@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

vaurora

@vaurora@wandering.shop

Systems programmer, writer, cat appreciator

The artist formerly known as vaurorapub on Twitter and infosec.exchange

I post about computers, nuclear stuff, science fiction, and science fact. I have ADHD so I'm into things that are Novel, Interesting, Challenging, and Urgent.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

vaurora, to random
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

I'm going to Paris in a couple of weeks for and trying to get excited about stuff to do in Paris but failing. Any suggestions on how to get hyped about this trip?

Challenges include: being gluten free, not being able stand or walk at museum speed for very long, needing to avoid COVID, not liking superciliousness or disdain, thinking most France-adjacent movies are sexist garbage, and being far too large to buy most French clothes :)

https://www.ow2con.org/view/2024/Program

jon, to random
@jon@gruene.social avatar

Fuck off really.

In the train to Hamburg. A dude starts playing music on his phone loudly. I ask him to use earphones. He says he has none. And he gets aggressive towards me and asks me to move. And then accuses me of being aggressive because I got annoyed. 😡

But at least he stops playing the music.

vaurora,
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

@jon @quixoticgeek my go-to for this situation is to start playing "Wicked Game" at full volume on my phone while bopping along. I love the song and it is guaranteed to irritate anyone playing music out loud on transit

vaurora, to random
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

Remember that blog post "I got robbed of my first kernel contribution" where a maintainer slightly rewrote a patch and took credit for it? Well, I decided to do something about it.

I co-authored a guide with Maria Matějka and some other folks on documenting how your project gives credit and otherwise handles contributions. If your project's policy is to lightly rewrite contributions and take credit for them, say so! Subscriber link (free) to the LWN article:

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/971817/ae5fbbbc8cd1cf18/

vaurora,
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

When I started work on a credit policy for open source projects, I was mostly thinking about preventing a particular kind of plagiarism, in which a maintainer edits or slightly rewrites someone else's work and takes primary (or sole) credit.

But then a lot of maintainers who try hard to give credit told me about situations that look similar but weren't their fault. Someone submits a patch that doesn't get a review , then another person writes the same feature and gets accused of plagiarism.

vaurora,
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

Another surprise approach to contributing to open source projects was finding projects with a policy of not accepting outside contributions or always rewriting them for security or correctness reasons. It's hard to insert a subtle backdoor like the xz one if a trusted person reimplements it. (Of course in this case the ethical thing to do is list the original author as primary or co-author.)

vaurora,
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Some projects make it obvious that only the maintainer gets credit for the entire project. When I sent in a minor bug fix to xscreensaver as I described in the LWN article, I knew I would not get credit because no one other than the primary author was credited.

The problem is projects that make it look like contributors get credit for their work, but in reality the maintainers take as much credit as they can for other people's work and rely on a supply of naive new contributors to plagiarize.

vaurora,
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

Then there is the true grey area: one person worries a first draft, another person edits, rewrites, refactors, implements from scratch... at some point, they have done more work than the original author. When is that?

Our recommendation is to bias your credit policy in favor of rewarding the behavior you want to incentivize. Need more reviews? Maybe consider giving all reviewers co-author credit. Whatever you want people to do more of, make your contributions and credit policy reward that.

vaurora,
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

I want to thank and credit again all the people who helped develop this guide to writing a contributions and credit policy. They are in the credits file in the guide (link below) as well.

  • Maria Matějka: writing, editing, the naming policy, and making the git repo
  • Marcos Sanz and Martin Winter: several ideas, making space for it at the RIPE Open Source Working Group
  • Many members of the RIPE OS WG for comments, suggestions, and ideas

https://github.com/contribution-credit/policy/blob/main/CREDITS.md

vaurora,
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

And finally, if you want to adopt a contributions and credit policy, here is the guide and a few examples:

https://github.com/contribution-credit/policy/blob/main/README.md

My goal is that this is becomes like codes of conduct: so many projects have a written contributions and credits policy that the ones that don't start to stand out. I suspect that most maintainers aren't bold enough to have a written policy that says, "If I think I can get away with it, I will slightly edit your contribution and take primary credit for it." :)

vaurora, to random
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

I was looking in my closet and discovered that about ten years ago, I bought a swim shirt with several large logos of the brand name on it.

