freedom to scrape as big tech has?
Can I scrape content from my own Facebook timeline to train my model (after jumping all the client-side rendering hurdles that Facebook has put in place to prevent scraping) without resulting in my account being locked/banned?
Can I do the same with Twitter or Reddit maybe?
Can I systematically scrape the results of a YouTube page without resulting in my Google account being locked/banned or my IP being blacklisted?
Can I freely access the predictions of Copilot, which was trained on billions of freely available lines of open-source code, without having to pay for a subscription?
Can I freely scrape results from the Amazon store to build my own pricing model?
As long as the answer to all of these questions is *no*, I’ll block the shit out of whatever user agent has the *Bot* string inside.
And that’s only because *they* have ruined the game for everyone by twisting the rules in their advantage.

2024-06-17 13:03:23

Faiza Shaheen, the Labour candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, has also been suddenly deselected after the election was called.
Shaheen is an economist specialising in economic inequality, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, and widely regarded as a leading specialist in the field. She is just the kind of person Labour needs in its ranks given the widening wealth-poverty divide in Britain. Instead, she is out, and the circumstances of her deselection have caused much local controversy, with many local people resigning from the Labour Party as a result.
The added problem for Starmer is that the unease among many Labour supporters extends beyond the response to the carnage in Gaza to the many examples of Labour changing its policies. Most prominent are the watering down of previous climate commitments and the refusal to recognise the fundamental injustices of neoliberalism as we move even further into the era of runaway wealth.
Much of the election rhetoric so far has been about avoiding tax increases, despite independent analysts repeatedly pointing to the multiple crises across the public sector. There are issues in health, education, housing, child poverty and many other elements of life that would cost tens of billions of pounds a year to deal with adequately.
This seems a huge figure but isn’t when compared with the levels of wealth accumulated over the 40 years of the neoliberal transition. Last month’s Sunday Times Rich List is a salutary reminder, with the top five wealthiest people in the UK alone possessing £135bn. The richest 350 individuals and families together have £795bn, greater than the total GDP of Poland.
Given the appallingly bad performance of the Tory party in the campaign so far, these issues may not matter much. Labour may well still be on course for a majority of 150 seats or more. If that is achieved, though, there will be many hundreds of thousands if not millions of dissatisfied supporters after the election who no longer see the party as relevant to them.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/labour-left-wing-purges-affect-government-keir-starmer-jeremy-corbyn-faiza-shaheen/

2024-06-16 10:32:27

Dilution through #AI. It seems that, when you don't have sufficient content, the new trend is to ask generative AI to create that content for you. Even when it comes to sensitive statistics such as voting intentions.
Humans no longer pick up the phone when pollsters call them, thus political polls are often inaccurate because of small samples size.
We could try and ask ourselves why humans no longer pick the phone - maybe because most countries don't have their citizens reliable mechanisms to ask for their phone numbers not to receive targeted calls, plus with our phone numbers included in dozens of data leaks we've ended up in a situation where people receive multiple cold calls per day (from recruiters, energy companies, insurance companies, book publishers who call you to ask what you thought of a book you've bought, shops that aggressively inform you about offers etc.), we're all sick of them, we have no way out, so we just started blocking or dropping calls from unknown numbers?
Well, apparently this is a problem too hard to solve even for Harvard scholars.
Instead, their solution seems to involve, again, gen AI - probably because, like any other business, academia also receives more attention and funding when they sprinkle a bit of AI on top of their stuff, even when it solves no actual problem.
So, instead of asking humans who they would vote for, try to understand the nuances of their thoughts and concerns, let those messages bubble up to candidates so they can adjust their campaign to meet voters' demand, why not just segment humans into a bunch of shallow segments (the socialist Millennial, the conservative Boomer, the liberal city dweller, the rancorous rural voter who feels left behind...), have some AI agents replicate how those people would respond, and then just enjoy AI take down whatever is left of our democracy through feedback loops that exponentially enforce existing biases?
https://futurism.com/the-byte/harvard-experts-polling-ai

2024-06-15 21:32:53

Is there a currently supported way to install the Play Store on #microG?
I don’t use any Google apps on my phone, but other apps I use need the Play services to verify the status of the in-app purchase. Namely, Tasker, JuiceSSH, Solid Explorer and Nova Launcher. These are all apps that rely on in-app payments that IMHO have no comparable replacement on F-Droid (yet).
The latest version of microG doesn’t seem to have the FakeStore anymore, and the Phonesky project itself has been archived. The patched Play Store app from the NanoDroid repo is old and no longer compatible with the latest microG. And Aurora can manage paid apps, but not in-app payments.
I guess that if there was a way to simply use the official Play Store signature on Aurora, or any other Play Store clone, things should work, but I’m not sure if anything has changed on the Google Play verification side.

2024-06-15 09:07:55

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I don't think that, at least in my case, there's been a push given by Muslims who settled in the EU.
I joined my first protest for Palestinian statehood around the year 2001, long before the waves of Muslim migration to Europe.
The right thing to do is the right thing to do regardless of political and religious affiliations. The support to self-determination and the condemnation against military occupation must be held high, regardless if it's about Palestine, Ukraine, Taiwan or Myanmar.

2024-06-15 08:48:54

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Netanyahu is actually the guy that, at every single occasion, for the past two decades, has stated again and again that the two-State solution won't happen as long as he's in power. And he's also bragged on multiple occasions on how much he jeopardized the path to Palestinian statehood. And he's the one who's been opposing every single peace deal proposed in the past months.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/world/middleeast/netanyahu-biden-israel-palestinian-state.html
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-rejects-international-pressure-palestinian-state-2024-02-16/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/21/israels-netanyahu-doubles-down-on-opposition-to-palestinian-statehood
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-boasts-of-thwarting-the-establishment-of-a-palestinian-state-for-decades/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/21/middleeast/netanyahu-palestinian-sovereignty-two-state-solution-intl/index.html
Netanyahu is the real reason why Hamas exists. He and his fascist government are enemies of peace, and he actually has strong political motivations to get the conflict going as long as possible.
No peace will ever be possible in those lands as long as both Netanyahu and Hamas are in power.

2024-06-15 07:48:42

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https://progressives.social/@chargrille/112618540016653888
I'm not sure anymore who's the aggressor and who's the victim here.
Until Israel acknowledges a two State solution, stops evicting people from their houses, stops murdering 100 Palestinians for each murdered Jew, stops treating all Palestinians as terrorists, stops starving them, and retreats from Gaza, I don't see any big difference between them and Hamas. Both sides keep repeating "from the river to the sea", and for some reason you want me to believe that the terrorists are only on one side.

