Ahoj Fediverse! 👋
Tohle oficiální účet české #PeerTube instance 📼 VHSky.cz. Budeme vás tu upozorňovat na nové autory a zajímavá videa. A rádi uslyšíme zpětnou vazbu, co se vám líbí a co byste na VHSky.cz rádi viděli.

#introduction

The #38C3 presentation about the massive #Volkswagen data leak is over and the leak was as bad as it sounded. 100,000s of cars could be located down to cm precision. Also a lot of metadata that is NOT supposed to be public. Disturbing.

The main takeaway was that the real problem here wasn't the leak itself, but that this data was collected in the first place.

I agree. It's not a good idea to create mountains of very personal data and then pray it never leaks.

#privacy #fail #leak #breach #vw

Today is the day. Welcome to THE charger!

USB-C is officially the common standard for charging electronic devices in the EU.

This means:

🔌The same charger for all new phones, tablets and cameras
⚡ Harmonised fast-charging technology
🔄 Reduced e-waste
🛑 No more “Sorry, I don’t have the right cable”

One charger to rule them all.

#SingleMarket #DigitalEU 

In case you missed it, the hackers who reverse-engineered DRM on Polish trains got sued by the train manufacturer…

…multiple times.

You can donate to their defense fund:
ccc.de/en/updates/2024/das-ist…

Context:

Their original talk from last year
media.ccc.de/v/37c3-12142-brea…

My piece about the first lawsuit against them
rys.io/en/175.html

#Newag #38C3 #DRM #Trains

Breaking "DRM" in Polish trains

We've all been there: the trains you're servicing for a customer suddenly brick themselves and the manufacturer claims that's because you...

^media.ccc.de

does anyone know of a
blog-like cms with features:
- self-hostable
- subscribe to posts with email
- rss
- activityPub
- supports images upload
- posts in markdown in webUI
- smolweb/minimalist
- no nodeJS
- no SSG

plz boost

Gajim’s port to GTK4 is almost finished. 🥁 Currently we’re testing thoroughly to make the switch as smooth as possible.

We went ahead and made lots of small improvements, e.g. writing messages while offline, better styling for image previews, improved chat filters and more.

Gajim also improved its spam fighting toolkit: The next release will allow you to moderate all messages of a spammer at once. 🤖

If you like to support Gajim, please consider making a donation: liberapay.com/Gajim

Gajim's profile - Liberapay

Gajim is a fully-featured XMPP client.

^Liberapay

When I spent a year with the DotPad and now 6 months and going with the Monarch, besides the fact that the Monarch is the only Multi Line Tactile display still available in Australia, here are some of my advantage points for the Monarch over the DotPad.

Can be used as a stand alone device,
20 hours battery life,
On/off, USBC, USBA, HDMI, 3.5MM ear phone jack, and volume up/down buttons,
Users used to the Braille Note, Brailliant, and Mantis will pick up same concepts used on the Monarch (its KeySoft),
Plug in a QWERTY keyboard and/or portable HDMI display,
Braille input keyboard,
10 line by 32 cell tactile display,

Removable metal template to replace membrane over the pins,

Speech output,
Navigation and Zoom keys, Point and click to move cursor or Zoom tactile graphics,
Button to refresh tactile array at any time,
Tactile horizontal and vertical scroll bars to let user know where they can scroll,
Easily jump around tactile graphic with keyboard short cuts,

increase line spacing when reading Braille,
Easy to identify cursor in menus, and place focussed line that contains cursor to the top of the display,
Access various file formats,
Various applications including web Browser (beta), email (beta), Tactile Library (APH), Maths graphing calculator, Word Processer, Braille Editor, Book Reader (victor Reader),
2025 WingIT app for iOS drawing, and Terminal screen reader support.

Inspired by Google's move to remove @organicmaps from the Playstore without warning, I finally decided to move my > 3,000 Google Maps saved places to Organic Maps. To facilitate doing this for others' benefit, I made a quick webpage to convert your Google Maps GeoJSON data to GPX and KMZ files that render well in Organic Maps.

rudokemper.github.io/google-ma…

Did you know that you can configure custom notification sounds per contact or group chat in #Conversations_im?