The brand name is Tesla.

Not sure whether to put it in the used clothes bin or the trash...

vaurora, to random
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

Test your detection of AI images (I'm about 70%)

https://detectfakes.kellogg.northwestern.edu

vaurora, to random
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

I love having friends visit, in part because they remind me of how lovely Amsterdam is. This week: I can take a walk along the edge of the water at sunset and all I hear is birds chirping and an occasional gentle murmur as we pass people sitting on benches also watching the sunset. Cities aren't loud, cars are loud.

vaurora, to random
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

Academic journals can price gouge because universities are relieved to be able to outsource performance reviews of PhD students and faculty to them

(From https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/ )

vaurora, to random
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

A friend recommended a newsletter for executives in tech and today's issue had a link to a blog post advising tech leaders on how to get better at asking questions. It had this... illustration...

I am confident the author had no idea how much this graphic torpedoed my trust in them. I am realizing that often people who use AI art don't understand how art works

vaurora,
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

@grimalkina nice to meet you, my name is Orourushty

vaurora,
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

@larsmb I know for a while that there was at least a belief that an image would improve SEO... what I hate about this image is that it had the form of information and flow charts and data - in a blog post about finding information and data - but it contains only nonsense. I am so angry

vaurora,
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

Ha, exactly the problem with the AI art in the above post:

“The human in the loop isn’t just being asked to spot mistakes — they’re being actively deceived. The AI isn’t merely wrong, it’s constructing a subtle ‘what’s wrong with this picture’-style puzzle.”

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/

vaurora, to random
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

The neighborhood WhatsApp is full of people counting down to when our new Albert Heijn opens at 11am today. Before that we had to bicycle SEVEN MINUTES to get groceries to put in our tiny fridges. There are plans to buy wijn and have a borrel. I'm mad because I have a doctor appointment at 11 and will miss the exact moment it opens

whitequark, to random
@whitequark@mastodon.social avatar

IEEE 802.3 having a normal one

image/png

vaurora,
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

@raggi @froztbyte @huitema @whitequark the exciting thing right now is when you have a tunnel/encapsulation with a 1280 byte default internal mtu, you can't layer another one with the same default over that... I think the future is cryptographically verified DPLPMTUD and it will be painful. This article includes what James and I came up with

https://lwn.net/Articles/960913/

vaurora, to random
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

Wow, the Netherlands really goes from "slight alleviation in the darkness for a few hours a day" to "so much light it's difficult to get 8 hours of sleep" in like one month flat

vaurora, to random
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

I'm such a dork. I went to Keukenhof this week and every time I saw a particularly pretty massing of tulips I would gasp audibly. I'd blame advancing age but I've had old people hobbies since I was a kid

https://keukenhof.nl/en/

vaurora,
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

Not as much of a dork as my husband, who saw a giant orange tulip out of the corner of his eye and gave himself tulip-gazing whiplash

vaurora, to random
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

I am abandoning the unusable WordPress editing experience for some kind of static website generator. I need only a very basic set of web pages and maybe a blog. What's your favorite and why?

vaurora, to random
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

People living in the Netherlands or nearby: I have found velcro window screens (raamhorren klittenband) to keep the bugs out. But all the ones for sale on the internet have terrible reviews, mostly about the tape coming loose or the screen material being damaged in shipping. Is this just the nature of velcro window screens? Or is there a brand that is better than others?

vaurora, to random
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

Have you ever hired a consultant, or been hired as a consultant, to fix a technical problem that turned out to be a non-technical problem? If so, what do you think the early warning signs were?

My (anonymized) stories of being the consultant in this situation are in the replies

vaurora,
@vaurora@wandering.shop avatar

From my personal experience as a systems consultant, the pattern is:

Mysterious latency? It's a management problem

Data corruption or performance problem while evaluating new hardware? It's a technical problem

The more general version seems to be that if the client is having trouble involving some component provided by an outside organization, then it is a technical problem that is politically possible to fix

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