2024-06-15 07:25:34

Nobody in this world should take a single lesson about democracy from a country fully bent on banning books, denying reproductive rights, condoning police violence or letting people walk on streets with assault rifles.
The "Moms for liberty" (I can't think of a name more Orwellian than this) can't even see the irony of banning a book called "Ban this book", about a teenager who has to travel through dozens of libraries to find a banned book.
Redneck America is turning into fascist America, and we should stay far from it while it rots.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/11/florida-book-bans-book-banned

2024-06-13 14:02:19

“Around 37% of Gen Z and millennial consumers report drawing on savings or going into debt to finance their food purchases over the past year compared to 28% of Gen X and only 13% of boomer-plus consumers”.
Let that sink in: more than a third of adults under the age of 40 has to either draw from their savings or ask for a loan in order to afford to pay for their own food. And that’s three times more than the share of people that are no longer in the workforce.
And let’s not even mention how many of them can afford to buy their own house, like their parents did.
Capitalism is that economic system that benefited boomers and nobody else.
Boomers literally fucked up their own sons and grandsons, asked us to work harder than them and retire later, while getting much less than them in return. They’ve put us in a situation where many of us can’t even afford food without asking for bank loans, while many of them own 2-3 houses purchased for pennies, and in the meantime they keep voting for selfish parties with selfish programs that propose to screw us up even more.
The boomer generation and their cynical economic systems have been a disaster that made all of us poorer, dumber, more insecure and less likely to start a family.
The earlier this generational aberration is gone, the better.
https://phys.org/news/2024-06-consumers-food-prices-goods-ways.html

2024-06-13 12:06:54

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I definitely understand the cultural issue. But ActivityPub isn’t Mastodon.
I’ve lost track of the feuds I’ve had with Mastodon talibans. When it comes to search, discoverability, quotes, markdown/rich text, customizable post length (without having to change the source code), emoji reactions, interaction with other large platforms…
Whenever you propose a new feature, there will always be a Mastodon taliban who will call you a privileged techbro and will attack you for not doing enough for protecting <insert name of oppressed minority here>. There are indeed people who will oppose any change to their “safe island” and will be very aggressive towards anyone who doesn’t unconditionally support them.
I’m personally sick of this kind of extremists as well, and they are the ones who hold back the progress for the Fediverse as a whole.
But, again, ActivityPub ≠ Mastodon, even though Mastodon of course if the largest platform.
I’ve given up on getting anything changed on the Mastodon side, given up on wasting time maintaining my fork with features that will never be merged upstream anyways, and I’ve spun up my Akkoma instance instead.
And, guess what? You’ve got quotes here, as well as Markdown, authenticated API calls enabled by default, emoji reactions, customizable post length, and much more. All while remaining compatible with ActivityPub. If a feature isn’t supported on Mastodon, then Mastodon instances simply won’t render it, but they’ll render at least the basic text.
I believe that BlueSky could have followed a similar pattern. Embrace ActivityPub and work on extending it, regardless of what the Mastodon talibans think. The folks who work on Pleroma, Akkoma, Calckey, and probably even Threads, would have probably supported their efforts, as we all share many objectives. Some competition against Mastodon’s opaque and top-down conservative approach would have been more than welcome.
Instead, we’ve now got another protocol that is basically 90-95% ActivityPub, and developers will have to work hard to bridge.

2024-06-12 22:14:40

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I’ve often been critical about Bluesky, but not because of Jack. After leaving Twitter, he’s been throwing money at anything that breathes without managing to focus on a single thing for more than a few months. I knew that was only a matter of time before he lost interest in such a demanding effort as a new distributed social media protocol (not a centralized platform with a centralized app that you can roll out within a couple of months).
My criticism is motivated by the fact that I really don’t see the point for another protocol. ActivityPub has been around for a while, it’s very mature and widely adopted. To me somebody coming and saying “hey, I’ve made this new distributed social product based on this new social protocol, we’ll figure out how to interact with ActivityPub later” sounds like somebody coming and saying “hey, I’ve made this new Web browser based on an entirely alternative protocol to HTTP, we’ll figure out how to interact with traditional HTTP servers later”. I want competition when it comes to *products*, but I don’t think that it’s a good thing when it comes to *open protocols*. Especially when 95% of the features of ATProto are basically a rip off of ActivityPub, and the remaining 5% (like authenticated and signed API calls) could have easily added on top of the existing ActivityPub specification.

2024-06-12 20:35:27

I don’t agree with some of Dave Karpf’s points in this article: of course an essay pushes for some arguments over some others, and of course a political essay is mainly targeted to those who already sympathize with that political ideology. But some of his criticism of Varoufakis’ views over tech giants is quite spot on.
Varoufakis makes some very good points and has great rhetorical skills, but he indeed often sees the world only through the lenses of Marxist class struggles. His analysis of economic systems invariably produce the same orthodox Marxist diagnosis - problems are caused by inequality and class struggles, and the only thing that can restore a level playing field is a revolutionary escalation.
I don’t agree however with Karpf’s point that the rent-seeking behaviour of Amazon, Apple and the likes is just a slightly worse version of the malls of the 1990s - which were seen as a triumph of capitalism and consumerism, not as a return to feudalism. Malls never charged a 30% commission to shop owners over each sale. Malls didn’t buy all the land around to prevent shop owners from going somewhere else. The market of malls was actually competitive and relative healthy, and with relatively low entry barriers, not dominated only by a handful of players that had an absolute monopoly in their own segment and raised entry barriers as high as they could.
Malls were seen as a triumph of capitalism. But had we allowed them to grow without regulations and constraints, with merger over merger to vacuum all the potential competitors off the market, had we allowed them to buy all the land around them until there was no option for those who needed a piece of land than to rent it through them (or lease it “as-a-service”), had we allowed only 1-2 remaining brands to extort 30% of commission from vendors that were left with no alternatives, I have little doubt that today we would probably live in a world where Mall of America is a multi-trillion company that owns everything - from retail shops and franchises, to book stores, to news outlets, to IT infrastructure, and everything in between. Everybody would pay their rent to them for using any services that they need, with no alternatives available. Which is exactly the definition of a feudal economic system based on exploitation, with no incentives for innovation nor any risk-taking strategies. Which is exactly the situation where we are today with Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia. The writer doesn’t take an extra step to outline the next obvious corollary: capitalist systems, when unconstrained, consistently gravitate towards feudal oligarchies.
Karpf is right however when he says that a socialist-style revolution isn’t necessarily the only way out. Bold US regulation and monopoly break-up, along the lines of what was done in the past century by breaking up and constraining Standard Oil, and later AT&T, also proved to be effective. Or bold EU regulation along the lines of the GDPR first and the DMA then. Or lawsuits between titans along the lines of Epic v Apple. Or employees themselves pushing to unionize in spite of the ostracism from their management. But his analysis falls short of acknowledging the next corollary: the liberal and socialist pushes against big tech are complementary faces of the same coin.
Socialists criticize big tech because of the inequalities it creates, because of its absolute control over the means of production, because of its rent-seeking behaviour, and because those in charge are only accountable to those who provided them with capital.
Liberals criticize big tech because they believe in free markets where competition for customers drives businesses to innovate and build better products, and without that level playing field there are no incentives to prevent market consolidation and atrophy, and consumers left with worse products and no choice.
Those two economic models may disagree on many things, but they strongly agree on one thing: criticism against economic systems that revolve around feudal lords, as both the systems were born on the ashes of feudalism. The fact that criticism of big tech seems to unite so much both liberals and socialists is a strong indication that big tech may have many features of the pre-capitalist system that both socialism and liberalism were supposed to replace. Their arguments should therefore be treated as complementary, not as mutually exclusive.
https://links.fabiomanganiello.com/view/54

