social.gl-como.it
the UNIX v4 tape reminded me of this story by Ali Akurgal about Turkish bureaucracy:
Do you know what the unit of software is? A meter! Do you know why? In 1992, we did our first software export at Netaş. We wrote the software, pressed a button, and via the satellite dish on the roof, at the incredible speed of 128 kb/s, we sent it to England. We sent the invoice by postal mail. $2M arrived at the bank. 3-4 months passed, and tax inspectors came. They said, “You sent an invoice for $2M?” “Yes,” we said. “This money has been paid?” they asked. “Yes,” we said. “But there is no goods export; this is fictitious export,” they said! So we took the tax inspectors to R&D and sat them in front of a computer. “Would you press this ‘Enter’ key?” we asked. One of them pressed it, then asked, “What happened?” “You just made a $300k export, and we’ll send its invoice too, and that will be paid as well,” we said. The man felt terrible because he had become an accomplice! Then we explained how software is written, what a satellite connection is, and how much this is worth. They said, “We understand, but there has to be a physical goods export; that’s what the regulations require.” So we said: “Let’s record this software onto tape (there were no CDs back then—nor cassettes; we used ½-inch tapes) and send that.” Happy to have found a solution, they said, “Okay, record it and send it.” The software filled two reels, which were handed to a customs broker, who took them to customs and started the export procedure. The customs officer processed things and at one point asked, “Where are the trucks?” The broker said, “There are no trucks—this is all there is,” and pointed to the tape reels on the desk. The customs officer said, “These two envelopes can’t be worth $2M; I can’t process this.” We went to court, an expert committee examined whether the two reels were worth $2M. Fortunately, they ruled that they were, and we were saved from the charge of fictitious export. The same broker took the same two reels to the same customs officer, with the court ruling, and restarted the procedure. However, during the process, the unit price, quantity, and total price of the exported goods had to be entered—as per the regulations. To avoid dragging things out further, they looked at the envelope, saw that it contained tape, estimated how many meters of tape there are on one reel, and concluded that we had exported 1k to 2k meters of software. So the unit of software became the meter.
Bare Metal STM32: Increasing the System Clock and Running Dhrystone
hackaday.com/2025/12/18/bare-m…
When you start an STM32 MCU with its default configuration, its CPU will tick along at a leisurely number of cycles on the order of 8 to 16 MHz, using the high-speed internal (HSI) clock source as …Hackaday
Maggiori informazioni su https://casoratesempione.ils.org/2025/12/05/mezzora-damicizia-fpga/Italian Linux Society - Video
George Clooney is an actor.
Put him in the role of a surgeon in front of a camera, and he will do and say things the average non-surgeon viewer will agree are surgeonish. After an hour of that, we are, as average non-surgeon viewers, satisfied and entertained.
Put him in an operating theatre, and the patient will fucking die because he's not a surgeon and knows nothing about really doing surgery.
This is a post about LLMs.
20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple
«I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active “bricked" hardware. My iPhone, iPad, Watch, & Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly.»
— Paris Buttfield-Addison
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and…Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison (hey.paris)
That's the level of harm that would at least have me threaten a civil case.
I also wonder if, within the domain of the GDPR, at least access to the data could be compelled. Maybe Australia has a similar law?
At least they have a possible explanation.
I only ever used my Apple ID for downloading free stuff from the Mac App Store and to add music to my iTunes wish list. I have no clue why it got disabled.
eBookDaily emails you the best 1-day $0 Kindle book freebies, personalized for you every day. Each ebook is free for 1 day only.ebookdaily.com
RT @moultano on Bluesky:
Oil is the most Lovecraftian thing that actually exists. You’re telling me that there's a black ichor under the earth, made from the ancient dead, whose burning can realize all the dreams of man but only at the price of slowly returning the earth to its primordial state?
I just found a page on from what I can tell is an actual food cooking site that is an entry on Yocto recipes. Because the tool Yocto used to create Linux distros calls their directions to install certain software "recipes".
