fabio

fabio, 3 days ago to random

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 basically zero, and I feel like it’s a war I can’t win. Wondering if there’s a way out that doesn’t end up affecting our own mental health even more.

fabio, 7 days ago to ai

#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

fabio, 11 days ago to random

Positioning your project as an alternative implementation of something is a losing proposition.

It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how hard you work. The problem is, when you build an alternative implementation, you’ve made yourself subject to the whims of the canonical implementation.

They have control over the direction of the project, and all you can do is try to keep up.

https://pointersgonewild.com/2024/04/20/the-alternative-implementation-problem/

fabio, 13 days ago to random

Is anyone aware of ways to control #ffplay programmatically in any form, without having to focus the window and having to emulate keyboard/mouse bindings in it?

ffplay is amazing, light, fast, and it’s a player that comes with any #ffmpeg installation.

#Platypush supports media players such as VLC, mpv, mplayer, omxplayer and gstreamer, but they all come with their bags of issues - the VLC libraries seem to break too often on Wayland, mpv has too many API breaking changes across versions and controlling it only works if the version of the library and the player are carefully aligned, mplayer is an unmaintained dumpster fire with a messy control API, working with gstreamer in Python requires the user to install the whole fat GLib luggage and MBs of plugins, and omxplayer is basically dead.

ffplay would be my favourite pick for a portable and lightweight default media player. But the fact that it apparently can’t be controlled in non-interactive ways really puzzles me.

fabio, 13 days ago to apple

#Apple challenges the courts again on payments processing.

You can now show users an external link to process the payment outside of Apple’s platform.

But that comes with a new “external link fee” of 27% - to be paid on top of the fee you pay for users who still make their purchases through the App store.

I’ve said it several times, I’ll repeat it: companies like Apple can get away with such parasitic rent-seeking behavior with no added value, and with challenging courts all over the world, because they are practically above the law.

They can afford to create their own taxation system as if they were an independent country, but without being accountable to voters, and without losing a single percentage point of market share if they behave like jerks.

And any fine thrown on them by courts around the world is likely to be only a tiny part of their revenue - unless we get the balls of fining them for hundreds of billions and use that money to support more competition in the market, which would be an act of redistribution long overdue IMHO.

Apple can treat fines as small operating costs because their monopolistic behaviour is still profitable enough to pay those one-off fines many times over.

And if they are above the law, it’s because too many people bought their crap and gave them power that they didn’t deserve. And they’ll keep buying their products even if Tim Cook starts wearing a Darth Vader mask during interviews.

If you use anything made by Apple, you are part of the problem.

https://darnell.day/apple-outsmarts-court-upsets-judge-regarding-third-party-app-payments

fabio, 13 days ago to llm

A study that confirms what I’ve been suspecting for a while: fine-tuning a #LLM with new knowledge increases its tendency to hallucinate.

If the new knowledge wasn’t provided in the original training set, then the model has to shift its weights from their previous optimal state to a new state that has to accommodate both the previous and new knowledge - and it may not necessarily be optimal.

Without a new validation round against the whole previous cross-validation and test sets, that’s just likely to increase the chances for the model to go off the tangent.

#AI #ML @ai

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.05904

fabio, 15 days ago to random

Selling credits for carbon capture initiatives that never happened: how the green economy became a marketing tool for parasitic fossil companies that reap profit without contributing any value.

When the executives of Exxon and Shell repeat that no green initiatives can happen without them (because they have the expertise, the capital, the competencies etc.), keep in mind that they’re shamelessly lying in order to extend their ride and inflate their retirement profits while burning the planet for everybody else.

Funding needs to be moved from them to new businesses that don’t have incentives in burning T-Rex juice, and these companies must be left to rot and die without anybody mourning them.

They’ve had plenty of occasions to do things right, they’ve managed to squander each single one of them, and they aren’t worth of a single inch of our trust.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/shell-greenpeace-quest-1.7196792

fabio, 18 days ago to random

@adiz lol my bad - my tut client mixed up the threads.