2024-06-12 15:06:27

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IMHO most of the criticism against OO is unfounded. Organizing your code into components with their own methods and leveraging inheritance, polymorphism etc. is actually something very useful.
Problems arise when:<li>Domain boundaries are not properly drawn, so you end up with objects that are collections of a bit of everything - I’ve seen plenty of classes that are supposed to only model objects but eventually end up also implementing serialization, relational storage, interaction with Kafka streams, and maybe also some logic to make your coffee.</li><li>The Java approach is applied to the letter. I put my blame on Java because it created a generation of developers forged in dogmas such as “everything must be a class, and every file must contain exactly one class”. You then end up with things that are conceptually supposed to be functions, or compositions of functions, being squeezed into unholy constructs such as factories, builders, adapters, builders of factories, adapters of builders, through infinite layers of abstraction that only benefited a few authors of fat design pattern books in the 2010s, just because everything must be an object that you need to label in some way.</li>

2024-06-12 14:55:17

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Milan and Rome are on 55th and 57th respectively, on par with cities like LA, Chicago or Boston (the fact that some European cities are on par with North American cities when it comes to sustainability isn’t usually a good sign).
Around the bottom of the list there are mostly African and south-east Asian cities that still rely a lot on coal, so at least Italy is above those.
https://s3.nl-ams.scw.cloud/manganiello-social-media/44e77af9100fd37fe85d817651f9c3e6168a3f95fdd8396e5100a17f5fcb13d1.png

2024-06-12 13:32:38

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in seems to me more like a sampling decision than an exclusion based on data.
Stockholm ranks 12th, but no other Swedish cities are on the chart (same for Copenhagen and Oslo for DK and NO respectively). It looks like they only picked the most populated cities in each country, weighted by total country population.

2024-06-12 11:17:24

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in Amsterdam’s case I think a big factor has been the [2050 climate neutrality roadmap](https://carbonneutralcities.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Amsterdam-Climate-Neutral-2050-Roadmap_12072019-1.pdf ), which is among the most ambitious around and has already slashed CO2 emissions back to the levels around 1990.
However both Amsterdam and Rotterdam [score low on the people pillar](https://images.connect.arcadis.com/Web/Arcadis/%7B8dc89ba8-072e-4571-b752-3228076e5b4c%7D_The-Arcadis-Sustainable-Cities-Index-2024.pdf ) (42th and 44th spot out of 100 cities). The Netherlands scores low in general on welfare state, income equality, support for families, house affordability, and when it comes to public transport the situation has been consistently getting worse since 2020 because the government has lost its interest in running railways, and has decided to let NS rot and passengers figure out alternative means of transportation.
However both make up with their ambitious plans for cutting emissions and also for figuring out the market incentives side. When weighted against the low scores on the people pillar, it indeed highlights the low ambition of the sustainability plans of other cities.
https://s3.nl-ams.scw.cloud/manganiello-social-media/c113396ddd4b2f56d258cfc179045ed2449cbb7557a59404944a81bf76d6bae2.png

2024-06-12 10:06:44

Two Dutch cities lead the 2024 sustainability index - and the whole top 10 is composed only of European cities.<li>Amsterdam 🇳🇱</li><li>Rotterdam 🇳🇱</li><li>Copenhagen 🇩🇰</li><li>Frankfurt 🇩🇪</li><li>Munich 🇩🇪</li><li>Oslo 🇳🇴</li><li>Hamburg 🇩🇪</li><li>Berlin 🇩🇪</li><li>Warsaw 🇵🇱</li><li>London 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿</li>
https://dutchreview.com/news/rotterdam-amsterdam-most-sustainable-cities-in-the-world/

2024-06-11 08:23:58

The shifting baseline problem, a.k.a. the slowly boiled frog.
It applies to privacy like it applies to fish populations or climate change.
When your measured metrics consistently degrade over a long time span, comparing today’s values to the values from a couple of years ago is likely to miss the big picture.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/online-privacy

2024-06-10 22:59:35

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Just found this milestone, I guess I can respond my question myself.
Looks like there's still some work to do - that "dbus activation of bluetooth under systemd fails" issue in particular doesn't seem very promising because it most likely means that the Gnome/Plasma native Bluetooth clients will break apart.
I'll take a look around if I can help with something - systemd support on PostmarketOS has really been the single thing standing between me and installing Linux on all of my old devices.
https://gitlab.com/groups/postmarketOS/-/milestones/22#tab-issues

2024-06-10 22:43:09

I completely missed this post from the folks at #PostmarketOS finally announcing #systemd support.
I just so happen to have a new primary Android driver, so my loyal #OnePlus 6 can be used for all the Linux experiments without fears of losing access to my online banking or government apps.
systemd support means that I finally have a way to run all of my services on mobile without having to convert them into OpenRC scripts or using polyfills. And also that all Gnome/Plasma things can work without hammering too much the original scripts.
Since the article is from March, has there been any progress on getting systemd support merged upstream, or would I still have to use custom images? Any feedback from users who have tried it?
https://postmarketos.org/blog/2024/03/05/adding-systemd/

2024-06-07 15:17:53

Make personal data as fungible as money, and when it comes to corruption it’s likely to replace money itself.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/06/07/1450210/bangladeshi-police-agents-accused-of-selling-citizens-personal-information-on-telegram

