Cursing Disables Google's AI Overviews - Google users have discovered that adding curse words to search queries disables th... - tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/… #ai
Le sette meraviglie di Mastodon glitch-soc (e di poliversity.it)
Eh già, Mastodon sa andare spesso oltre i limiti conosciuti, e questo grazie al fatto di essere un software open source, cui chiunque può apportare personalizzazioni interessanti. Oggi parliamo del fork Mastodon Glitch-soc, quello utilizzato nella nostra istanza Poliversity!
#playdate just added networking to its latest SDK beta. this screenshot does not look like much, but this is actually my local temperature, grabbed FROM THE INTERNET⁉️ let's see what else i can do with this
We're live at #FOSDEM in Brussels! Come to our stand in Building K, grab some merch, and buy a T-shirt/hoodie to support the LibreOffice project 😊 fosdem.org/2025/ #foss #OpenSource
I'm skipping #FOSDEM this year, but the #XMPP Standards Foundation will be there! Stop by the Realtime Lounge¹ to chat about XMPP, pick up some merch, and maybe grab a #Conversations_im sticker—while supplies last! 🚀
I don’t usually do this kind of evangelism, but if you’re looking for a reason to try #XMPP on #GlobalSwitchDay, now’s the perfect time: #Conversations_im is currently free on Google Play!
@frdl I've never used Nation-Scale Matrix Synapse myself. So probably the slow version 😉 But if you want WhatsApp functionality and more, then that's the tool of choice for me. Especially in combination with Jitsi.
I'm happy that #Matrix works for you. From a developer POV the dominance of Element (the company) is a huge liability and I prefer a standardization organization where I can actively participate without paying millions of dollars in member fees.
XMPP is a messaging protocol (among other things) that needs no introduction to any technical audience. Its various implementations have proliferated through technical communities for decades. Many…
I agree that xmpp connections work reliable. But a point is that users can not know which server is properly configured, can they? edit: I mean client to server connections. Unfortunately the protocol is not reliable regarding server to server connections.
I don’t usually do this kind of evangelism, but if you’re looking for a reason to try #XMPP on #GlobalSwitchDay, now’s the perfect time: #Conversations_im is currently free on Google Play!
It seems to me that popular developer sentiment has been shifting away from packaging of software by Linux distributions, and toward direct packaging by upstream developers (as they do for other platforms), for a while. Here's the most recent anecdote I read, about a bug involving Wine and Debian: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4… This developer clearly thinks that the distro packaging model in general is a bad idea. I'm sympathetic to this perspective. 1/?
And yet, I'm working on some infrastructure and security related stuff for my SaaS company, and I have an incentive to use distro packages, and distros like Debian or Ubuntu that have a large number of such packages, for as many of the dependencies in our container images as possible, particularly for dependencies that aren't managed by a language-specific package manager. 2/?
The reason is that dependencies that are installed as packages from one of the popular distros are legible to tools that scan container images for known vulnerabilities. We happen to be using Amazon Inspector, but the same principle applies to similar open-source tools. Here's the list of operating systems / distros that Amazon Inspector supports. docs.aws.amazon.com/inspector/… 3/?
If companies are still dedicating resources to open-source projects around "supply chain" security, it'd be nice if they would put some resources into a distro-independent metadata format for binary distributions (in whatever format, even tarballs), that could include package names, versions, and URLs pointing to a security advisory database in some standard format. Then vulnerability scanners would have something more generic than the package repositories for a fixed set of distros.
Of course, a related issue is that for upstream developers, building a distro-independent package that works on any glibc-based Linux system (I'll ignore musl for now) is difficult compared to other platforms (not necessarily other free Unixes, but certainly Windows, macOS, and the mobile platforms). The common solution is to build on a sufficiently old distro. This article about glibc's approach to backward compatibility basically confirms that this is necessary. developers.redhat.com/blog/201…
One of the GNU C Library's (glibc's) unwritten rules is that a program built against an old version of glibc will continue to work against newer versions of glibc.
Not so on Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android. You can build with the latest platform SDK, but still be compatible with older versions, as long as you don't use functions or behaviors that were introduced in later versions, and those details are documented. I think glibc's approach, using symbol versions, was misguided.
the symbol versions are fine themselves i feel, it's just that you can't choose which symbol versions you want to target without lots of pain. everybody else just lets you select the target version at build time :')
Hot take: I wish Windows's Portable Executable (PE) format, the format for .exe and .dll files, had become the industry standard, even for open-source platforms. It does a couple of things right compared to ELF, specifically, per-module import tables rather than a global symbol namespace, and making symbol exports opt-in rather than opt-out.
sometimes you need to coordinate between DLLs that don't know much about each other. Like std's backtraces uses dbghelp where all functions are single threaded. Which, ok, is a problem for a lot of reasons but it can fairly simply be worked around by using process global synchronisation. Except there's no way to store a process global mutex in PE so we have to resort to using Windows API named mutex with a magic name that hopefully doesn't conflict with anything else.
My own, perhaps unpopular, opinion is that backtrace generation, or crash handling more generally, doesn't belong in individual applications or libraries, but in the platform (for users) and a debugger (for developers). I know that the ship has already sailed on Rust's default for this, but I'm hoping panic_immediate_abort is eventually stabilized. Is there any way I can help that along rather than just griping about it?
you're preaching to the choir. I've argued before that at the very least symbolisation should be done in cargo rather than embedded in every rust binary by default.
I'm not sure if there's anything in particular that can be done to get panic_immediate_abort stabilized. In its current form it (and other things like it) needs build-std to be stabilized. There has been a renewed effort to get us there but it's still likely going to take awhile.
@chrisdenton I would literally spend thousands of dollars (let's cap it at $20,000) to get panic_immediate_abort stabilized if I knew that sending money to a particular person or organization would lead to it getting done. It bothers me that much.
there's a fair bit of stuff around "software bill of materials", which additionally really wants reproducible builds, but it's also worth noting that this issue is independently solved in places like npm and cargo too. regardless of the format being "distro agnostic" you still have the issue where different distros have different bugs for *the same software*, for various reasons.
@blaise Do you think Fedora does a better job of staying close to upstream than Debian? My understanding is that Fedora still splits up packages (the cause of the problem in the HN comment I linked), and I wouldn't be surprised if they sometimes patched things to support things that are priorities to Red Hat, like SELinux back in the day, though I haven't studied this.
Fedora's package splits are less rigid than Debian's. To give an example, KDE's QML modules in kirigami-addons are interdependent and applications generally need them all for it to function properly. Debian splits up each QML module into separate packages, whereas Fedora just ships them in a single `kf6-kirigami-addons` package. KDE gets many bug reports on this from Debian users.
So in this sense, Fedora package splits are more based on logical splitting with packager judgment.
@blaise fedora does a lot of baffling things too... the issue regardless is that no distro is going to supplant all the other ones. so as an upstream your issues are always multiplied by num_distros.
On the server side I think Docker builds have been responsible for this. I used to use Debian packages for Mailman but in Mailman3 its such a mess imho I just use a venv with Pip. I don't know anyone who does use those Debian packages and I kind of feel sorry for the maintainers as they are doing a lot of work and the advise on the support list is not to use it.
Email leaked to Ken Klippenstein telling NOAA employees that their course material can’t contain ANY of the following words in order to remain complaint with Trump’s executive order on DEI.
The party than ran on freedom and speech and avoiding censorship now actively censoring people.
Every word breaks my heart… but I want to pause on the inclusion of “empathy”.
The fact that they can’t use the word empathy is a perfect encapsulation of this whole administration.
Re: last boost (on "Rationalist" cults: maxread.substack.com/p/the-ziz…), the part that most concerns me is the last section, which argues that a bunch of individually good personal qualities, when combined, tend to leave people vulnerable to sophistry and, by extension, cults.
I think that this reading is … incomplete. One of the personal qualities required here is straightforwardly negative, which is to say, a perverse level of intellectual humility and an inability to recognize cognition itself as a process with a cost. There is a ton of “I can imagine X, therefore X is inevitable”, ignoring of physical limits, assuming that the starts of sinusoidal curves are all exponential forever… the movement is rife with faith, they just call faith “logic”
@glyph I keep thinking back to one thing you mentioned in this thread from a few weeks ago, "a perverse level of intellectual humility". I think after rejecting the religion and politics I grew up in, I spent a long time thinking that questioning everything was a must. And that has led me, at times, to question things I probably shouldn't, like the belief that it's worth firmly and persistently advocating for accessibility.
Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.
ACB and other leading disability organizations have responded to President Trump's recent remarks regarding the plane crash at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Click here to read the statement: acb.org/acb-and-other-leading-…
“Federal employees should know that approved union contracts are enforceable by law, and the president does not have the authority to make unilateral changes to those agreements. … If our contracts are violated, we will aggressively defend them.” - AFGE
This essay was written in 2002 (modulo some minor updates) but although a few of its specific examples are somewhat outdated at this point, it is still extremely relevant today. ometer.com/preferences.html
FDA approves first non-opioid pain medicine in more than 20 years The drug, Journavx (suzetrigine), inhibits an ion channel in peripheral nerves. arstechnica.com/health/2025/01…
On this day in 1972, Al Green released his Let's Stay Together album, hitting #8 on the pop albums chart and became the first of 6 consecutive Green albums to peak at #1 on the soul album chart, where it held the position for 10 straight weeks.
It’s been a long road, but your patience is about to pay off. Tuesday is the day!
February 4 we’ll be releasing v1.0 of Tapestry for iOS, our universal, chronological timeline for your favorite social networks, rss feeds, and much more. Stay tuned! #TapestryApp
@DavidGoldfield Yes, it certainly was and thanks to our backers and beta testers in the accessibility community like @Blindworrell, we’ve been working hard on improving it even more while 1.0 is awaiting launch.
I updated the Accessible Audio Plugin And Software Catalog (APS) today, providing more than 700 new Kontakt libraries which can now be browsed and filtered by price, nks compatibility and more. The information was imported from ReaperAccessible.fr. Feel free to check it out at timtam.github.io/musicalsight/… And if you want to contribute, feel free to do so, you can add new products from the catalog's root or edit any product information from the product page.
It’s been a long road, but your patience is about to pay off. Tuesday is the day!
athmane mokraoui [BoF] ⏚ꝃ⌁⁂
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