irenes

irenes, 8 months ago to random

All right! And we're back, at #pepr23 to live-toot today's afternoon session, which starts at 13:30. We once again missed the morning sessions, which is, as always, distressing but kinda what we expected to happen - we're out of practice at attending conferences and we're not as young as we used to be and bipolar stuff is hard. Ah well.

irenes, 8 months ago to random

in just a few minutes we'll be tooting the afternoon sessions of #pepr23 !

we missed the morning sessions, including one by a friend. we're sad about that, and sorry if anyone was looking forward to our thread. our followers know we're bipolar, and that comes with sleep issues that make conferences hard. we're just glad to be here now though, some great stuff lined up for the afternoon!

irenes, 7 months ago to random

look

shared block lists, whether instance-level or person-level or both, are a centralized power structure

we're upset about THAT, even before we get into how they're run, who's on them, etc

we don't want to have the power to decide who other people can meet and talk to

we're concerned that anyone DOES want to have that power, because there is no such thing as a responsible way to wield it

irenes, 9 months ago to random

there's this kind of thinking trap that programmers sometimes fall into, which we'll explain

honestly? in our youth we fell pretty hard into it and were huge Lisp fans. then later we were huge Haskell fans for similar reasons. it took a while to really process everything and come to terms with the impossibility of the desire

irenes, 1 month ago to random

tired: using <3 to denote a heart
wired: using ❤️ to denote a mathematical inequality

irenes, 8 months ago to random

as someone who's been involved in the architecture of systems like this, this was a good read

(our focus of course has been privacy, but there is no privacy without security)

https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-technical-investigations-for-storm-0558-key-acquisition/

irenes, 7 months ago to random

instead of trying to fix the problem of LLM-assisted content farms by charging money to do a search

how about remove the incentive for it and build search tools that simply exclude any site that's selling something or running ads of any kind

like that's the actually useful results anyway, to end users, right?

irenes, 6 months ago to random

hey so recent versions of Thunderbird seem to be more aggressive about attempting to connect to accounts that don't have saved credentials, even when all three "automatically download things" boxes are unchecked in the account settings

has anybody messed with specifically RECENT versions enough to figure out how to turn that off?

(it's very annoying when there's an account that no longer exists upstream but we can't delete it from Thunderbird without losing data)

irenes, 1 month ago to random

every once in a while there's some big well-known personality in tech circles who we realize is on the fediverse

and it's like, hmm, we're glad that person is on the fediverse. now what do we have to do to make sure we never have to read any of their crap.

irenes, 8 months ago to random

the EFF's position on hate speech has three critical problems

1. it assumes that cops want to do anything, and that they even could. hate groups know exactly where the legal line is, they walk right up to it and spit over it. they can destroy people's lives regardless.

irenes, 1 year ago to random

every time we see people talking about "the AT protocol" our brain goes "it's properly called the Hayes modem protocol"

and then we realize they mean the other thing

and feel sad for a bit

the Hayes modem protocol is surprisingly well thought out for what it is, and deeply nostalgic :D

irenes, 1 year ago to random

has anybody gotten Google Bard to work in Canada?

it's supposedly available in "180 countries" but we haven't got a list of which ones, nor do we have any way of checking what country it thinks we're in

irenes, 11 months ago to random

so, like

if XR is going to be anything to people it's going to be a tool for creative expression

and the thing is? exploring the potential of a new artistic medium is not something that happens within tidy boundaries. it's not something that winds up being shaped like apps, or like any sort of product.

irenes, 6 months ago to random

we're currently working on setting up what is honestly quite a small tool to run on a NixOS server and uh

this is one of those open source tools with a company behind it, the documentation is honestly very professional

but the documentation completely does not speak to the concerns a sysadmin has AT ALL. it pushes very heavily to use Docker (in any of ten different ways) and the non-Docker explanation leans on Debian to have already done the hard parts.

irenes, 4 months ago to random

it's worth taking the time now and then to notice that phenomenon where, when a new thing is invented, we all have to be taught to want it, and therefore to find our current things inadequate

every once in a while you can see a case where the process breaks down - people don't want the new thing - but companies still try to move ahead

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1993084

irenes, 4 months ago to random

hey is there a way to get rustdoc to output manpages

we would like to not have to use a browser for it

hmm

irenes, 1 month ago to random

RedHat is reporting that the official upstream of xz, a common library on Unix systems that you've probably used via the tar command, contains malware. The full report is at https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/urgent-security-alert-fedora-41-and-rawhide-users and it's CVE-2024-3094.

irenes, 4 months ago to random

NixOS PSA

 environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.man-pages ];

 documentation = {  
 enable = true;   
 dev.enable = true;  
 doc.enable = true;  
 info.enable = true;   
   
 man = {   
 enable = true;  
 generateCaches = true;  
 };  
   
 nixos = {  
 enable = true;   
 includeAllModules = true;   
 };  
 };   

irenes, 10 months ago to random

it's interesting how popular posts here seem to have a slower burn than they did on Twitter. like we have something now that's still getting about ten reshares every day, and it's almost a week later. on Twitter we would expect a post to need to be up in the 10k range to still be active after this much time.

irenes, 1 year ago to random

a lot of the challenges that appear to face technical architects for social media platforms are uh

actually about assessing a political landscape where the green grass of civility has grown atop the clay soil of hatred, hiding it... terrain atop which multiple layers of deception and posturing are taking place and apparent aggressors are often victims and vice-versa, and sometimes everyone is in the wrong

this is not a problem technology should attempt to solve

irenes, 8 months ago to random

hey, does anybody have a favorite metaphor along the lines of "all sizzle and no steak" for describing stuff such as technology that isn't there? we specifically want one that doesn't involve eating meat, as this is a topic we try to stay away from when it isn't necessary to the subject matter, as a behind-the-scenes form of support for vegan ideals

we're asking purely for personal use and not as a thing to push on others

irenes, 5 months ago to random

so like yes Blockbuster Video would not be a viable business model today, retail space is expensive and nobody wants to go to a physical location if they don't have to

but um

it's really annoying how the largest streaming services have, like, 5,000 titles and that's it. there is SO MUCH STUFF, so much good stuff, that will never appear on any top-five-thousand list. like, humans have been making movies for well over a hundred years.

irenes, 5 months ago to random

reddit recently started blocking our visits to it because we have some privacy stuff set up (including but not limited to a VPN)

and it's an excellent reminder that we don't actually want to visit reddit ><

(but we do wish people would post their questions and observations about random topics in places that aren't corporate and anti-democratic)

irenes, 3 months ago to random

us: hmm our laptop's disk space is running low, probably due to this thing where we obsessively download repositories of written information, we should be careful about that

also us: ooo someone packaged kiwix for nixos and bundled 70 gigs of Project Gutenberg books...

irenes, 4 months ago to random

we've said it before and we'll say it again

it is important that Linux distributions are independent from upstream software developers, that they have their own governance structures and their own experts on how to integrate software into an overall system

that is a feature. that protects people.