2024-06-06 15:28:43

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I’ve worked in AI in many forms for many years, and I’m quite positive that eventually it will turn out to be a net positive force. It’s what happens in the transient until that new stability point that worries me.
What worries me is that it’ll honestly take AI a few more years of pure R&D to reach a true maturity point. Blockers on the way:<li>Scaling issues. We’ve realized that statistical neural-like models are great at solving many problems, but they are an efficiency and scalability nightmares. My kid only had to see a couple of cats before being able to tell the difference between a cat and a dishwasher, but it took some of the top-level models in use today a lot of energy-intensive training on millions of carefully labelled pictures. We can do better. We would honestly need a few more years of R&D to figure out how to solve this problem - add symbolic-like reasoning to the current models? invest more on small modular models rather than general-purpose huge models? All ideas are on the table.</li><li>Supervision issues. We don’t know why exactly a model may favour an outcome over another other than “it’s statistically more likely based on the data it’s been trained on”. And we don’t know the full implications of such a large-scale usage of models that we don’t even fully understand. We need a few more years of pure R&D with everyone in the field - politicians, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, engineers etc. - just to get things right.</li>
Unfortunately, both things are unlikely to happen if everybody has incentives in squeezing as much milk as possible out of today’s cow for as long as possible.
Product/business managers in companies of all sizes keep repeating “we need to use AI in our products” because everybody up the chain has incentives in saying so. And it’s not even clear what problems exactly they want to solve. If everybody has incentives to keep the hype on, then funding and attention is unlikely to go to those who are trying to get things right.

2024-06-06 11:04:48

I feel sorry for Gen Z women. I’d rather be lesbian than dating one of those conservative and ignorant jerks that many young men have become nowadays.
All generations have so far been more liberal in their youth than their parents and grandparents. Except for Gen Z men. Two decades ago there wasn’t a significant gap between men and women who considered themselves liberal rather than conservative. That gap has now grown to 25%.
All generations in the past century have been more educated than those that preceded them. Except for Gen Z men. 46% of EU women under 30 have a university degree or are achieving one, versus 35% of men - and the gap has doubled in the past 20 years.
On top of that, 28% of Gen Z men fail basic reading and comprehension tests. That’s against 18% of women. Let that sink in: nearly a third of young men today struggle even to process the information in a newspaper.
All generations in the past century have been more sensible to topics such as fairness and equal opportunities than the ones that preceded them. Except for Gen Z men. Those under 30 are more likely than those over 65 to respond affirmatively to statements such as “advancing women’s and girls’ rights has gone too far because it threatens men’s and boys’ opportunities”.
It doesn’t threaten your opportunities, you dumb fucks. You guys have just become too dumb, too isolated and too full of vitriol to be of any use in a functioning society: that’s why you’re left behind. Go back to school, learn how to read, learn the basics of logical reasoning, learn what empathy means, spend less time poisoning your mind with incel bullshit on social media, and then you can talk about opportunities.
The extinction of our species may eventually be triggered by men who have become just too stupid, too conservative and too self-entitled to get any chance of being attractive to someone of the opposite gender - let alone a chance at reproduction.
https://links.fabiomanganiello.com/share/666193637cd841.69511467

2024-06-06 09:16:23

“Some 90% to 99% of the MDMA produced in the Netherlands is exported to other countries. And if you move it to the soft drugs list, it will become more attractive for criminals to produce MDMA here. Crime is really a big problem.”
Quite the opposite.
Production is in the hands of organized crime because the drug is illegal. Crime will always have an absolute monopoly on whatever the State deems illegal.
Legalize it, control it and tax it, and let regular businesses take over criminal businesses.
Then the problem will lie squarely with countries that don’t have a legal framework for drugs and therefore prefer to open themselves to foreign criminals. It’s their problem, not ours.
The article also mentions that more research is needed. Then we’d better lower the entry barriers to researchers - procuring hard drugs for scientific purposes and administering them to volunteers in controlled trials is a bureaucratic hell that often discourages research.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2024/06/mdma-is-relatively-safe-but-must-stay-illegal-commission-says/

2024-06-06 08:21:15

“Yes, #Windows #Recall will take automatic screenshots of whatever you do on your computer and store them, it’ll require a computer with at least 16 GB btw, but hey it’s not a privacy nightmare as you folks say! All the data is stored locally, it won’t go to Microsoft’s cloud!”
Sure, it’s stored locally in an unencrypted SQLite database. An unencrypted database that contains all the activities the user has ever done on the computer btw. I’m sure that no hackers, no lawyers, no intelligence services and no scammers will *ever* think of accessing that, right?
Enshittification has reached a point where I can’t help the feeling of throwing up in the face of these clueless and arrogant business and marketing people who have taken over my industry and are dismantling one block at the time whatever people smarter than the have built over decades.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/microsoft_research_recall/

2024-06-05 10:37:37

“Digital creator” on #Instagram seems to mean “I post pictures of my ass and I have thousands of people following me to see them” nowadays.

2024-06-05 07:36:08

Unjustified fear of technology is almost as old as mankind.
A drawing from 1900 criticizing the adoption of electricity.
https://s3.nl-ams.scw.cloud/manganiello-social-media/876b33fb4e30e72afa2c800faa9957c7e9e33593f1c6fc91e50245eceabd433e.jpg

2024-06-04 09:11:10

It’s been almost 3 months since #Threads joined the Fediverse family. A quick overview of what changed since then:<li>The hordes of Nazi/homophobic users from the outside world into our safe islands are nowhere to be seen. I was insulted multiple times a couple of months ago, along the lines of “if you don’t proactively defederate Threads then you’re an asshole who does nothing to protect the marginalized minorities on the Fediverse from the outside world!“. Well, guess what, it turns out that not everyone outside of our comfort zone is a pathological jerk craving for psychological abuse. It turns out that, again, the “oppressed minorities” Fediverse police over-reacted. And it turns out that the whole Fedipact thingy was nothing but collective hysteria.</li><li>The Threads-Fedi sync is still an opt-in feature, and only available to accounts in selected countries. And posting responses from the Fediverse to a Threads post isn’t supported yet. I’m not sure if they are ever going to change that, but given the lack of announcements in these months I’m wondering if anybody at Meta is even bothering to work on this integration, or if it was just about a loud announcement followed by abandonment - Google’s favourite product strategy.</li><li>Threads itself, after reaping the initial novelty benefits, is losing momentum.</li>
Result: I added a couple of Threads accounts to my list, I see their content on my timeline every now and then, I can’t even interact with it, end of the story.