The only alternative I see to Matrix right now is XMPP. I still run my own server. But it doesn’t come even close to compete with the number of available bridges (that’s actually the main thing I use Matrix for).

The only thing that can still compete with Matrix when it comes to bridges/integrations is still IRC+bitlbee. But that ecosystem is literally falling apart, it’s largely based on libpurple extensions that often haven’t been touched in years, and of course you can forget decent mobile-native clients.

Or maybe just run alternative servers to Synapse, but so far I’ve had a mixed experience with them - Conduit is definitely snappier, but I’ve had trouble to set up many of my bridges, which seem to be primarily designed for Synapse.

fabio, 20 days ago to random

Like with all the commodities with increasingly scarce supply and high demand, the time has come for #IPv4 addresses to also become a speculative asset.

Not the kind of thing that you'd buy to run your little server, but the kind of thing to hoard on and use as the aluminum foil to wrap and back your corporate bonds.

Just when you think that the enshittification of our industry can't get any worse, here you go with news of somebody creating money out of thin air backed by IP addresses.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/05/04/2122251/multinational-isp-offers-206m-in-secured-notes-backed-by-ipv4-addresses#

fabio, 20 days ago to Jewish

My solidarity goes to those #Jewish / #Israeli students who genuinely feel unsafe, threatened or subject to prejudice. Nobody deserves it.

But I couldn't care less about those who just feel uncomfortable because the protests are about something bad that their country is doing.

When Putin started his unforgivable war in Ukraine, and protests sprawled around the world, there wasn't much talk about shutting down the protests because they would make Russians abroad feel uncomfortable. So why do we have to treat Israelis and Jewish as exceptional snowflakes? Just because they keep stubbornly playing the antisemitism card whenever you criticize them?

#Safety and #comfort aren't the same thing. People have an inalienable right to feel safe and not subject to prejudice. But their ideas and dogmas don't have the same rights. They aren't people. I shouldn't refrain from protesting against ideas and acts that I perceive as wrong just because my protest may make somebody else feel uncomfortable. Pulling people out of their comfort zone and creating awareness is the whole point of a protest, after all.

And universities are exactly meant to be those factories of ideas where different sensibilities meet and come up with a better view of the world, without fear of retaliation.

If you don't feel comfortable about it, if you feel like criticism against your ideology is criticism against you as a person, then probably you just don't belong to a university in the first place.

And if you keep calling out as an antisemitic anyone who criticizes the acts of #Netanyahu's government, thus advancing the fascist theory that the ideology of a government is part of the identity of the nation, and thus political criticism is personal criticism against all of its the citizens, then you're just an idiot, or someone who benefits from this simplification.

#Israel #Palestine

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/03/college-gaza-protests-antisemitism

fabio, 27 days ago to bitwarden

Just migrated from #Bitwarden to #Vaultwarden.

Same API, same features, same UI, and support for other DBs than MSSQL.

One single stand-alone application vs. Bitwarden’s 10 Docker containers. 70MB of RAM vs. 2GB. 3MB of db storage vs. 300MB.

Why was a password manager supposed to take so many resources in the first place? Just because it runs on a Microsoft-only stack and on .NET’s inefficient VM? Just because somebody thought that it was a good idea to separate everything into different containers (even icons and 2fa are modeled as separate services in Bitwarden)?

It reminds me of my recent migration from Mastodon to Akkoma. I got more features, 5GB of RAM freed up and 300GB of storage freed up almost overnight.

Writing and running inefficient software that pointlessly consumes all the resources available on a machine should be a crime in a world with limited resources.

It makes me think of how much shitty bloated software like @bitwarden, probably based on awfully inefficient languages and frameworks like Java, Ruby on Rails and .NET, is running out there, pointlessly sucking up resources for doing simple jobs that could easily be done with 99% less resources.

Today’s developers, spoiled by IDEs, powerful machines, docker-compose and shortsighted “just throw more RAM at the problem” approaches, have forgotten how to write efficient software. Time for them to learn how to write good efficient software again. Software doesn’t eat the world. Only shitty software built on shitty framework does.

fabio, 28 days ago to wordpress

It’s 2024, and paid #WordPress plugins still have trivial SQL injection vulnerabilities like it’s 2004.

