It’s been almost 3 months since #Threads joined the Fediverse family. A quick overview of what changed since then:
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 the minorities police over-reacted. And it turns out that the whole Fedipact thingy was probably collective hysteria.
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 another loud announcement for what was a time-bound experiment with no follow-ups.
Threads itself, after reaping the initial novelty benefits, is losing momentum. No E-E-E on the horizon for now.
Result: I added a couple of Threads accounts to my list, I see their content on my timeline every now and then as if they were just another Fediverse instance (but one that I can’t directly interact with), end of the story.
“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. The whole declarativeNetRequest API that replaces the dear ol’ webRequest API is the equivalent of tying developers’ hands behind their back with the only purpose of increasing friction.
Manifest V3 is a technological abomination that greatly limits what extensions can do, and it should have never seen the light of the day.
My browser extensions will stubbornly remain Manifest V2 only. Even if that means being compatible only with Firefox. I wish that more developers did the same, so the Chromium-based extensions ecosystem may become as barren as it deserves to be, and more people would switch to alternative browsers, but of course nobody likes to say no to the browser that serves ~90% of the market. I just hope that the folks at Mozilla won’t get strange ideas and will keep supporting Manifest V2 forever.
“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, forever, their own fork of Chromium that keeps the old API.
I feel like Google used its weight and 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 to serve probably <5% of the market with a tiny subset of extensions that didn’t migrate? Hmm…
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, 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:
from platypush import run, when
from platypush.events.sun import SunsetEvent
@when(SunsetEvent)
def sunset_lights_on():
run('light.hue.on')
There’s also a revamped documentation portal, 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.
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.
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.
@informapirata a proposito, ma va bene se redirigo un paio di boomer intortati da anni di complottismi su Facebook su mastodon.uno come forma di detox temporaneo? 😆
#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.
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.
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.
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.
#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.
@fabio I am not a fan of #apple, however the issue here seems not to be that their behavior is illegal, but that their customer base have chosen to voluntarily self-jeopardise their bargaining power. 🙄
On my little corner, I shall continue my personal apple-free life.
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.
@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.
@Goffi integrations like Instagram, Telegram and WhatsApp mostly rely on libpurple plugins (like purple-gowhatsapp or purple-instagram) that are either poorly documented, more unstable or lack many features that are available on Matrix bridges.
By own admission of some of these developers, they usually don’t test their plugins against Spectrum2, and mileage may vary a lot. And usually when one of these plugins dies it takes the whole service down with it.
I’m in general a bit unimpressed with the state of libpurple - I feel like it’s becoming a very aged ecosystem maintained by a very limited number of developers that have to make those plugins work for a very wide range of clients. That’s also the reason why I left bitlbee.
Slidge seems to be promising, but I feel like it’s still at an immature stage.
@fabio I don't think that libpurple integration is great indeed, I've just mentioned it because you were talking of bitlbee, and spectrum2 is the XMPP equivalent.
Slidge is working on tight integration and is the way to go. And Telegram and Whatsapp are supported (I don't see Instagram though).
My point is that gateway ares part of XMPP ecosystem since the early days, and there are many. You say that you use Matrix mainly for its bridges, and I think that XMPP offer is similar.
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.
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.