2024-06-03 11:27:10

📢 **New #blog article**
This is the third article I write on #voice #technology in #Platypush. I wrote the latest one in 2020, but unfortunately all the voice products I described there (Snowboy, DeepSpeech, Mycroft, AVS…) are now gone.assistant.google
is still there (but I don’t know for how long, as the underlying Assistant library was deprecated back in 2019), but Platypush 1.0 has also added two more integrations to the mix:<li><code class="inline">assistant.openai</code></li><li><code class="inline">assistant.picovoice</code></li>
These are based on the OpenAI voice+GPT APIs and the Picovoice products respectively, and when combined they can offer a very modern and flexible voice assistant interface.
The article also describes how to create your custom action hooks to control your devices and services, train assistants with context, customize voice models, play custom conversation sounds, handle voice intents and offline transcriptions, and run multiple assistants on the same device.
Happy read!
https://blog.platypush.tech/article/The-state-of-voice-assistant-integrations-in-2024

2024-06-02 07:21:09

Whether it’s Russian or Chinese scum, the world has really decided that it wants a world war.
Just like the previous two, it’s going to be between declining empires trying to grab land that doesn’t belong to them, versus everyone else.
Just like Ukraine is not Russia, #Taiwan is not China, it doesn’t want to be China, and it’ll never be China. And it’s never even been China either. Enough with calling them separatists. None of those alive in the island today has ever lived under Chinese rule. Taiwan has just had elections overwhelmingly won, again, by those who don’t want to have anything to do with their former cousins: is it so hard to respect?
China is a declining power, for political, economic and demographic reasons, and declining powers ought to learn the lesson from history that aggressive territorial expansion isn’t going to buy them more time - it’s only going to accelerate their isolation and decline.
The world should stand behind Taiwan in this moment, and make it clear that the dragon can’t afford to attack them without coming out with shattered bones.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/02/chinas-defence-chief-repeats-threat-of-force-against-taiwanese-independence

2024-05-31 22:23:23

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as my solution would be easy: time().
This isn’t the first painful migration of timestamps that I’ve had to deal with. And I’m starting to ask myself why we even need abstractions like Instant and datetime when everything could be stored as a time(). It can be converted on the fly to whatever the user wants to see, but all the logic and all the comparisons should probably *always* be between UNIX timestamps.

2024-05-31 20:47:02

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fully agree on that. And that’s apparently the current stance of the #Python community as well - dt.now(dt.UTC) forces the user to always specify the offset.
But all the versions of Python before 3.12 had the opposite approach. now and utcnow would always give you offset-naive objects unless you passed a tzinfo. I had a hunch that at some point things had to change, and that migrating would have been painful, but I guess that I’m realizing only now how painful it’s going to be.
And btw I’ve never understood why dt.now(), still to this day, always returns an offset-naive datetime. Like how hard it is to just fetch the tzinfo from the machine and fill it up? Literally all Python’s issues with datetime comparisons would have never existed had this approach been taken from day 1.

2024-05-31 20:30:21

What a mess with #Python’s utcnow deprecation.datetime.datetime.utcnow()
has been deprecated since Python 3.12. And I see why. I’ve always wondered why that method for some reason returned a timezone-naive datetime. Like if I’m asking for UTC, can’t you just set tzinfo to UTC, before I accidentally do a comparison with a datetime.datetime.now() (which is timezone-naive) in another method and suddenly end up comparing a timestamp in L.A. with one in London, without any interpreter mechanisms to differentiate between the two?
The officially suggested alternative is to go for a datetime.datetime.now(datetime.UTC) instead, so explicitly set the UTC timezone if you need a monotonous datetime object.
It’s a sensible implementation that should already have been implemented years ago.
Except that datetime.UTC is a macro introduced only in Python 3.11. On older versions:<code>>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.UTC
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: module 'datetime' has no attribute 'UTC'</code>
So the officially supported solution actually only works with Python versions released since October 2022. They could have at least suggested datetime.tzinfo.utc, as that one at least has been around for a while.
But the biggest issue is how badly it breaks back-compatibility with everything that has been written (and stored) before.
Take this code for example:<code>import datetime as dt
...
token = SessionToken(...)
token.expires_at = (
dt.datetime.utcnow() + dt.timedelta(days=365)
)
db.save(token)
...
if token.expires_at < dt.datetime.utcnow():
raise ExpiredSession(...)</code>
You’ve been running this code for a while, you’ve created a bunch of users, and since you used utcnow all those timestamps have been stored as offset-naive UTC.
Now you modify all the references of utcnow with now(dt.UTC). What happens?
Well, if your code was running with timestamps that are generated on the fly, everything should go ok. It’s a tz-aware to tz-aware comparison. But what happens when you load from the db your token that was saved with the previous, tz-naive utcnow implementation? Well, your code breaks all of a sudden:<code>TypeError: can't compare offset-naive and offset-aware datetimes</code>
I’m not sure if everyone within the community is already aware of the consequences of the new implementation, and that migrating to Python >= 3.12 should be considered a breaking change - especially if your code deals with persisted datetime objects. Sometimes you have to break eggs in order to make an omelette, I guess.
@npub1k55…6pef

2024-05-31 20:28:07

2024-05-31 20:23:52

What a mess with #Python’s utcnow deprecation.datetime.datetime.utcnow()
has been deprecated since Python 3.12. And I see why. I’ve always wondered why that method for some reason returned a timezone-naive datetime. Like if I’m asking for UTC, can’t you just set tzinfo to UTC, before I accidentally do a comparison with a datetime.datetime.now() (which is also timezone-naive) a couple of lines down and suddenly end up comparing a timestamp in L.A. with one in London?
The officially suggested alternative is to go for a datetime.datetime.now(datetime.UTC) instead, so explicitly set the UTC timezone if you need a monotonous datetime object.
It’s a sensible implementation that should already have been implemented years ago.
Except that datetime.UTC is a macro introduced only in Python 3.11. On older versions:<code>>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.UTC
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: module 'datetime' has no attribute 'UTC'</code>
So the officially supported solution actually only works with Python versions released since October 2022. They could have at least suggested datetime.tzinfo.utc, as that one at least has been around for a while.
But the biggest issue is how badly it breaks back-compatibility with everything that has been written (and stored) before.
Take this code for example:<code>import datetime as dt
...
token = SessionToken(...)
token.expires_at = (
dt.datetime.utcnow() + dt.timedelta(days=365)
)
db.save(token)
...
if token.expires_at < dt.datetime.utcnow():
raise ExpiredSession(...)</code>
You’ve been running this code for a while, you’ve created a bunch of users, and since you used utcnow all those timestamps have been stored as offset-naive UTC.
Now you modify all the references of utcnow with now(dt.UTC). What happens?
Well, if your code was running with timestamps that are generated on the fly, everything should go ok. It’s a tz-aware to tz-aware comparison. But what happens when you load from the db your token that was saved with the previous, tz-naive utcnow implementation? Well, your code breaks all of a sudden:<code>TypeError: can't compare offset-naive and offset-aware datetimes</code>
I’m not sure if everyone within the community is already aware of the consequences of the new implementation, and that migrating to Python >= 3.12 should be considered a breaking change - especially if your code deals with persisted datetime objects.