I hope that by 2034 PHP developers will learn how to use prepared statements and sanitize SQL inputs.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/hackers-make-millions-of-attempts-to-exploit-wordpress-plugin-vulnerability/#p3

fabio, 28 days ago to random

> The mayors argue that while criticism of the Israeli government is not anti-Semitism in itself, holding Jewish people responsible for the actions of that government just because they are Jewish is.

I have absolutely nothing against the Jews who openly condemn their fascist government.

But I have a lot against the Jews who don't. And I have a lot against the Jews who kicked Palestinian families out of their houses and still occupy them.

And that's not anti-semitism.

Just like criticizing the Palestinians who support Hamas isn't an attack against all Muslims.

Just like criticizing the Americans who support Trump isn't an attack against all Americans.

Just like criticizing the Germans who supported Hitler wasn't a hate crime against all Germans.

Just like shooting at the Italians who supported Mussolini's social republic and plunged the country into civil war wasn't a crime against all Italians.

We need to call people accountable for the governments that they elect and support just like we call those governments accountable for their actions.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/2024/04/respect-the-may-4-traditions-mayors-say-in-open-letter/

fabio, 1 month ago to random

How can you call yourself a civilized country when you can’t even keep guns outside of schools, and your solution to gun violence in schools is either to have armed guards at the entrance or give teachers guns as well?

Is it a civilized Western country or is it the fucking far west?

How come most of the other countries around the world have figured out long ago how to send kids to school without fears of them being shot, and the richest country in the world can’t figure out how to solve such a simple problem yet?

https://www.dw.com/en/tennessee-passes-bill-to-let-teachers-carry-guns-at-school/a-68903939

fabio, 1 month ago to twitter

The cesspit formerly known as #Twitter has reached such a point of no return that journalists can be kicked out of it for criticizing its sociopath owner, but the sociopath owner will fight with all of his power to ensure that the live stream of a murder won’t be taken down because “freedom of speech”.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/23/australia_x_terror_video_takedown/

fabio, 1 month ago to random

Annual recurring revenue, rent-seeking behaviour and everything-as-a-subscription will one day permeate so much of our economic system that even drinking water from a public tap will require you to download an app and activate a subscription.

That day is today.

This degeneration of capitalism with zero added value for the customer must be ended at all costs.

RE: https://toot.lgbt/users/FuchsiaShock/statuses/112314285197633042

fabio, 1 month ago to random

I’ve decided to go full-in with my own mail server. The #ProtonMail bridge over SSH+VPN tunnel is no substitute for a proper mail server - plus it’s awfully slow when used as a full IMAP server and it breaks the IMAP implementation in a lot of ways.

I’ve created my new domain, gone through the configuration of DKIM/DMARC/SPF like a good postmaster, just to get immediately blacklisted by @spamhaus on my first outbound email.

I’ve been through this before, but in my previous experiences a blacklist removal ticket would be either resolved automatically or within a couple of hours at most.

In this case, nearly 24h and three tickets later and nothing is moving. Not even some directions on how to get removed or an ETA. The mailboxes have already been all migrated with forwarding configured on the old addresses, but outbound email is still broken because being blacklisted by a single company means being unable to communicate with nearly any mail servers out there.

Does anyone have any tips on how a #Spamhaus blacklist removal process can be sped up?

fabio, 1 month ago to Palestine

US: “We support a two-State solution, but let’s not get too serious about it ok?” #Palestine

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/18/us-veto-palestine-membership-request-united-nations-council

fabio, 1 month ago to Ukraine

Putin’s strategy eventually paid off.

Russian sources mentioned many times that it was just a matter of time before the easily distracted Western countries shifted their attention somewhere else - and when that happened nothing would have prevented #Ukraine’s capitulation.

And this is, indeed, what’s happening now.