Apparently not many people knew that so the next version will make, what essentially is a native Android feature, easier to access via the overflow menu of contact or group chat details.

gultsch.video/w/8wZSkoad1bv4VH…

Conversations: Custom notifications

Conversations 2.17.7 makes it easier to configure custom notifications for contacts and channels

^PeerTube

I finally turned off GitHub Copilot yesterday. I’ve been using it for about a year on the ‘free for open-source maintainers’ tier. I was skeptical but didn’t want to dismiss it without a fair trial.

It has cost me more time than it has saved. It lets me type faster, which has been useful when writing tests where I’m testing a variety of permutations of an API to check error handling for all of the conditions.

I can recall three places where it has introduced bugs that took me more time to to debug than the total time saving:

The first was something that initially impressed me. I pasted the prose description of how to communicate with an Ethernet MAC into a comment and then wrote some method prototypes. It autocompleted the bodies. All very plausible looking. Only it managed to flip a bit in the MDIO read and write register commands. MDIO is basically a multiplexing system. You have two device registers exposed, one sets the command (read or write a specific internal register) and the other is the value. It got the read and write the wrong way around, so when I thought I was writing a value, I was actually reading. When I thought I was reading, I was actually seeing the value in the last register I thought I had written. It took two of us over a day to debug this. The fix was simple, but the bug was in the middle of correct-looking code. If I’d manually transcribed the command from the data sheet, I would not have got this wrong because I’d have triple checked it.

Another case it had inverted the condition in an if statement inside an error-handling path. The error handling was a rare case and was asymmetric. Hitting the if case when you wanted the else case was okay but the converse was not. Lots of debugging. I learned from this to read the generated code more carefully, but that increased cognitive load and eliminated most of the benefit. Typing code is not the bottleneck and if I have to think about what I want and then read carefully to check it really is what I want, I am slower.

Most recently, I was writing a simple binary search and insertion-deletion operations for a sorted array. I assumed that this was something that had hundreds of examples in the training data and so would be fine. It had all sorts of corner-case bugs. I eventually gave up fixing them and rewrote the code from scratch.

Last week I did some work on a remote machine where I hadn’t set up Copilot and I felt much more productive. Autocomplete was either correct or not present, so I was spending more time thinking about what to write. I don’t entirely trust this kind of subjective judgement, but it was a data point. Around the same time I wrote some code without clangd set up and that really hurt. It turns out I really rely on AST-aware completion to explore APIs. I had to look up more things in the documentation. Copilot was never good for this because it would just bullshit APIs, so something showing up in autocomplete didn’t mean it was real. This would be improved by using a feedback system to require autocomplete outputs to type check, but then they would take much longer to create (probably at least a 10x increase in LLM compute time) and wouldn’t complete fragments, so I don’t see a good path to being able to do this without tight coupling to the LSP server and possibly not even then.

Yesterday I was writing bits of the CHERIoT Programmers’ Guide and it kept autocompleting text in a different writing style, some of which was obviously plagiarised (when I’m describing precisely how to implement a specific, and not very common, lock type with a futex and the autocomplete is a paragraph of text with a lot of detail, I’m confident you don’t have more than one or two examples of that in the training set). It was distracting and annoying. I wrote much faster after turning it off.

So, after giving it a fair try, I have concluded that it is both a net decrease in productivity and probably an increase in legal liability.

Discussions I am not interested in having:

• You are holding it wrong. Using Copilot with this magic config setting / prompt tweak makes it better. At its absolute best, it was a small productivity increase, if it needs more effort to use, that will be offset.
• This other LLM is much better. I don’t care. The costs of the bullshitting far outweighed the benefits when it worked, to be better it would have to not bullshit, and that’s not something LLMs can do.
• It’s great for boilerplate! No. APIs that require every user to write the same code are broken. Fix them, don’t fill the world with more code using them that will need fixing when the APIs change.
• Don’t use LLMs for autocomplete, use them for dialogues about the code. Tried that. It’s worse than a rubber duck, which at least knows to stay silent when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

The one place Copilot was vaguely useful was hinting at missing abstractions (if it can autocomplete big chunks then my APIs required too much boilerplate and needed better abstractions). The place I thought it might be useful was spotting inconsistent API names and parameter orders but it was actually very bad at this (presumably because of the way it tokenises identifiers?). With a load of examples with consistent names, it would suggest things that didn't match the convention. After using three APIs that all passed the same parameters in the same order, it would suggest flipping the order for the fourth.

#GitHubCopilot #CHERIoT

I've been thinking about this for ages, but never had the time to craft the words around it.

People keep saying that "Maths should be fun" ... and I push back with "It should be engaging ... 'fun' is a different thing.

So @rakhichawla has posted pretty much exactly this, but better than I ever could.

I'm copying it here with permission.

Please read this, then as it says at the end ... let's have a deeper conversation about this ...

1/n

(PS: I'd love this to get boosted to get outside my bubble ... you're all amazing, but there will be other opinions, and other thoughts that could be helpful or valuable)

Hashtags: #MathEd #MathsEd #MathEdChat #MathsEdChat #MathChat #MathsChat #MTBoS #TMWYK

Continuing a decade-long tradition #Conversations_im is currently available for free on Google Play.

play.google.com/store/apps/det…

Merry Christmas 🎄 Happy Holidays ☃️ and have fun at #38C3

Conversations (Jabber / XMPP) - Apps on Google Play

An encrypted, user friendly XMPP instant messaging client optimized for mobile

^{play.google.com}

Yesterday, I made a silly production for a group of friends. We like to sometimes welcome each other to the start of whatever week number of the year it happens to be.
In 2023, week 52 started on Christmas Day, so I made a little "Merry Weeksmas!" production using Elevenlabs, featuring the Ssanta voice, and a guy called Lars, who likes gongs.
Lots of inside jokes that will be somewhat familiar to those who listened to my show, Things and stuff, quite a while back, on a now-defunct internet radio station called TBRN.

I had every intention of doing something short and sweet, but what actually came out was an 18 minute, 25 second long pretty much full-on audio drama thing.

Santa ends up in a car accident and misses Christmas. Lars has a fight with his wife. Is Christmas ruined, or are you just being welcomed to week 52 in a ridiculous way?

Again, lots of inside jokes, including amateur radio references, but hopefully you'll enjoy even if you don't get them, or know that they are there to be gotten. I'll admit, I had way too much fun putting this stupid thing together. I don't get to do creative production much anymore.

Featuring a few tracks from @Onj. my Ableton Move even gets a short cameo. So does my old Yamaha Motif Classic.

I should also mention that I don't speak German. Some things may not make sense. I'm OK with that, personally, because this is a silly production.

If you're bored, click here and hear what this is all about, I guess...
borris.me/audio/w52.mp3

I have an early prototype of #w3m using #libcurl. This means today is the day when #w3m did its first HTTP/1.1 request.

Only 28 years after HTTP/1.0 was obsoleted.

I'm excited!

#http

I looked up the enterprise management features of the Firefox and Chrome browsers and wrote down how to turn off the advertising features once by installing the right config files in the right places. Not hard and affects all accounts and profiles, so a big time saver

blog.zgp.org/turning-off-brows…

Linux paths so far, but I know there are some Mac OS command line users on here -- anyone have this set up on your system? If so and you have instructions posted anywhere I'll link to them

Rebuilding much of my infrastructure in NixOS again because I'm sick of shit breaking and being hard to fix. In the process I've been revisiting services I run to ask whether they're worth maintaining or whether a simpler alternative would do.

Started poking Nextcloud today and oh wow is its app ecosystem extensive. I thought it was just a nerdy contact/calendar/file-syncing app but no, you can really build out your own household-specific portal with it.

Right now for instance I'm playing with the Cookbook app. So far I've pasted in a few recipe URLS and have gotten back nicely-accessible, no-fluff copies of those recipes, saved locally, linking back to the originals, with spinners that seem to scale them by serving size. That's really neat.

So I don't think I'll be replacing it with Radicale quite yet. It can apparently somehow parse emails and extract travel itinerary data into calendar events with kitinerary but I'm not sure how. That's one more proprietary service down.