2024-05-31 09:58:49

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I also don’t feel very comfortable with [Mozilla’s stance on the topic](https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manifest-v2-march-2024-update/ ) either:
> *“Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future. And even if we re-evaluate this decision at some point down the road, we anticipate providing a notice of at least 12 months for developers to adjust accordingly and not feel rushed.”*
I really don’t like that “*even if we re-evaluate … 12 months notice…*“ part. I know that the folks at Mozilla may have the best intentions, but with all Chromium-based browsers leaving V2 behind Mozilla will basically become the sole maintainer of the old Manifest API. Brave at some point announced that they’ll keep supporting it as well, but 1. I don’t trust anything that comes out of Brendan Eich’s mouth, and 2. if they decide to keep supporting V2 then they’ll basically have to maintain their own fork of Chromium that keeps the old API.
I feel like Google used its weight played the long game quite well here. Of course we all know why V3 came out. Of course nobody likes it. But hey, what are you going to do? Maintain your own fork of V2 without having even a fraction of Google’s resources, and while serving ~5% of the market? Hmm…

2024-05-31 08:42:55

> "_We understand migrations of this magnitude can be challenging_"
No, this specific migration should have never happened in the first place.
Manifest V3 is an absolute disaster that makes developers' lives hard for no reason other than Google being desperate to crackdown on adblockers.
No additional security. No additional features. Nothing to make the pill sweeter. Just Google abusing its dominant position in the browser market to relentlessly push for years for a new standard that makes HTTP requests and intercepting requests at runtime ridiculously hard, so it can tame uBlock and friends.
Manifest V3 is a technological abomination that greatly limits what extensions can do, and it should have never seen the light of the day.
I will keep hating it with every single cell in my body, and I wish very unhappy lives to the Google employees who fought so much to push this technological abortion.
My browser extensions will stubbornly remain Manifest V2 only. Even if that means being compatible only with Firefox. And I hope that the folks at Mozilla won't get strange ideas and will keep supporting Manifest V2 forever.
https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/manifest-v2-phase-out-begins.html

2024-05-30 12:41:01

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indeed, like in all the cases where generational fuckups are the byproduct of the previous generations fucking up the next ones, I wouldn't put the blame entirely on them. But at least we should all acknowledge the scale of the fuckup and try to mitigate the impact if we still can. When experts say that Gen-Z is a generation deeply traumatized by being raised in the era of cynical late-stage ultra-capitalism and widespread/normalized social media addiction, I feel like we're actually just starting to get an initial taste of how bad and bitter the reality actually is.

2024-05-30 11:39:48

That's it.
You raise a whole generation with social network interactions squeezed in 140 characters, videos squeezed in 30 seconds, short stories that disappear after a few hours, songs that start directly with the main hook so people won't skip them after 10 seconds of streaming, and this is what you get.
Every single product made by every single business in the past 10 years has rewarded short attention span, low-quality interactions, scroll-and-move-on behaviour, immediate over delayed rewards, and this is what you get.
A completely fucked up, self-entitled and spoiled generation with the attention span of a goldfish who dares to say that a song should never be longer than a TikTok video.
Fuck you, shallow Gen-Z.
https://musictech.com/news/music/pinkpantheress-songs-2-minutes-30/

2024-05-29 11:27:46

#Alpine #Linux support for #RiscV is huge!
I’ve now got the right incentives to try and toy with some Risc-V boards and try and run my containers there.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/29/alpine_linux_320_released/

2024-05-28 21:48:45

The batteries. The batteries for the sensors that measure the uplift of the soil under the center of the most dangerous active supervolcano in the world. How can someone on earth even *think* of stealing them?
I wanted to be in the room where this conversation happened. “Hey, I’m bored tonight, shall we go and steal the lithium batteries that power the Campi Flegrei monitoring network?”
https://www.isnews.it/2024/05/28/terremoti-nei-campi-flegrei-rubate-le-batterie-e-vandalizzati-i-sensori-ingv/

2024-05-28 10:51:39

The home of the 5000-year-old #Yamnaya civilization, ancestors of most of the people currently alive in Europe, US, and all the way down to Iran and India, has finally been pinpointed in the valley laying between the Dniepr and Don rivers - just in the middle of Eastern Ukraine’s current battlefield. It was most likely a branch of the original Indo-European communities that lived in the Caucasian steppe.
From the Ukrainian steppes, these people spread throughout the whole continent within a couple of centuries, arrived in the UK about 4500 years ago, carried with them the language that evolved into the languages spoken by most of today’s people (from Latin, to Norse, to Germanic, to Sanskrit), the Y chromosome carried by most of men alive today, and probably also tolerance to lactose - and also susceptibility to genetic diseases like multiple sclerosis.
It’s sad to think that this may be the last archaeological finding in those lands for a while, as future archaeological missions will probably have to dig through km of landmines.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/05/05/archaeologists-identify-the-birthplace-of-the-mysterious-yamnaya

2024-05-28 07:20:30

“You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”
#Israel has employed against the #ICC the same intimidation tactics employed by criminals in my home town, and so far got away with it.
Calling Israel a mafia State that ought to be eradicated in its current form is a civic duty.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/28/israeli-spy-chief-icc-prosecutor-war-crimes-inquiry?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

2024-05-27 21:50:44

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> is there any standard container format for such things?
Not that I'm aware of, but I'd love to be proved wrong.
My point is basically that whenever a post with a link is shared on a social media platform, that social media platform usually takes the extra step of doing an HTTP request to that link - usually to render page title and main image, or render a dynamic preview if it's a link to another post on the same platform.
Now imagine if platform A had a way to tell website B "hey, I'm a social media platform, not a browser, I'm trying to parse this link from your web server to get a preview; if you also speak my language, could you please return this a response in this format filled with this metadata, and optionally with these API links to instruct my user how to interact with your content (comment, like, share etc.), instead of returning some raw HTML that I'm supposed to scrape anyway?"
How this could be done is an implementation detail - via HTTP `Accept` header, through separate machine-readable links exposed over `/.well-known/*`, through an entirely separate link-to-metadata API etc., but it *can* be definitely done IMHO.
Then supporting also RST/Markdown output, or HTML with limited tags / BBcode style, should be relatively straightforward if the target website clearly tells the requester which is the right content type for each fragment of metadata.
Of course, the only blocker against such an implementation is that major social media platforms would see it as a backdoor for scraping. But again, it's a business/political problem, not a technological one.