The Russian army is reaping successes on a daily basis, while Ukraine has even run out of missiles to defend their own infrastructure.

In the meantime, plans to provide more weapons to Ukraine are stuck both in Europe and in the US, while pro-Russia puppets get elected all over the place.

Shame on us for not taking more care of our own values.

https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-updates-kyiv-ran-out-of-missiles-to-defend-plant/live-68835067

fabio, 1 month ago to beeper

How do you feel about #Beeper, #Automattic and Automattic acquiring Beeper?

TBH credit is due where credit is due. Nobody can predict the real intentions of a company, least of all engineers, but Beeper has from day 1 built its product on top of #Matrix, it has made it much easier to install and configure messaging bridges (even to those less likely to go through the hassle of configuring a full Synapse server and install bridges with huge configuration files), and it has challenged Apple head-to-head with the iMessage bridge.

I feel that Beeper joining forces with Automattic will give the company both:

1. Stronger shoulders to defend themselves from lawsuits coming from the likes of Apple and anybody who has made it their business mission to oppose inter-operability as long as they can - Apple can’t simply take down a Github repo with a snap of their fingers if that Github repo is owned by the same company that also owns Wordpress, at least not without a lengthy legal battle on the blueprint of Epic v Apple. Moreover, sclerotic corporate scum with an outdated business model like Apple will just never understand how big of a favour they do to small companies like Beeper when they attack them. Beeper was in beta until recently. Then it got a lot of attention after Apple declared war to its iMessage bridge. Consequence: the largest company on earth suddenly put a relatively small product like Beeper under the spotlight, its user-base went up by an order of magnitude or so within a short time frame, they rushed their way out of beta, and now Automattic is acquiring them. There’s no better publicity than an aggressive rent-seeking parasite waging war against your product.
2. More opportunities to sit at a table with the likes of Google, Meta etc. and get them to actually build the open alternatives together, instead of reverse engineering their closed garden and play and endless catch-up game with them.

The timing of this announcement is also perfect, as the EU’s #DMA is just about to make inter-operability a requirement for messaging gatekeepers - and Beeper seems to be eager to capitalize on its opportunity of being at the right place at the right time.

Let’s keep an eye on how this product develops. I see a lot of potential for growth, and I’ll be looking for all the signals of early-exit/lock-in/enshittification.

https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/beeper-is-joining-automattic/

fabio, 1 month ago to Quotes

Is there a “I want #quotes in #Mastodon” button that I can hit somewhere?

Seriously, it’s holding everything and everybody behind.

Context: I’ve decided to play with some tighter interaction between my #Akkoma social feed and my #WriteFreely blog.

I can now write long posts in a more blog-friendly format on @fabio. Then leverage the Fediverse integration to quote them from my main handle.

My Akkoma post can add a TL;DR and a bunch of hashtags. And the quoted message has a nice “Read more“ link that can expand the blog post for those who want to read it directly on their timeline.

Amazing, right?

Well, just look how nicely it’s rendered on my Akkoma instance, and how Mastodon renders it instead.

A cryptic RE: https://my.write.freely/api/posts/post-id that doesn’t even render a preview nor anything.

The cryptic version is the way that >75% of the people who use the Fediverse will see on their timelines.

No matter how much progress other implementations decide to do. No matter how sophisticated their UX. If the major implementation decides that quotes will never be a thing, we’re kind of stuck in the state where JavaScript could do amazing things on Firefox, but most of the folks used IE, so the party was ruined for everybody else too.

How WriteFreely blog quotes are rendered on Pleroma/Akkoma. The quoted post is nicely wrapped under the more recent post, with a "Read more" link to expand it. The preview image and title of the article are nicely rendered at the top and the bottom of the quote.

fabio, 1 month ago to microsoft

How monopolists brag about their ability to build horizontal and vertical monopolies and use language such as “maximizing user revenue”, “opportunities for market penetration”, “incremental upsells” or “sticking with the user” to cover their despicable and unfair practies with a coat of corporate bullshit jargon.

