@alcinnz@floss.social
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

alcinnz

@alcinnz@floss.social

A browser developer posting mostly about how free software projects work, and occasionally about climate change.

Though I do enjoy german board games given an opponent.

Pronouns: he/him

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

b0rk, to random
@b0rk@jvns.ca avatar

finally ready to announce that my git zine, “How Git Works", is coming out in ONE WEEK! on May 31!

it also comes with this (free!) cheat sheet which you can download and print out here: https://wizardzines.com/git-cheat-sheet.pdf

Lana, to random
@Lana@beige.party avatar

1990 Internet: You gotta be a hacker to find anything on the web

2000 Internet: Literally all the information in the world accessible to everyone so easy a toddler could do it

2020 Internet: You gotta be a hacker to find anything on the web

davidbisset, to random
@davidbisset@phpc.social avatar

RIP to a real web tech.

" will stop working
from June 26".

https://icq.com/desktop/en

I think this it for ICQ. I used to remember my ICQ by heart.

theluddite, to random
@theluddite@assemblag.es avatar

The point of solar panels is not to ensure "solar profitability," but to make for a greener, better world. Its profitability is only justified insofar as it moves us towards that goal. If we want to switch to renewables, then sometimes we're going to have surplus, because of how renewables work. This is well known and discussed ad nauseam. If that makes power markets unstable, then the problem is with markets, not with there being too many solar panels.

josh, to climate
@josh@josh.tel avatar

A reminder: epidemics and pandemics are expected to increase in frequency as the climate crisis advances [1] and as humans build deeper into wildlands [2].

So what do we do?

  1. Address the climate crisis!
  2. Embrace urbanism, controlled growth, and leave wildlands alone.
  3. Push for infrastructure improvements for indoor air quality.
  4. Push for better healthcare and sick leave policies.
  5. Advocate for better funding for scientific research.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adk4500
[2] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2020.11.002

jplebreton, to random
@jplebreton@mastodon.social avatar

There's a real Rube Goldberg quality to many of the attempts to find real use cases for LLMs: take regular desktop screenshots, OCR them, "find meaningful patterns" 🤔 so the system can answer queries... the amount of compute being chucked on a fire speculatively is absurd - so much of it already rolled out to users! The carbon cost of that is immediately alarming but there's also just something repellent about it from a systems design perspective. The desperation of these companies is palpable.

rysiek, to random
@rysiek@mstdn.social avatar

> Look, I'm no luddite…

First of all, why do tech writers feel they need to be apologetic when criticizing bad technology decisions by Big Tech?

I don't see similar hedging when the piece is about the tech underdogs – say, small FLOSS projects. Being a vicious critic is then somehow okay?

Secondly, just embrace your inner Luddites. Luddites were not against all technology per se, they were against how technology was being used to abuse people:
https://techwontsave.us/episode/187_the_real_history_of_the_luddites_w_brian_merchant

Sounds damn valid to me!

civodul, to guix
@civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr avatar

Call for contributions to the infrastructure 👇
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2024-05/msg00183.html

Many areas where you can help, with different time commitments and prerequisites: funding & spending, hardware hosting, system administration, and coding.

kirschner, to random
@kirschner@mastodon.social avatar

Please help us to create a 2D animation movie of "Ada & - A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream" and publish it as an by the end of the year.

Please become an @fsfe supporter today an enable us to spark children's interest in coding for the next years to come: https://fsfe.org/donate

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

iFixit's had enough with Samsung. That secret contract was only part of the problem.

Anyway, I've been saying Samsung sucks for years. Not sure why it wasn't obvious to anyone who's used one of their crapware-laden devices.

iFixit divorces Samsung over lack of real commitment to self-repair program
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/05/23/ifixit_samsung_repair/

ajroach42, to random
@ajroach42@retro.social avatar

Suppose you wanted to get in to Jazz, but you didn't know where to start.

You might benefit from this blog post I just wrote about how I introduce people to Jazz.

https://www.hemlockbazaar.com/2024/05/24/product-spotlight-may-23-2024-jazz/

sandboxgeneral, to linux
@sandboxgeneral@fosstodon.org avatar

How many folks out there use the Gemini protocol, even a little? Do you have your own Gemini Capsule?

What about the Gopher protocol, do you use that?

For a while I ran my blog on http, Gemini and Gopher.

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Diffing can be incredibly helpful for managing software! It can be used to retrofit CRDT support, monitor changes being made, guide how the software should be adjusted to match desired output(s), etc. Maybe for our Output Unit we'll have tool which autoruns & diffs a converter to guide its development, maybe adding automation where we find it worth the effort?

So how'd we implementing diffing on our string-centric hardware? Strings specifically? Its not trivial!

1/5?

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

If the document's already stored as a CRDT we could just ask which edits are in one CRDT-document vs the other. Maybe postprocessing it to determine when both peers made equivalent edits!

As for state snapshots...

The core (Dynamic Programming) algorithm for a optimal text diff involves a building table of the max number of common characters between 2 strings. Common chars increment this count, differing chooses an optimal path. Then traverse a path back-to-front to output.

2/5?

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

The increments & compares are well within the capabilities of even our Arithmetic Core. Though being a 16bit machine we may want to operate in UTF-16, or a custom variant with a larger character-space.

The catch is for strings a & b long this takes on the order a*b bytes. So if we're diffing 2 1kb files (not that big...) we'd need an entire mb! Whereas I've established that this Arithmetic Core has 64kb at most (in its slower Harvard mode).

We must optimize for it to fit!

3/5?

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

One thing to note is that the only reason we're keeping the entire table around is to read back a sliver of it as the diff. To build up a single row of it we only need to store that row & the previous one! So what if we leaned more on compute rather than storage to read back the diff?

If we run the core algorithm (possibly using alternate coordinates into the problem-space) both forwards & back to meet in the middle, we can run a Divide & Conquer algorithm to recursively split both halves.

4/6

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Once both inputs to a recursion are equal or either's empty then we have a piece of our diff! Or maybe we'd switch to the unmodified Dynamic Programming algorithm once the inputs are small enough for the Arithmetic Core to handle?

This reduces how much data the Arithmetic Core must store to roughly the length of either or (depending on coordinate space) both files! Huge improvement, but in often not enough...

So what could we reasonably expect of our Parsing Unit to simplify this problem?

5/7

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Utilizing its "dictionary" construct our Parsing Unit can readily extract all the unique lines within a file, & in turn the common unique lines between 2 files.

Assuming those unique lines are in the same order now only need to diff the text between them! Probably trying a recursion first! Maybe even splitting the text down further into e.g. words? Before falling back to a proper diffing algorithm, if we succeed in splitting the file up enough!

Except... Guess what?

6/7!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

We must handle cases where those unique lines have been reordered between the 2 files. So we'd read them out in the order the order they occur in one file (by re-parsing that file, the list-keys operation I made sure to include orders keys alphabetically instead) & feed these line numbers to the Arithmetic Core so it can compute a common subsequence!

The Arithmetic Core would do so in a way which resembles playing a solitaire card game e.g. Patience!

7/7 Fin! Tomorrow: A codeforge, and RSS!

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

There's a handful of strategies used we use to design "algorithms" for computing answers to mathematical problems.

We have "divide & conquer" algorithms which splits the problem into smaller parts, recurses to solve those subproblems, & combines the solutions.

We have "greedy" algorithms which solves a simpler version of the problem & keeps extending it until we've solved our problem.

1/2

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

We have "Dynamic Programming" (named to sound impressive to the researchers' generals) which resembles "divide & conquer" algorithms, but we store the partial solutions so we can relate them in a non-obvious order.

These strategies describe most of the popular algorithms we see all over computing & computer science!

But where all the real ingenuity lies is in designing datastructures, which can require mindset changes!

2/2 Fin!

Thomas, to random
@Thomas@laserdisc.party avatar

techbros should take an hour a day every day just to interact face to face with someone outside the tech industry. I am available for this job at the rate of $100 plus lunch

mwl, to sysadmin
@mwl@io.mwl.io avatar

Back the "Run Your Own Mail Server" Kickstarter for $15 and get

  • a DRM-free ebook of the brand-new "Run Your Own Mail Server"
  • DRM-free ebooks of "Networking for Systems Administrators," "Ed Mastery," and "$ git commit murder."
  • An invitation to the online release party
  • A video of me doing the "holy crap this funded!" Happy Dance

Four well-reviewed books and a chance to grill the author. $15. A heck of a deal.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwlucas/run-your-own-mail-server/description

triskelion, to linux
@triskelion@floss.social avatar

Suggest some beginner-friendly resources for learning about Linux kernel features like LSM (SElinux, Yama Landlock, Lockdown), Netfilter, eBPF, Cgroups, Namespaces, and KVM :D

GossiTheDog, to random
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

For those who aren’t aware, Microsoft have decided to bake essentially an infostealer into base Windows OS and enable by default.

From the Microsoft FAQ: “Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers."

Info is stored locally - but rather than something like Redline stealing your local browser password vault, now they can just steal the last 3 months of everything you’ve typed and viewed in one database.

video/mp4

GossiTheDog,
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

I got ahold of the Copilot+ software.

Recall uses a bunch of services themed CAP - Core AI Platform. Enabled by default.

It spits constant screenshots (the product brands then “snapshots”, but they’re hooked screenshots) into the current user’s AppData as part of image storage.

The NPU processes them and extracts text, into a database file.

The database is SQLite, and you can access it as the user including programmatically. It 100% does not need physical access and can be stolen.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • thenastyranch
  • ngwrru68w68
  • cisconetworking
  • magazineikmin
  • Youngstown
  • InstantRegret
  • rosin
  • slotface
  • khanakhh
  • mdbf
  • Durango
  • megavids
  • modclub
  • tacticalgear
  • GTA5RPClips
  • normalnudes
  • osvaldo12
  • everett
  • anitta
  • ethstaker
  • tester
  • Leos
  • cubers
  • provamag3
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •