Dream come true yesterday!

I got to talk to a packed room of normal (non technical people) at the local library about how important it is to upcycle computers, and how Linux can save the world in this respect.

Thanks to all the people who showed up, supported, donated laptops and listened. We even gave away 9 free laptops at the event.

Library said it was the most well attended event they've had! So will be many more of these in the future. :)

#nixos #Linux #Cosmic #system76

Spoiler: there’s no treasonous conspiracy .

I read every word of the Gabbard Files so you don’t have to. The arguments — when compared to the evidence, timelines, 3 prior investigations, and 3 prior meta-investigations — indicate either breathtakingly bad faith or astonishingly low reading comprehension. You decide.

lawfaremedia.org/article/from-…

Detroit front yard food pantry overwhelmed with donations after community learns of need

What an amazing woman to provide this space in her front yard like that in the first place.

It sucks that there's even this deep need in the first place, but it's heartening to see how people can come together.

youtube.com/watch?v=OrERFal5vt… #GoodNews #Detroit

Ok, VOLlama 0.6.0 finally supports speech via screen reader on Windows only. I changed to NSSpeechSynthesizer on Mac which means you can use default voice set in the system settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content.
github.com/chigkim/VOLlama/rel…
@danestange @mcourcel @FreakyFwoof @pixelate
in reply to feld

@phnt Basically what I'm learning from this is that people who are most vocal about these AI models not getting things correct with seemingly basic requests have never hired a tradesman to do a task. Talk to any general contractor and they will tell you hilarious stories where they've had to have work ripped out and redone because it wasn't done right.

We have released Tusky 30 🥳 Highlights:

* New reporting flow
* Improved image editor
* Support for onion services
* Dialog to not lose poll that's being created
* New UnifiedPush connector
* Technical improvements (16KB page size)

Fixes:
* Sometimes wrong thread would open
* Layout tweaks
* Harder to lose a draft when switching apps

See changelog here:
codeberg.org/tusky/Tusky/src/b…

#tusky #tuskyapp

This entry was edited (4 months ago)

Among currently available ARM64 single-board computers, which one has the simplest and most fully open boot process? The Raspberry Pi family has boot handled by the VideoCore, a whole other processor running its own RTOS during and after boot. Other ARM64 boards, like the Rockchip RK3566-based Quartz64 that I own, have a Rockchip version of ARM Trusted Firmware (which IIUC runs continuously at a higher privilege level) as a blob. Is there any ARM64 board that avoids both of these?

Peter Vágner reshared this.

in reply to Matt Campbell

I'm a month late but:
Rockchip RK3399 (e.g. Pine64 ROCKPro64) has zero blobs. As in, both DDR init and ATF are open (former in mainline u-boot, latter in mainline ATF).

RK3588 (e.g. Radxa ROCK 5B+) has open mainline ATF, but closed DDR init (runs once at boot) at the moment.

K3576 (e.g. Radxa ROCK 4D) also has open mainline ATF, but closed DDR init.

RK3566 *does* have something in ATF but I've heard it has problems. Closed DDR init as well though.

Yesterday was #DebianDay , celebrating the release of #Debian #Trixie !

So far, I have updated: 9 physical machines (including 7 Raspberry Pis running #Debian, not Raspbian), 23 Docker containers running full Debian including cron, systemd, and the usual services (thanks to my salsa.debian.org/jgoerzen/dock… ), and one other VM, for a total of 33 installations upgraded.

Yet to be done: 3 servers in the cloud, 3 laptops, and a Raspberry Pi 400 that's my daughter's computer.

1/

in reply to Matt Campbell

@matt Not at all! Our rules were going to be using it only at one location anyhow at her age. She is excited to have her very own computer and keyboard. This was an upgrade from an ancient Athlon64 machine she'd been using (my workstation from about 23 years ago; 512MB RAM, PS/2 connectors, and so forth). We try to delay electronics that go everywhere and have all sorts of notifications and such, in general.