“We tend to think of our ability to first secure the license, and then from the license to upsell to increase the average revenue per user. And that’s a motion that we do very well.”

“We were 12% penetrated with E5 in the Office 365 base. Man, there is still a lot of opportunity there for us.”

“Why pay multiple vendors what you could pay one vendor at kind of a discounted price?”

We ought to call such strategies with the right name: anti-competitive monopolist practices aimed at using existing monopolies to solidify new ones, coated with a stinky hand of corporate bullshit to make the bitter pill easier to swallow to the uninitiated.

We have a duty of calling out #Microsoft’s “bundles” for what they are: a shameful attempt of building monopolies in all the areas of technology through the excuse of “user convenience”.

We have to ban bundles from the EU when they are proposed by companies that already fit the definition of “gatekeeper”.

We have to make sure that not a single cent of taxpayers money goes in the pockets of these filthy innovation-adverse rent-seeking parasites.

We need to give users the right to choose among multiple vendors, instead of getting locked up with the same guys providing them with the OS, the office suite, the browsing tools, the productivity suite, the AI tools, the cloud solutions, the search engine, and everything connected to them.

It’s cheap for someone as big as Microsoft to provide such horizontal bundles. It’s expensive for everyone else to compete with them, and eventually customers are the ones losing out - they get locked in “you can check out any time you like but you can never leave” plans, they lose alternatives, and no matter how much their Microsoft plan decides to enshittify, they’ll have to stick to it or face huge migration costs to alternatives that struggle to even gain market share.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/microsoft_bundles/

fabio, 1 month ago to threads

I’ve had some quite passionate (euphemism) discussions in the past couple of days with people who accused me of “throwing minorities under the bus” or “allowing Meta to scoop up everybody’s posts” just because I’ve temporarily decided not to defederate #Threads from my personal Akkoma instance.

What’s interesting is that some of those accusations came from people who, in some cases, had their profiles fully public and searchable, on instances with webfinger enabled and without authenticated API constraints.

Their posts are already available on any search engine, searchable on Mastodon, their profiles can already be enumerated via API, and, even if their instance blocks another one, users on the blocked instance may still be able to see their content (especially if reshared/quoted) through unauthenticated API calls. But yeah, they think that the problem is with my tiny personal instance not defederating what they don’t like.

I’ve got the impression that there’s a lot of confusion on the #Fediverse on how to customize the #visibility and #privacy of your content, and how to make sure that only those you wish will ever be able to see it.

In order to prevent pointless retaliatory blocks/defederations towards instances whose only fault is not to block what others want them to block, and in order to prevent the Fediverse to splinter into small islands along totally arbitrary fracture lines on the basis of unfounded beliefs about how it works, I’ve put together a sequence of steps to check if your profile and your content are really private and sealed from unauthorized access (if that’s what you wish) - thanks to @gruff for the suggestion, and thanks to @evan for validating some of my assumptions.

@Gargron you’re welcome to validate my hypothesis about how AUTHORIZED_FETCH and DISALLOW_UNAUTHENTICATED_API_ACCESS work on Mastodon - I knew about AUTHORIZED_FETCH before, but I see that its functionality is now split on two environment variables, and I’m not sure if both instance A and instance B need to have it enabled to prevent content leak towards blocked instances from reshares/quotes.

cc @fediverse @privacy

fabio, 1 month ago to random

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: “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”.

fabio, 1 month ago to random

If a free #VPN sounds too good to be true, it’s usually because it is.

Free VPN services that actually turn your device into a zombie proxy:

• Lite VPN
• Blaze Stride
• Byte Blade VPN
• All CaptainDroid apps
• Fast Fly VPN
• Fast Fox VPN
• Fast Line VPN
• Oko VPN
• Quick Flow VPN
• Sample VPN
• Secure Thunder
• Shine Secure
• Speed Surf
• Swift Shield VPN
• Turbo Track VPN
• Turbo Tunnel VPN
• Yellow Flash VPN
• VPN Ultra
• Run VPN

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/free-vpn-apps-on-google-play-turned-android-phones-into-proxies/