2024-05-27 11:46:52

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image formats for sharing what is supposed to be plain-text content (or Markdown at best) are an accessibility nightmare - not to mention how they make content less searchable/discoverable, and how they affect performance (a few KB/MB of JPEG/PNG content exchanged instead of a few bytes of text).
> Besides plain text, I’m not aware of a good meaning-embed rich-text preservation standard for snippet exchange.
Well except for Mastodon, intra-platform quotes are supported by basically every social platform out there. They all offer a way of sharing/quoting a post, which will be fetched and rendered at runtime when the quoting post is rendered.
But Mastodon doesn’t support quotes for ideological reasons, and all other platforms don’t support quotes/embeds outside of their own walled gardens. So we’ve ended up with the proliferation of screenshots to fill the gap.
From a purely technological perspective, I don’t see the reason why the response to a query to a link within a post couldn’t be rendered as some kind of multipart form, with an attachments field containing a list of payloads, content types and roles (e.g. body, quote, media…).
It doesn’t even to be an ActivityPub thing, it’s simple enough that all platforms could adopt it tomorrow if they want, and enable posts to be shared and quoted consistently across all of them.

2024-05-26 23:31:07

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I've been running my mail server for a while by now.
In my experience Gmail isn't a big problem. I mean, it's quite strict about DKIM/DMARC/SPF/RDNS stuff, it wants to wait a bit before trusting a new server, and one single mistake is enough to get you blacklisted for a while. But if you know your 21st century postmaster fundamentals, and you aren't on a Spamhaus list, you can get your mails delivered to Gmail 99.9% of the times.
The real problem out there is Microsoft IMHO. Even complying with all the best practices out there often only results in them "temporarily whitelisting" your domain. Microsoft has sent even seasoned postmasters to the hell and back with their illogical policies. And of course their support is a complete black hole - the only feedback I got once for them, after asking why they would periodically blacklist one of my domains, despite having good reputation and no issues with any other mail services, was that "they can't disclose their acceptance policies with other postmasters".
Microsoft is the real reason why people who would have all the skills to set up and run their own mail servers eventually have to resort to paying money for SMTP relays like Mailhop, Mailgun, Proton, Tutanota etc. - just to have the piece of mind that Outlook/Hotmail addresses won't start rejecting emails out of the blue. SMTP relays are literally the "Microsoft tax" for daring to run your own mail server.

2024-05-26 15:45:42

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OpenStreetMaps (it also has a nice Nextcloud integration), paired with Organic Maps and Magic Earth on Android.

2024-05-26 14:30:56

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> they never index anything you write on the internet
That’s a bit of a wide definition of “usage”. Anyone can run a scraper to index my blog or posts, but that doesn’t mean that I’m “using” their product.
Same goes for writing to GMail - people email me on my private server, but I wouldn’t say that they are “users” of my server.
> you never use a browser that has google code in it
That’s again a wide definition of “usage”. I mitigate this by using Firefox, which isn’t based on the Chromium engine - unless the definition of “usage” is “anything that has code committed by a Google employee in it”, but then we fall into the “purity for the sake of purity” argument.
> you never use websites that use google analytics or google fonts
Both of them are blocked by NoScript, and analytics are blocked on the DNS side before they can even reach one of my devices anyway.
All this to say that if by “usage” we mean “any potential data point that Google can collect about us, even through indirect usage”, then I agree with your statement. Even if I were super paranoid and sealed, my neighbour with a Google Wi-Fi router or an Android device part of the Find My Device network could already made me an “indirect user”.
But my definition of “usage” is usually a bit tighter and it involves mostly “direct usage”. On that front, I think that we can all try and play our little part.

2024-05-26 13:50:21

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my life is basically Google-free - with the exception of a phone that still runs vanilla Android for my banking apps.
It is possible ;)

2024-05-26 13:48:52

An interesting analysis of the #LinkTax.
To be fair, for as much as I like to lash against #BigTech, I've always criticized the link tax in the format it's often implemented.
Taxing another website, no matter how big, for sharing a link to yours (or for letting theirs users share a link to yours) is a violation of everything that the Web is supposed to be.
It's a desperate attempt from news outlets to get money out of tech giants that focused on the wrong problem and proposed the wrong solution.
Their argument was flawed from the very beginning: it assumes that readers that see the title of a page on Facebook or Google won't click on the link to read more because they've already read the title on Facebook or Google. And they ignore that, even if they click on the link, users will be welcome by a paywall that hides the content anyway.
And such laws completely miss the point too. Big Tech doesn't cannibalize media outlets because it allows its users to share links to NYT or The Guardian on their platforms, while rendering the titles of the Web pages on user timelines. Big Tech cannibalizes media outlets because it caches and scrapes their content and uses it to feed AI models that compete with them. While media outlets were complaining for Facebook users sharing links on their timelines without Facebook paying them any dividends, Microsoft and Google have trained models exposed through chat bots on years of those outlets' content, and they can reproduce it in hundreds of ways - and none of them requires the user to ever click on the link to the source.
It's also interesting to see how such laws have backfired on the long run.
As a response to Canada's link tax, Facebook has decided that it'll simply prevent links from major Canadian news outlets from being shared on the platform.
The result? People have got very creative on how to share news (including screenshots and links to cached/reproduced articles), the void left by professional news outlets on the platform has been filled by disinformation/misinformation, many outlets have seen their traffic drop by a third or more, while Facebook hasn't been affected at all.
Of course we need to have a serious discussion on how sustainable it is for people to consume news articles from 2-3 private platforms with algorithms designed to enforce their biases. But that's unfortunately the reality we're in now. Slamming a tax on the links and hoping that it would fix things by redistributing revenue (only to those outlets large enough to get a deal with Big Tech btw) was a solution doomed to fail from its very inception anyway.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/05/16/canadas-law-to-help-news-outlets-is-harming-them-instead

2024-05-26 13:30:32

Each single screenshot shared on a social media platform instead of a quote/native share is a technological and political failure.