New #GNOME app release! Just a tiny one, based on the idea from a few weeks ago ( mastodon.social/@pojntfx/11491… ). A nice skeumorphic Pomodoro timer, except you get to set the session and pause durations yourself (which happens to be the way I use my physical Pomodoro timer).

Felicitas Pojtinger 🌅 (@pojntf...

How to make a portable coppy of NVDA, if you ever need too. Hope this guide is helpful to new users, or folks who didn't know this was possible. And the good news is, you can make as menny of these as you want! If i want one, i make one. Thats the beauty of this, in my opinion. No lisins, no money involved, just having the ability to run this portably has been an absolute lifesaver for me.
in reply to Alexis

If you're planning on using these as serious reference tools for newbies, I'd make a few changes.
Firstly, there's a great nubmer of background sounds from other open apps you have running that sometimes make it difficult to hear what you're saying.
There's a lot of background hiss under your voice, which might benefit from being toned down if possible.
Mike is quite robotic to modern audiences, so I'd recommend changing him or at least slowing him down.

In terms of this specific recording, writing to the root of the c drive isn't always recommended, and the fact you're doing it in a VM just adds tremendous confusion to anyone learning about these things, and your repeated references to bad crashes don't really enspire confidence adnd talking about your USB's from before only mean something if you're a regular listener.
And it's generally bad practice to show something that doesnt work. Like, if you tick the box to keep your config and for whatever reason that didn't work, you probably don't want to show that as typical behaviour.
The repeated shitting isn't overly professional, either.
I bring these up not to complain, but to query the future. If you're doing it for your regular audience who're already familiar with what you're doing, that's fine.
If you're making something for people wanting to learn something new, you might want to adjust your approach slightly.

in reply to Sean Randall

@cachondo Yeah, i could figure out something. My comp's mic is also garbidge, and maybe Blue shouldn't be running. My issue is, it's like a ruteen to load it up, the second i start my computer. The most natural sounding voices i have are Blastbay, i just need to remember to switch before recording. I am also gonna see if i can get a better mic, as my AC can be heard. Thank you, and i will figure something out.

EU #Sovereign Tech Fund gains traction! OpenForum Europe's report highlights the need for better funding of #opensource software to ensure digital sovereignty. linux-magazine.com/Online/News…

Einladung zu einem Canva Workshop für unsere Ehrenamtlichen - Canva ist ein Software Programm, mit dem Flyer o. ä. gestaltet werden können.

Bei Interesse bitte bei Alexandra Bosch, alexandra.bosch@drs.de melden.
kath-kirche-affaltrach.de/allg…

in reply to Kath. Kirche Affaltrach

Wie wird das bei Euch in Bezug auf #Datenschutz, #Datenverarbeitung und #Verwertungsrecht gehandhabt?

Soweit ich erinnere verkauft #Canva, bzw. die Firma dahinter, nicht nur Daten, sondern kauft auch bei Dritten ein um zu verknüpfen.

Und war es nicht auch so, dass man an den erstellten Produkten keine eigenen Rechte mehr hat, auch für den eigenen Content, den man einbringt, oder z.B. in der Gemeindearbeit dann von anderen (Content von Veranstaltungen z.B.)?

Dazu würde mich der aktuelle Stand und eine Einschätzung/ Korrektur meines Verständnisses intetessieren.

Vielleicht wissen @ChristianBrecheis@kirche.social und @fxneumann@bonn.social etwas?

A contact just told me that my old "LLMs generate nonsense code" blog post from 2 years ago is now very outdated with GPT5 because it's so awesome and so helpful. So I asked him to give it a test for me, and asked it my favorite test question based on a use-case I had myself recently:

Without adding third-party dependencies, how can I compress a Data stream with zstd in Swift on an iPhone?


and here is the answer from ChatGPT 5: chatgpt.com/share/68968506-183…

Very confident, very bold, even claims "Works on iOS 16+".