Does this site scrape other sites and copy anything about "recipes"? Did someone that does Linux development post this to the site? This is just funny.
eathealthy365.com/the-ultimate…
Struggling to add your software to a Yocto image? This step-by-step 2025 guide shows you how to create a Yocto recipe from scratch. Go from zero to a working package!Silas (Flavor365)
@mwl man, respect to food bloggers. I would at first want to make fun of them, but they out there putting work into their own site, not on a social media platform, but their own blog at their own domain.
So I might scoff at their recipe blog "Carrot and the Crisp" or something with curated pics of all the ingredients in their own bowls, but I'm still making their roasted cauliflower recipe.
Food bloggers understand platform, branding, and owning your intellectual property.
That's why they write long posts. The recipe itself is not copyrightable, but commentary around it is. It lets them track scrapers.
Batch #1 is officially sold out! 🎉
Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered and helped bring the new Jolla Phone one step closer to reality.
Because of the incredible demand, Batch #2 is now open.
⚓ Batch #1 — Sold out (499 € final price)
⚓ Batch #2 — Now available (549 € final price)
⚓ Limited run of 2000 units
⚓ 99 € refundable down payment
Be part of the next wave shaping the independent European Linux phone.
Pre-order Batch #2 → jolla.com/phone
#JollaPhone #SailfishOS #DIT #LinuxMobile #DeGoogle #european #DigitalSovereignty
The independent European Do It Together (DIT) Linux phone, shaped by the people who use it.Jolla Shop
Just want to clarify, this is not my Substack, I'm just sharing this because I found it insightful.
The author describes himself as a "fractional CTO"(no clue what that means, don't ask me) and advisor. His clients asked him how they could leverage AI. He decided to experience it for himself. From the author(emphasis mine):
I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me. I wanted to experience what my clients were considering—100% AI adoption. I needed to know firsthand why that 95% failure rate exists.I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.
Now when clients ask me about AI adoption, I can tell them exactly what 100% looks like: it looks like failure. Not immediate failure—that’s the trap. Initial metrics look great. You ship faster. You feel productive. Then three months later, you realize nobody actually understands what you’ve built.
My all-in AI experiment cost me my confidenceJosh Anderson (The Leadership Lighthouse)
What's interesting is what he found out. From the article:
I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me. I wanted to experience what my clients were considering—100% AI adoption. I needed to know firsthand why that 95% failure rate exists.I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.
RE: cosocial.ca/@timbray/115639842…
OMG it turns out this is due to the Mac APFS filesystem’s default case-mapping behavior, so things like SSH and LS work (bleccch).
(h/t @stoey.bsky.social over on bsky)
On Mac, open up a terminal and type or copy-paste: ßh (Doesn't work on Linux)Tim Bray (CoSocial)
Nice that they were given something to snack on. Better than some airlines.
I assume that’s what the branches on the sides were for.
A headless mystery
Archaeologists find evidence that a wave of mass brutality accompanied the collapse of the first pan-European culture
@kaasbaas BTW if the "Sea Peoples" thing is not widely known...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peop…
Mysterious people in ships who decimated multiple civilisations in the late Bronze Age.
You meet the users where they are.
You have literally no idea how much this paid off. The number of infected media players people downloaded in the age before Windows Media Player had more than three codecs is unimaginable
Who knows if I saved the entire firm doing this
opl.it/evento/24-11-2025-CHI-T…
CHI TI HA DETTO CHE ERA AMORE? Sguardi, parole e responsabilità di fronte alla violenza di genere e al femminicidio
Evento accessibile da remoto, organizzato dall'Ordine degli Psicologi della Lombardia
“Chi ti ha detto che era amore?” è una domanda che rompe il silenzio e smaschera narrazioni pericolose. Invita a guardare con occhi nuovi ciò che spesso viene normalizzato, negato o giustificato: la violenza che si nasconde...opl.it
Look, we can all complain about religion all we want, but the Protestant Church in the Netherlands in the city of Kampen who have been holding an uninterrupted mass for over a year to protect a family of two parents and five kids (21, 15, 11, and 4) from deportation are fucking heroes. This family has been in The Netherlands for 12 years, so these kids know nothing of the place they came from (hell, two of them were born here and have never seen their parents' home country), and deporting them would be insanely cruel.
Why the long mass, though? Well, according to Dutch law, law enforcement is not allowed to enter a church (or other house of worship) as long as a mass/service/etc. is underway. As such, members of this church take turns holding mass, and 2000 of them have been keeping this up for over a year. The family has its own little area in the church, but they can't leave the building. The kids are taught by local teachers inside the church, and the 21-year old does odd jobs in the building. So yeah, they've been inside for over a year.
Turns out this "church asylum" thing has actually been attempted over 50 times since 1978, and it's been successful at times.
I almost bought a house in Kampen a few years before meeting my now-wife and moving to Sweden. Had that not happened, and I managed to buy a house in Kampen, I would've joined this church in a heartbeat to help out.
nos.nl/artikel/2591258-kerkdie…
Met hulp van 2000 vrijwilligers beschermt de protestantse gemeente in Kampen het Oezbeekse gezin tegen uitzetting. Voorgangers wisselen elkaar af om de twee uur.Rolinde Hoorntje (NOS Nieuws)
EDIT: The Malwarebytes article has been updated:
"After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case."
This confusion could've been easily avoided if Google was more clear in how they communicate with their users.
ORIGINAL:
PSA to anyone who uses Gmail!
"Reportedly, Google has recently started automatically opting users in to allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for training its AI models. This means your emails could be analyzed to improve Google’s AI assistants, like Smart Compose or AI-generated replies. Unless you decide to take action."
malwarebytes.com/blog/news/202…
Did you know that Gmail can use your emails and attachments for its smart features? Here's how to check your settings.Pieter Arntz (Malwarebytes)
Automatically blocking any account that uses Harry Potter to farm engagement. It is time to move past Harry Potter as a society, we do not need to keep maintaining JK Rowling's cashflow or propping a series that actually is not very well written and chock full of offensive racial stereotypes and literary cliches.
#bookstodon #movies #books #films
A rare interview with the creators of the always-funny, always-brilliant, and *usually*-sexy—or occasionally anti-sexy—OGLAF! Cooper has kept a low profile over the years, but is legitimately one of the very best artists in comics today. Read OGLAF if you're old enough to drive!
Talking Oglaf with Trudy Coope...
Other than some time off every year for Christmas, Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne have delivered a new Oglaf comic, skewering fantasy tropes with absolutely not safe for work humor, every week since 2008.Jason Bergman (The Comics Journal)
Folks it is now about one hour until #MONSTERDON the weekly monster movie watch party! If you want to filter out the hashtag, now'd be a good time to do that.
If you'd like to join in, this week's movie is VAMPIRE ON BIKINI BEACH (1988), which I can only assume is a documentary about vampire bats in California.
No? Huh.
Anyway it's free with ads on Tubi over here: tubitv.com/movies/712244/vampi…
Or you can download from Archive.org over here: archive.org/details/vampires-o…
Just hit play at the top of the hour and toot along! See you there ^^
#Cinema #Movies #Cinemastodon #Horror #Scifi #Vampire #Bikinis
perfect programming language. Contribute to TodePond/GulfOfMexico development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
Absolutely ghastly—I approve!
(Only one quibble: array base being fixed to -1 is *boring*. Why not steal the discontinued Perl idiom of the array base being a special variable $[ which you can assign to, so you can start enumerating your arrays from -1, 0, 1, or pi? Much more powerful and general! Also, can we have rich markup syntax is comments, please? Markdown is ubiquitous so how about using nroff with the -ms macro package by default?)
@cstross delightful!
The 'const 5 = 4' is very like early FORTRAN where you could redefine numeric constants. The official line was "don't do that", but nothing stopped the determined programmer.
@cstross what’s wrong with PostScript for documentation. Let’s hear it for stack based executable documentation!
What could go wrong?
Linux running inside a PDF file via a RISC-V emulator - ading2210/linuxpdfGitHub
RetroStrange TV is now streaming!
24/7 science fiction and horror all October long
#streaming #retro #movies #scifi #horror #tv #vintage #publicdomain #adfree
A community-supported 24/7 streaming TV channel based on public domain media and original content. We're in Halloween Mode all October long. Support us at http://patreon.com/philnelsonRetroStrange TV
If someone comes into a dev mailing list and says "my AI told me … I don’t understand it, but you sure do" that means that many people will either ignore it completely or read a wall-of-text that isn’t known to actually be useful.
Please read your search results yourself, and if you find something useful, summarize it and only ask about the stuff that you actually need to know to move forward.
Please respect the time of people in mailing lists. Don’t drop generated walls of text.
Europe's Self Inflicted Cloud Crisis
berthub.eu/articles/posts/our-…
<- Bert Hubert nails one of the big problems in contemporary IT management
The short version For decades, governments and organizations could run services based on servers we actually owned.Bert Hubert's writings
Let's Help NetBSD Cross the Finish Line Before 2025 Ends
@mart_brooks *Wags reproving finger*
I really wish the BSDs could resolve their differences, and more of the people focused on things like Plan 9 instead, but there's room at the table.
🗓️ Linux Day è domani! 25 ottobre 2025 - 25° edizione in Italia 🎉
Incontra la community più vicina:
linuxday.it/2025/
Grazie a tutte le città attive! Arona, Avellino, Bari, Benevento, Bergamo, Biella, Bologna, Bolzano, Brescia, Cairate, Casarano, Casorate Sempione, Cesate, Cosenza, Crotone, Este, Fabriano (parte 1 ..)
#LinuxDay #LinuxDay2025 #SoftwareFreedomDay2025 #SoftwareLibero #Italy
A #Torino, farò una presentazione di #LINEAGEOS, #FDROID, #XMPP durante la #LINUX DAY TORINO 2025
Https://linuxdaytorino.org/2025/#schedule
Orario 14.00
Dove: arsenale della Pace, Torino
Prima di tutto, vi invito a venire e partecipare numerosi
Puoi, questa presentazione è l'occasione di offrire un'alternativa a #Google, e aumentare la #Privacy
Pertanto, vi invito a divulgarlo presso i vostri colleghi, amici e famiglia torinese che volete convertire a #LINEAGE OS, F-DROID e XMPP
La presentazione spiegherà come installare LINEAGE OS, F-DROID e XMPP.
Dei QR code gratis per #MONOCLES da GOOGLE PLAY saranno distribuiti.
Sperò di esser stato esaustivo e vi aspetto, voi, i vostri amici, colleghi e famiglie, sabato 25 ottobre 2025, a Torino, alle 14.00, Arsenale della Pace, per la LINUX DAY TORINO 2025, nella AULA MISC.
#jabber #dino #monoclesim #gajim #movim #siskin #monal
"The villain is a gay Muslim terrorist who looks like Prince doing a terrible Doctor Strangelove impression with a monkey scurrying around his shoulders. He's aided by an army of lesbians led by Colonel Honey Hump."
My latest newsletter is about my fav weird movies:
buttondown.com/charliejane/arc…
Hi! Thanks for reading my newsletter. My new book Lessons in Magic and Disaster has been out for a couple of months. It’s about a trans woman who teaches her...Happy Dancing
Struggling with vibe coding? You just need to get better at prompting. Here is a six video series "course" to teach you how to write the most effective AI prompts and get the most out of vibe coding!
(Do you ever wonder what it would be like if there were some special language for giving commands to computers... a kind of prompting language so they would do *exactly* what you wanted? Maybe someone should invent that.)
"The manufacturer had the power to remotely disable devices and used it against me for blocking their data collection."
codetiger.github.io/blog/the-d…
...and people wonder why I resist having that kind of stuff in my home...
Would you allow a stranger to drive a camera-equipped computer around your living room? You might have already done so without even realizing it. The Beginning: A Curious Experiment It all started innocently enough.Harishankar (Small World)
Talented fellow to pull it apart and then put it back together!
That morsel of advice, to never use the same WiFi for IoT devices and your actual computers is something most people ignore. It's a major effort to setup, and the priority slides down the list unless something out of the ordinary nudges them.
No no no no no and no.
None of this is trivial to 99% of humanity. PLEEEEEEEASE see this from the perspective of regular humans!
@ewen setting up an extra SSID is mostly easy for people who know what an SSID is without looking it up. Which is a fairly small slice of humanity.
But it's worse than that -- I don't think putting IoT devices on their own SSID *but the same underlying network* makes much sense. You'd probably like IoT networks to look more like guest networks, with strictly controlled access to other devices. Which needs (at a minimum) VLANs and an extra set of firewall policies, all of which depend on so many things that there's no way to produce any sort of useful cookbook for people with moderate amounts of technical skill.
And then you'll discover that there's no good way to actually configure new IoT devices without moving a phone onto the IoT network. And some features will just silently fail to work if you don't have direct IP access to the IoT device from a phone. And useful things like mDNS won't work at all unless you go to heroic lengths.
I'm perfectly capable of setting up an IoT network at home. I even have most of the config for it rolled out. But I've never moved a single device into the IoT network, because it's just going to make everything extra-painful in practice.
Exquisite description of the drama required to isolate IoT from anything important. Right down to the "Oh crap I'm six steps into configuring a device over the Thread network but I forgot to change my phone to the IoT network first. Urgh. Start over."
I have actually implemented those firewall rules to restrict what IoT devices can see. And in the back of my mind I'm thinking "What if I missed something?"
And then there's the maintenance in case something stops working.
The average person will go to Office Depot and buy a box that says "Fast Internet". Even if there was a wifi/router that would setup your separate IoT network by default and manage all those firewall rules, people would still choose a product that is cheaper or has pretty flashing LEDs.
And governments let this go on. There is zero effort from my govt to regulate for products that protect consumers. The govt has a website telling us to "be alert for scammers" and other malarkey, with absolutely tools that might actually help avoid the average person from having their digital life stolen, let alone just being spied on by corporations.
@Laberpferd @ewen @laird ...or they just have their own cellular interface...
The 'Internet of things' (IoT), being the future paradise that awaits us when all of our device [...]LWN.net
Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than
<- please can someone do an updated version, comparing Oberon to bits of Linux/BSD?
Anche quest'anno il GL-Como partecipa al Linux Day!
L'appuntamento annuale organizzato da ILS è nato nel 2001 per promuovere le idee del software libero e dell'open source, con un occhio di riguardo verso Linux. L'evento è costituito da una rete di eventi decentralizzati in tutta Italia organizzati autonomamente da gruppi volontari e appassionati.
In questa edizione il GL-Como si unisce a ILS Casorate Sempione, sabato 25 ottobre presso la biblioteca comunale Alda Merini .
Il programma è in via di finalizzazione, vi invitiamo a seguire il sito di ILS Casorate Sempione per aggiornamenti!
Meshtastic iOS app breaks EU law with sending lots of telemetry (logs, usage) to DataDog in US wthout user consent and without any kind of notification of the app doing so.
I reported this as issue and it got immediately closed without any explanation: github.com/meshtastic/Meshtast…
Apple iOS, iPadOS & macOS Clients For Meshtastic. Contribute to meshtastic/Meshtastic-Apple development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
I once read a story about the people writing the software for the NASA Apollo missions. There was a functionary in charge of weight accounting, who came to them and asked how much the software would weigh.
They told him it weighted nothing, but the functionary had heard *that* one before and insisted—everything had to be accounted down to the last ounce. He demanded to see it.
They showed him a stack of punched cards, and he was triumphant. “You see,” he said smugly, “it doesn't weigh only ‘nothing’!”
“No, you misunderstand,” they replied. “The cards aren't going on the spacecraft. Only the holes.”