@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

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stavvers, to random
@stavvers@masto.ai avatar

Heads up to anyone using facebook or insta: you'll receive a notification about your data being used to train AIs. The opt out process is deliberately convoluted and you have to fill out a form to object. This is what I wrote in mine, and the objection was immediately registered as successful, so feel free to copy.

Masto reply bores, this is not a post on which to fart out your opinions about Meta or AI or whatever. So don't. I'm sharing helpful info for people who need it, not for you.

josh, to foss
@josh@josh.tel avatar

The organizers of @pycon have given community organizers a massive gift 🎁

Let's not squander it!

A sold out 2024 proved that even large events can prioritize safety and inclusion for caregivers and immunocompromised people by way of requiring masks, and gathering venue data to calibrate their policy from year-to-year. Smaller events have proven it's possible at that scale, too.

Now is the time for at least one other large event to step up.

Who will it be? 👀

josh,
@josh@josh.tel avatar

PS. It's no coincidence that the Python has arguably the single most diverse and welcoming global tech ecosystem on the planet.

That happens because they make choices like this, again and again.

If you're in a position of influence or decision making authority, the questions are:

  • What kind of culture do you want to foster?
  • And are you leaving something on the table that would help you foster that culture?

Don't let yourself be cowed by fear of possible blowback on mask requirements.

Not only is that fear overblown, but giving into it prioritizes reactionary jerks over people who actually have something to lose.

zachleat, to 11ty
@zachleat@zachleat.com avatar

A blog post about what is likely the biggest @eleventy news in our project’s history — and we need your help!

https://www.zachleat.com/web/independent-sustainable-11ty/

neuralreckoning, to random
@neuralreckoning@neuromatch.social avatar

OK, let's try something new. I'm not well connected because I'm bad at in person networking, and this is compounded by my decision to stop flying to conferences. So, can I use mastodon to find potential experimental colleagues who would like to work together?

Ideally for me, this would be people in Europe so I can visit by train, but it's not essential. I have some ideas for interesting projects and grant applications, and I'd love to develop those into concrete projects in close participation with experimental colleagues.

One of the main themes I'm interested in is how we can relate various neural mechanisms (e.g. inhibition, recurrence, nonlinear responses) to functions, using computational modelling to ask 'what if' questions that couldn't be answered by experiments alone.

I'm also interested in thinking about how we can use "information bottleneck" ideas to think more clearly about what computations networks of neurons are doing, going the next step beyond representing information to computing / discarding information.

A big question I'd like to answer is to find out how different brain regions work together in such a flexible and scalable way.

A technique I'm very excited about at the moment is using modern ML algorithms to train spiking neural networks at cognitively challenging tasks, making them directly comparable to both psychophysical and electrophysiological data.

Part of that could involve building in new mechanisms, like dendritic structure or neuromodulators into those networks and allowing the trained networks to make use of them in the best way possible.

I'd also love to build jointly motivated experimental and theoretical/synthetic datasets to test models against.

If any of that sounds interesting to you, take a look at some of my recent papers and get in touch. I'd love to hear from you.

http://neural-reckoning.org/publications.html

pheras, to random Spanish
@pheras@fosstodon.org avatar

"The use of probabilistic techniques to determine who is worthy of death – wherever they’re used – is, to me, the most chilling example of the serious dangers of the current centralized AI industry ecosystem, and of the very material risks of believing the bombastic claims of intelligence and accuracy that are used to market these inaccurate systems."

Read the whole piece by @Mer__edith

https://www.helmut-schmidt.de/aktuelles/detail/die-rede-der-zukunftspreistraegerin

ploum, to random
@ploum@mamot.fr avatar

My blog has been available as an ATOM/RSS feed for the last twenty years.

3 years ago, I eventually decided to also offer a way to subscribe through email (aka "newsletter"). Same content.

Result: people are now subscribing to my newsletter using services (such as kill-the-newsletter) that offer to translate email newsletters into atom feeds.

Am I missing something?

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Yesterday I discussed collaboratively editing text, but there's other things you might want to edit!

Implementation notes: I'd keep the data in RAM in its sorted & compressed form, only decompressing it transiently for processing & modifying. Zipping from columnar format into "edit" rows would be most involved step.

For instance we'd want to edit not only individual files but whole directories of them! And the attributes attached to each of its files!

1/?

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

To implement such a "mapping" CRDT we can define an operation which sets the value at a given key to a given value, possibly to a "tombstone" value to indicate deletions. The problem comes when 2 peers attempt to set the same key to different values!

If we track our understanding of the latest edits our peers are aware of (a "lampart timestamp"), storing that in our edits' metadata, we can establish a causal ordering to these edits. When that fails we can compare peer IDs.

2/?

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

This causal sort is also vital for ordering text insertions!

Talking about text... Lists would be implemented basically the same way but with greater freedom regarding which data you can store in each node.

We may want to incorporate counters, by summing all the nudges up/down collaborators have made.

And once we have collections we'd want to store numbers, constant strings, booleans, etc in them. Combine these datatypes and we should be able to define most other CRDTs you might want.

3/4!

mayank, to CSS
@mayank@front-end.social avatar

now has round() and it's a big deal!

unlike say, Sass math.round(), this is much more powerful because it can round across units, and at runtime.

this is super useful when you have something like a percentage value that normally evaluates to a fractional pixel value.

top: 50%; /* computes to 662.27px */  
top: round(50%, 1px); /* computes to 662px */

rounding such values will make them fit better in the pixel grid, avoiding potential blurring issues on some (windows) devices

alcinnz, to random
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Continuing my study of ELF Utils' commandline tools...