Problem with that: Just like any other LLM I've tested that provided similar responses, it is - excuse my language but I need to use it - absolute horseshit. No version of any Apple SDK ever supported or supports ZSTD (see developer.apple.com/documentat… for a real piece of knowledge). It was never there. Not even in private code. Not even as a mention of "things we might do in the future" on some developer event. It fundamentally does not exist. It's completely made up nonsense.

This concludes all the testing for GPT5 I have to do. If a tool is able to actively mislead me this easy, which potentially results in me wasting significant amounts of time in trying to make something work that is guaranteed to never work, it's a useless tool. I don't like collaborating with chronic liars who aren't able to openly point out knowledge gaps, so I'm also not interested in burning resources for a LLM that does the same.

in reply to Dennis Schubert

Because it already happened: if you read my post and you feel an urge to respond with something along the lines of "it's just a hallucination", "it's just a bug", "it will be better in ChatGPT 6", or anything even close into that direction, please stop. Read this post and the next post, think about them, and if you have a factual argument to respond to me, only then reply. Focus on my factual claims, not on some inaccuracies in my analogy because of course it's not 100% accurate, that's the nature of analogies.

ChatGPT making up ZSTD compression in the Compression framework is not a bug. It's not even a weird edge-case. ChatGPT is doing exactly what it is designed to do. Let me try to explain.

If we grossly oversimplify what an LLM is, it's "just a statistical model" that generates "language" based on a chain of "what is most likely to follow the previous phrase". "language" can be anything: it can be human language, a fictional language, but it also can be code or even genetic information. Any kind of textual thing that you can feed large amounts of into a model works. "Not having an answer" is not a possibility in this system - there's always "a most likely response", even if that makes no sense.

ChatGPT inventing ZSTD compression in the Compression framework isn't due to a lack of training data. If you request an overview over all compression algorithms supported, it answers correctly with a comprehensive list that does not include ZSTD. So, if you want to anthropomorphize ChatGPT, you could say "it knows that ZSTD isn't supported", but that doesn't matter. LLMs do not possess the ability of logical thinking, deductive reasoning, or anything else. "It knows" that there are a bunch of compression algorithms available, the constants are all called COMPRESSION_[method], so there's a high likelihood of COMPRESSION_ZSTD to be the answer to a user asking for ZSTD compression in Swift. And so it generates that.

The only way ChatGPT will stop spreading that nonsense is if there is a significant mass of humans talking online about the lack of ZSTD support. For example a bunch of StackOverflow questions asking "How do I do this?" and people responding "you don't, Apple doesn't support it, you have to use third-party libraries" - or if you have a bunch of white dudes working in tech complaining on social media about Apple not supporting ZSTD in the Compression Framework.

My next post will be an attempt at comparing human thinking and LLMs generating text. As mentioned earlier, it's an analogy - and it's not going to be 100% accurate. If you want to reply, focus on the factual claims. If you only want to nit-pick my analogy, I have to assume you're not interested in productive argumentation.

This entry was edited (4 months ago)
in reply to Dennis Schubert

Let's imagine you're colorblind. The kind of colorblindness that only allows you to see grayscale - no colors at all - but everything else is fine.

You're stressed and need fidget toy - so a friend hands you a ball, roughly filling your hand. It's hard, but somewhat squishy, and has a weird fabric-like, furry texture. You now want to know what color that ball is. But, well, you're colorblind, and your friend already disappeared and isn't reachable - probably riding a Deutsche Bahn train or something.

So you take a picture and post it to a "what color is this?" subreddit. Seems reasonable. You get 200 responses - 198 of them say "it's yellow", two of them say "it's pink". A few people helpfully say it's a "tennis ball". That's helpful, because even the Wikipedia article states that only yellow and white tennis balls are officially approved colors. Sweet.

A few days later, a random person approaches you and says "wow, cool ball - what color is it?" and you say "yellow!". Alright, end of the chat. A LLM would do exactly the same - given the "yellow" responses far outnumbered the "pink" responses, your ball is probably yellow. Ball==yellow is something both you and the LLM "learned". A few weeks after that, another friend asks you "ALice has a ball, too! Do you know which color her ball is?" - and now it gets interesting.

The LLM would immediately say "yellow". Of course it would. It makes sense. Yellow is the most likely response to that question.

But you're not an LLM - you're a human, and your brain is cool. Instead of saying "yellow", you respond "huh I don't actually know that? My ball is yellow, maybe she has a similar ball. But it could also be that she has a completely different ball that might a different color! Also, lol, I'm colorblind, so I can't really answer that anyway - you should ask Alice." And now, your brain is already doing better than any LLM. Your logical thinking engine already realized that you don't actually know something, and you're honest enough to just say that. Your job isn't to be a ball color guesser, you're just a person.

Wait, it's gets more fun! A few weeks after that, you hang out with me. You hand me your ball, and say "hey look at my cool yellow ball!". Oddly enough, my reaction is "huh? this ball isn't yellow, it's a pink tennis ball..." and now things get funky. If you were an LLM, you would either insist that no, your ball is absolutely yellow - or you'd come up with some kind of "oh, sorry for the misunderstanding - it's pink, you're correct", almost implying that my definition of color is different - and the next time someone asks you about the color of your ball, you'd still say "Yellow!!" again. Because of course, there's still only three people claiming it's pink, and still 198 people saying it's yellow.

But you're not an LLM. You're human, and your sexy human brain immediately goes into a "uhhh we have a conflict of information! how exciting! let's figure things out!" You now have to conflicting hypotheses, and you're thinking about ways to experiment on your ball to learn more. And you have an idea! You know your additive color mixing theory, so you realize that your phone camera can take pictures and you can look at the RGB values. If it's yellow, you'd expect to see lots of red and green but no blue - but if it's pink, you'd see lots of red and blue, but no green! You can test that!

So you take a photo, and... rgb(255, 0, 255). Turns out your ball is actually pink! It's still a tennis ball, but a fun one not meant for official tournaments, so it's pink! Wow! You immediately learned something new - and from now on, if someone asks you about the color of your ball, you'll say "pink!" and you'll have a heck of a story to tell alongside. Also, after some self-reflection, you realize that the subreddit your posted your image to wasn't a real "what color is this?" subreddit - it was one of those "false answers only" shitposting subreddits. Whoops.

This process of having assumptions, but being able to question them, to come up with tests for it, and to immediately change your opinion on something when you have good evidence for it is what makes humans awesome. You don't rely on the majority of people screaming "pink!" at you. You don't need to rely on manual weights that give some sources more weight than other sources - you can independently process information and deduct things. Give your brain a pat on the.. uh.. cranium.

LLMs can be a useful tool, maybe. But don't anthropomorphize them. They don't know anything, they don't think, they don't learn, they don't deduct. They generate real-looking text based on what is most likely based on the information it has been trained on. If your prompt is about something that's common and the majority of online-text is right, you'll most likely get a right answer out of the LLM. But if you're asking something that not a lot of real people had interactions on, the LLM will still generate text for you - but it might be complete nonsense. You're just getting whatever text is "statistically most likely".

If you're a coder stuck on something, identify a colleague or friend who is more knowledgeable in that specific area. They'll happily help you out and provide all sorts of fun added context that'll allow you to learn. If you're a nerd on the internet who enjoys ranting on social media, just do it yourself instead of having an LLM generate it, because that'll allow you to insert some bad jokes and a bit of your own personality to it instead of just getting a "default-feeling" text. If you're a manager in charge of something and you need to come up with new directions to push your company towards, go take a walk outside and listen to some cool music and let your ideas roam free - don't ask an LLM to generate the statistically-most-likely direction for your project, because that's by definition the opposite of creative and innovative.

Use your brains.

This entry was edited (4 months ago)

Happy 21st Birthday @openstreetmap! 🍰 🥳 🎈

Gonna meet up with friends to celebrate, do some on-the-ground surveying, probably also walk around with a 360° cam to get imagery for @panoramax. And fly a drone, to get some nice aerial imagery while we're at it! 🗺️ 📷

And of course have some cake too 😂

#OpenStreetMap #panoramax

Peter Vágner reshared this.

in reply to Bastian Greshake Tzovaras

Had a blast at our little #OpenStreetMap birthday celebration. 🍰 🧉

It ended up being too windy to fly drones for long. Instead we recorded street-level images for #panoramax and GPS tracks, in addition to doing a lot of live surveying – using a huge range of tools that allow contributing to OSM!

In no particular order we at least used: @everydoor, @streetcomplete, @MapComplete, @CoMaps, HOTOSM's ChatMap, iD and JOSM.

Having so many different ways of making contributions is a real feature.

Three days before the end of the vacation here, I finally figured out how to get the Norwegian kartverket tile maps to display in osmand. Better late than never I guess, but this would have been really useful on a hiking trip a few days ago 🙃.

The details are here but this was somehow really hard to find: cache.kartverket.no/

This entry was edited (4 months ago)

According to the warnings on archive of our own: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage Sex

Sensitive content

in reply to Andre Louis

According to the warnings on archive of our own: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage Sex

Sensitive content

in reply to Timothy Wynn

According to the warnings on archive of our own: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage Sex

Sensitive content

"#Israel’s war on #Gaza has killed more than 61,000 Palestinians. Local hospitals said at least 42 have been killed today. Of those, at least 13 were said to be trying to get aid in an Israeli military zone in southern Gaza. Another two were killed on roads leading to nearby sites run by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to Nasser Hospital."

theguardian.com/world/live/202…

Big GNOME changes, Linux at 6%, Android loses to Epic - Linux Weekly News


Head to squarespace.com/thelinuxexperi… to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code thelinuxexperiment

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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:39 Sponsor: SquareSpace
01:57 GNOME's governance structure is changing a lot
05:01 Linux desktop reaches 6% market share
07:33 Linux's Steam marketshare rises close to 3%
09:17 Android has to crack open the Google Play Store
11:11 MX Linux moves to systemD & Wayland by default
15:53 OpenSUSE Leap 16 brings massive changes
16:09 Microsoft to open source WinUI library
18:23 Mesa 25.2 brings a lot of good updates
20:11 Nextcloud shows digital sovereignty is merely a dream right now
22:53 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers

Links:

GNOME's governance structure is changing a lot
bassi.io/articles/2025/08/03/g…

Linux desktop reaches 6% market share
zdnet.com/article/think-linux-…

Linux's Steam marketshare rises close to 3%
gamingonlinux.com/2025/08/stea…

Android has to crack open the Google Play Store
theverge.com/news/717440/googl…

MX Linux moves to systemD & Wayland by default
mxlinux.org/blog/changes-comin…

OpenSUSE Leap 16 brings massive changes
news.opensuse.org/2025/08/04/l…

Microsoft to open source WinUI library
github.com/microsoft/microsoft…

Mesa 25.2 brings a lot of good updates
linuxiac.com/mesa-25-2-lands-w…

Nextcloud shows digital sovereignty is merely a dream right now
linuxiac.com/finland-tops-next…
dsi.nextcloud.com/

This entry was edited (4 months ago)

#AndroidAppRain at apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid today brings you 14 updated and 1 added apps:

* Paperless NGX Uploader: uploads a single document to Paperless‑NGX directly from the system Share menu 🛡️

RB status: 681 apps (51.4%)

2 #Magisk modules have been updated at apt.izzysoft.de/magisk

Enjoy your #free #Android #apps with the #IzzyOnDroid repo :awesome: