Last night I finished a book I read for a reason that did not give me particularly high expectations: the author is a friend of my wife. I knew knew that she (the author) liked Babylon 5, so at least she had good taste.

To my surprise, I found myself really enjoying it. There are a couple of places where the writing is clunky but the characters were interesting and the story was engaging. I’m very much looking forward to the sequel (due this year).

If you enjoy low-stakes science fiction mysteries, I can thoroughly recommend Artificial Selection by Marianne Pickles. I will try to avoid spoilers, but if you hate people putting machine learning in totally inappropriate places, there is a two-page rant about 3/4 of the way through that you’ll enjoy (I did!).

Books - Marianne Pickles

Learn about Marianne Pickles's work-in-progress novel, a science fiction mystery set in a future when the climate crisis is history.

^{Marianne Pickles}

Interested to take a little tour through how #deltachat apps and the #rustlang core library are wired together?

@treefit and @WofWca provide a deep-dive into the history of apps migrating from a C-Foreign-Function-Interface to a #Rust based JSON-RPC mechanism, with entertaining horror stories like how an iOS release some years ago could delete profiles without the user intending it 😬

The post also highlights a few areas where folks interested to help could start ... delta.chat/en/2025-02-11-why-j…

Delta Chat: From C- to JSON-based APIs of the Rust

Foremost this is a quite technical post. Read our other blog posts if you want something more targeted at end users. If you have not yet looked at the Delta Chat source code, you might not know tha...

^delta.chat

How many characters must one type on a keyboard to make a heart?

Less than three.

Sensitive content Click to open/close

ghod I legit cannot imagine embarrassing myself like this. like it or lump it, proficiency in both official languages is table stakes in this game.

lapresse.ca/actualites/politiq…

Débat du PLC en français | Pas d’interprète pour la candidate Ruby Dhalla

Le Parti libéral du Canada (PLC) n’a pas l’intention de fournir les services d’un interprète à la candidate Ruby Dhalla lors du débat en français.

^{La Presse}

So I finally turned a recent popular post here into a proper story.

Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com’

Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.

krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/te…

There are so many apps re-inventing "append to clipboard" and "clipboard history".

That, along with ftp/sftp/scp/WebDav support, as well as 7zip and rar compression and decompression, should be bog-standard OS features by now.

Those features are not that hard to implement, certainly within the means of large companies / communities. They don't take much space or cause any inconvenience when not in use. Why the hell do we still ship OSes that don't have them is beyond me.

Il Garante della #privacy ha sanzionato E.ON per trattamento illecito dei #dati personali. In un caso "è stato dimostrato che l’azienda non verificava la legittimità della provenienza dei dati usati per le sue campagne pubblicitarie".

ilpost.it/2025/01/31/garante-p…

Il Garante della privacy ha multato di 890mila euro l’azienda energetica E.ON per trattamento illecito dei dati personali dei clienti

^{Il Post}

Iteration is the cornerstone of good design, but sometimes things go out of hand :) I'm really happy we finally rolled out the new gnome.org

I'm now convinced using the GHC* framework will enable us to focus on updating the content rather than the framework/infrastructure. Thank you everyone involved in making this happen!

* gitlab, HTML, CSS.

GNOME

An easy and elegant way to use your computer

^{www.gnome.org}

I'm Hungarian. Complaining is our national sport. So allow me.

I was born behind the iron curtain. In 1989 it seemed that we were going to be free and it really looked like freedom was forward and repression was backward and the world moved ever forward and eventually all of us would be free.

And now I get to see, from the inside, the West sliding backwards into fascism.

You don't know where you are going, but I do. It's painful to watch you harming yourselves like this.

✨ My first technical blogpost is out now. ✨

If you ever wanted to learn a bit about how
#deltachat works internally and why we have two ways to communicate with our #rust core, then this is the introduction to read

delta.chat/en/2025-02-11-why-j…

#jsonrpc #cffi #c #rust #deltachat_desktop #deltachat_core

Delta Chat: From C- to JSON-based APIs of the Rust

Foremost this is a quite technical post. Read our other blog posts if you want something more targeted at end users. If you have not yet looked at the Delta Chat source code, you might not know tha...

^delta.chat

🗺️ As many people are angry with #Google & asking for alternatives to #GoogleMaps, here are some Free & #OpenSource options:

📱 App
- osmand.net/
- organicmaps.app
🌐 Web
- mapcarta.com
- openstreetmap.org

Not Open Source:
🌐&📱
en.mapy.cz
wego.here.com
mapquest.com
🌐
lokjo.com
📱
komoot.com
magicearth.com

#FCKGoogle #Alternative #Apps #App #Web #Software #News #Tech #Maps #Map #Technology #it

Mapy.cz

Nejpoužívanější mapový portál v ČR s celou řadou tématických map - základní, turistickou, cyklistickou, dopravní a plno dalších. Nabízí možnost reálného leteckého, panoramatického nebo 3D pohledu.

^Mapy.cz

Since government efficiency seems to be all the rage these days, here's my experience with it:

At this point I can truthfully say I've spent literal years trying to get social (in)security to stop my disability benefits when I started work, which aside from a few threatening letters they did not. Now I'm holding onto probably like 20K in overpayments for them that I can't return because I can't get anyone on the phone at a local or national level who can help, can't get national to put an appointment on local's calendar for me, can't even get anyone to tell me how much I owe. Meanwhile the employment, which was the cause of the change anyway, has long since ended. I literally can't get anyone to take my money and, hopefully, re-instate my benefits.

And this is after reaching out to my congress critter and trying to find a lawyer. It's maddeningly hard to even pay these fuckers back, and I'm this close to not fucking caring about any of it anymore.

Geometric progression breaks your head, exhibit A:

2**53 nanoseconds is 104.25 days.
2**64 nanoseconds is 584.55 *years.*

(Correctly guess why those particular powers of two and win a fantabulous no-prize.)

@notjustbikes This afternoon in parliament, this research tweedekamer.nl/downloads/docum… “Crashes involving heavier vehicles; Empirical relationship between vehicle weight, drivetrain and crash frequency and severity”

"In collisions between passenger cars/delivery vehicles and vulnerable road users (i.e., cyclists and pedestrians) (…) as crash opponents, the severity for the crash opponent was on average higher (…)”

Summary on page 6 and 7 is already translated into English.

Anyone remembers the year where we eradicated a flu strain by... wearing masks? Wasn't that fun?

« Cette semaine, tous les patients sont positifs, ils sont faibles, ils sont fatigués et il y a beaucoup d’hospitalisation à cause de la grippe. »

lapresse.ca/actualites/sante/2…

Québec | Une des pires saisons de grippe depuis 10 ans

La grippe frappe fort cette saison au Québec. Les cas d’influenza semblent avoir atteint un sommet inégalé depuis les 10 dernières années dans la province. Une tendance qui augmente la pression sur les urgences déjà au maximum de leurs capacités.

^{La Presse}

ChatGPT is fairly convincing at creating code. But, like with everything you have to be vigilant on what it suggests you do. As a test I asked ChatGPT to "Write me an example C application using libcurl using secure HTTPS connection to fetch a file and save it locally. Provide instructions on how to create a test HTTPS server with self-signed certificate, and how to configure the server and the C client application for testing."

ChatGPT was fairly good here. It provided example code that didn't outright disable certificate validation, but rather uses the self-signed certificate as the CA store:

const char *cert_file = "./server.crt"; // Self-signed certificate
...
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_CAINFO, cert_file); // Verify server certificate
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 1L);
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2L);

This is a very good idea, as blanket disabling security is a big nono. The deployment instructions were also quite nice, creating a self-signed certificate with openssl, and then setting up the test website with python3 http.server like this:

mkdir -p server
echo "This is a test file." > server/testfile.txt
python3 -m http.server 8443 --bind 127.0.0.1 --certfile server.crt --keyfile server.key

Looks pretty nice, right?

Except that this is totally hallucinated and even if it wasn't, it'd be totally insecure in a multiuser system anyway.

Python3 http.server doesn't allow you to pass certfile and keyfile like specified. But lets omit that small detail and assume it did. What would be the problem then?

You'd be sharing your whole work directory to everyone else on the same host. Anyone else on the same host could grab all your files with: wget --no-check-certificate -r 127.0.0.1:8443

AI can be great, but never ever blindly trust the instructions provided by a LLM. They're not intelligent, but very good at pretending to be.

#ChatGPT #LLMs #LLM