After initialization both I/O & internationalization as well as parsing commandline flags ar configures LibELF to a specified format version, parses/validates the commandline flags some more ensuring additional args remain, pops the archive name as a commandline arg, & branches over the subcommand specified by those flags.

This may output some help text via LibArgP. Or it may...

1/5? for today

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

For Insert operations ar opens the ELF file, initializes some memory including a symboltable, for oper_qappend operations populates a hashmap ( LibC's search.h one), iterates over the ELF file, followed by extensive validation & cleaning up! For each ELF header (skipping filepaths for performance's sake) initializes a new archive entry for it, considers whether its present in the hashmap, & prepends the entry into a linkedlist.

Deletion works similarly (unconditional hashmap).

2/5?

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

Primarily ar performs "extractions" ("list" & "print" are variations), involving opening the archive & populating a hashmap, fstat()s the file, iterates over ELF entries, possibly atomically overwrites the file with extracted symbol table, & cleans up. For each entry it handles filepaths specially, extracts it into a new ELF symboltable, and/or checks for presence in the hashmap, & possibly formats human output with lots of options.

Has a small supporting arlib support library.

3/5?

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

... elfcmp configures supported ELF version, carefully opens the 2 given ELF files, retrieves their E headers checking equality on it, retrieves S header numbers to compare if they're equal, then P headers, S header index, various properties of all non-empty sections branching upon each's type, & the count of those sections. After which it gather E & P header properties, allocates regions possibly populating/sorting it, iterates over all P headers to compare them, & cleans up.

5/5.5!

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

After parsing commandline flags & configuring supported ELF version elfclassify iterates over remaining args then maybe stdin lines. For each it carefully opens the ELF file, retrieves ELF kind or E/P/S headers to retrieve various properties with optional logging, performs a bunch of checks on those properties possibly outputting results, & aggregates to output as text or exit code.

After initializing internationalization & parsing commandline flags ensuring 2 args remain elfcmp ...

4/5?

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

In iterating over sections elfcmp has a bit of logic to avoid being thrown off by relocations. With a fallback branch utilizing hashmaps.

5.1/5.1 Fin for today! Will continue tomorrow!

PixelOccult, to random
@PixelOccult@mastodon.social avatar

I guess people are chatting about Linux v Windows v Apple so for my two cents:

I have an older gaming laptop with a 2060 Nvidia graphics card that I’ve been running ubuntu on for years. It has a second hard drive running windows if I need it for some reason but I haven’t booted into it in 6+ months(I think?). In Linux I can run Steam and with Proton it plays Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3, Persona 3 Reload, and many many more games without issue. /1

emily, to random
@emily@sparkly.uni.horse avatar

Confused the fuck out of some consulting company today because they cold-emailed me at work asking if I'd talk to their clients about stuff. They clearly meant one of the other two Emilies at the same company, but I am emily@company.tld and so people email me a lot when they don't feel like looking up the right email address for the Emily in question and just take a wild guess.

So I stubbornly fill out their form to join their Network(tm), then fill out the other form for the specific client they want me to talk to, mostly with "I am not exposed enough to this side of the business to give useful information" pasted into every text box. Then at the end of this form they ask if I want to decline it, so I finally do.

Less than a minute later they called me, wondering why none of what I entered matches my LinkedIn account.

At this point I finally informed them that I don't have a LinkedIn account.

I hoped they learned a valuable lesson today. If not, I would be happy to charge them the $400/hour they offered me to read to them the entirety of Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.

timbray, to random
@timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

Renewables and batteries are moving the needle in California’s energy economy: https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/

18+ jk, to random
@jk@mastodon.social avatar

i use linux every day. and when i want to configure something? i don't know where to look, don't know which one of the many configuration utilities to use, have to go on a big forum thread research session to find out what the best practice is for my situation, don't know which config file to alter, don't know if the file will be overridden in the near or far future, don't know why the changes i'm making aren't working, etc. everything is the Principle of Most Surprise, and it sucks

18+ Testoceratops, to random
@Testoceratops@disabled.social avatar

My fiancee and I have to take the train on May 30th as I'm starting EMDR. It will cost us 54€ this time.

Also, due to ableism, I've had to change karate club and am going to my safe sensei's one. It's thrice a week and costs 8€ a day in carpool.
Karate does miracles on my reeducation and got me out of depression.

We can't afford it, living on my disability benefits. Any help is appreciated, thank you so much!

https://www.paypal.me/VirgileMougin

janriemer, to random

Modular #Servo: Three Paths Forward - by Gregory Terzian (#GOSIM 2024):

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=EA_1jxzR85M

(or YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA_1jxzR85M)

#Browser

freakazoid, to random
@freakazoid@retro.social avatar

This problem is why Arch Linux is both harder and easier to use: harder because you have to configure everything yourself. Easier because there's very little magic that's invisible until it's not.

https://mastodon.social/@jk/112485636960778400

tilton, to random
@tilton@fursuits.online avatar

One of my co-workers had a good point about Windows "Recall": it's not just a privacy nightmare, it's a whole new exciting world for malware to exploit. Imagine malware that can rifle through the entire history of everything you've ever done or seen on your computer before the malware got installed. I love the future!

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