2024-05-26 12:08:43

#Platypush 1.0 [is out](https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Platypush-1.0-is-out )!
It’s been [10 months](https://pypi.org/project/platypush/#history ) and [1049 commits](https://git.platypush.tech/platypush/platypush/commits/branch/master ) since the latest release of Platypush, 7 years since [the first commit](https://git.platypush.tech/platypush/platypush/commit/0b0d94fee3ab20e7f488072f624b4f33c527947a ), and 10 years since the first release of its ancestor, [evesp](https://github.com/blacklight/evesp ).
The past few months have been quite hectic and I have nearly rewritten the whole codebase, but I feel like the software is now at a stage where it’s mature and stable enough to be used by a larger audience.
The changelog [is quite big](https://git.platypush.tech/platypush/platypush/src/branch/master/CHANGELOG.md#1-0-0-2024-05-26 ), but it doesn’t even cover all the changes, as many integrations have been completely rewritten.
The biggest (breaking) change is the merge between plugins and backends. Now, except for those integrations that actually listen for messages and execute them (like HTTP and Redis), all the other integrations are plugins. This greatly simplifies the configuration and removes a lot of confusion for new users.
The Docker support has been greatly improved too. There are now officially supported multi-arch images for Alpine, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora, an official docker-compose.yml file, and both the platydock and platyvenv utilities have been almost completely rewritten to seamlessly automate the creation and configuration of containers and virtual environments (respectively) starting from a single config.yaml.
And the Python API has become much simpler and consistent. No more __init__.py files that the user had to manually create in each subfolder of scripts, just drop a .py file with your automation in the scripts dir and it’ll be picked up. Moreover, the most common imports are now available on top level as well, and there’s no more need to create procedures/hooks/crons with varargs:<code>from platypush import run, when
from platypush.events.sun import SunsetEvent
@when(SunsetEvent)
def sunset_lights_on():
run('light.hue.on')</code>
There’s also a revamped [documentation portal](https://docs.platypush.tech ), which now includes both the wiki and the plugin reference.
Most of the integrations have been rewritten at different degrees, and in the process many bugs have been squashed, many features added and many APIs updated to be more consistent, so make sure to check the documentation pages of your integrations in order to migrate.
And if you have more requests or questions, feel free to [open a ticket](https://git.platypush.tech/platypush/platypush/issues ), [a PR](https://git.platypush.tech/platypush/platypush/pulls ) or [ask on the Lemmy server](https://lemmy.platypush.tech/c/platypush ).
https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Platypush-1.0-is-out

2024-05-21 08:30:09

I’ve just had to debunk some more pseudoscience garbage shared by my mother on Facebook. The only reason why I still use that platform every now and then is just to make sure that my family doesn’t go completely off the basket case tangent with conspiracy bullshit.
This time, after chemtrails, vaccines that cause autism, Covid intentionally spread by the government, climate change that doesn’t exist, new world order secretely decided in Davos, freemasons and Jews ruling the world, gender theory pushed by a cult of paedophiles, and Putin and Trump as the only saviours, it was the time for the landing on the moon that didn’t happen.
The arguments used by the guy (“there are no signs of the source code that was used by the Apollo missions and the lunar module didn’t have enough thrust to take off”) could be dismantled with a simple Github link and a quick round of the Tsiokovsky rocket equation.
But the original post had hundreds of reshares, while my response didn’t get a single reaction. And my mother, who quit school at the age of 12 and has no clue of what either specific impulse nor escape velocity are, didn’t understand anything of my explanation anyway, and tomorrow she’ll probably just reshare some more bullshit that she wants to believe in.
Does anyone have family members or close friends who are also stuck in this vicious conspiracy cycle that apparently can’t be broken with any efforts of reasoning? How do you cope with that? It is becoming utterly depressing from my side. The conspiracy-inclined side of social media has features that resemble too much those of a cult. I’ve fought to take my family out of a cult years ago, just to see them plunge into another one. The time required to debunk bullshit is high, while the time to reshare it is basically zero, and I feel like it’s a war I can’t win. And the “I trust nobody, therefore I end up trusting perfect strangers on Facebook with no qualifications who say what I want to hear” phenomenon is too painful to watch when it impacts your dear ones. Wondering if there’s a way out that doesn’t end up affecting our own mental health even more.

2024-05-17 08:41:59

#NetBSD joins the ranks of software projects that ban #AI generated code.
How they are going to enforce such ban is an obvious question lingering in the air.
Does it include only cases like “hey #ChatGPT write a suite of unit tests for this class”? Or also cases where #Copilot simply autocompletes a for loop while I’m typing it?
In the latter case, how would a hypothetical reviewer enforce the ban? How would the for loop autocompleted by Copilot, or the boilerplate population of hashmap values, look any different than one I would write myself?
And if the issue is with any code that isn’t directly written by a human, then why stop at modern AI generation? Why not include LINTers and traditional IDE autocomplete features?
I have no doubt that the projects that are announcing these no-AI policies have good intentions, but it’s probably time for all of us to have an honest talk.
Code completion isn’t a clear cut binary feature. It’s a big spectrum that goes from the old exuberant ctags to ChatGPT writing whole classes.
And code completion shouldn’t be banned. If it makes a developer more productive, and if the developer understands the code that is being completed, then such bans are akin to a “drivers should only use cars with manual transmission because we feel that it’s more manly”. It’s a conservative and elitist act of shunning out new productive tools because we can’t understand them and regulate them properly.
And more people need to call out the bluff: in cases where the AI only completes a few lines of code, its basically impossible to tell if that snippet was written by a human or an AI assistant.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/05/17/007240/netbsd-bans-ai-generated-code?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

2024-04-15 06:08:59

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there is a [mopidy-plex](https://github.com/havardgulldahl/mopidy_plex) extension (so you can control Plex with any mpd/mopidy client), but it hasn’t been updated in 8 years, so I’m not sure if it still works. Any reason not to prefer Jellyfin over Plex?

2024-03-29 11:24:46

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I feel like [@zuck](https://threads.net/@zuck/) may achieve his goal of killing the #Fediverse through divide et impera without even needing to fire a bullet and kickstart the E-E-E phase.
The simple announcement that #Threads is going to federate has caused such a huge backlash, and so much pressure and retaliatory blocks and defederations towards users and admins guilty of not doing enough to block this perceived “cancer” (including [@Gargron](https://mastodon.social/@Gargron)), that I feel like the Fediverse is at risk of splintering in two - a subset of instances that will not defederate Threads, and another subset that will defederate it, and wants to cut all the bridges with those who haven’t done so.

2024-03-29 10:43:12

Me: “*After a long consideration, I’ve decided not to defederate Threads from my personal instance, because the benefits of being able to reach out to my friends and relatives using the open tools that I’m contributing to build and run outweigh the risks, but I’ll keep an eye on it, I may reserve the right to block Threads later, and I respect and understand those who prefer to block them instead*“.
Easily triggered strangers on the Internet: “*You self-entitled privileged cis tech bro, you are not doing enough to protect vulnerable minorities from the fascist harassers in the world out there, I hope you die from a gut infection*“.
So much for “the Fediverse is an open place that embraces diversity and mutual respect where everybody should feel safe”.