Dunque, bella gente fediversica e mastodontica, mi ricordo benissimo di aver ricevuto diverse richieste, nel tempo, riguardanti la ricerca storica, ultima delle quali quella di @valhalla relativamente ai passaporti tra le varie "regioni" (semplifico) d'Italia ai tempi dell'unificazione. Purtroppo, però, non ricordo l'ordine, né l'argomento, né il richiedente 😅
Quindi facciamo così: se avete #CuriositàStoriche scrivetemi qui sotto, così con ordine farò il possibile per rispondervi.
deploying solar panels over farms increases crop yields by up to 18% by preventing them from getting scorched, meaning huge solar power plants can be built with no harm to natural landscapes
Data from agrivoltaic canopy trials in France, developed by energy producer TSE and the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE), indicate measurable temperature, water-balance, and yield effects that reinf…
Nel 2025 in Madagascar i giovani della generazione Z hanno fatto cadere il regime. La colonna sonora delle proteste sono stati i brani di denuncia dei gruppi heavy metal e underground. Reportage dall’isola.
Nel 2025 in Madagascar i giovani della generazione Z hanno fatto cadere il regime. La colonna sonora delle proteste sono stati i brani di denuncia dei gruppi heavy metal e underground. Reportage dall’isola Leggi
La situazione ragebait sui social di Mæta ormai è fuori controllo. Facendo leva sul fatto che siamo tutti - comprensibilmente - già incazzati, stanno puntando tutto il banco SOLO su quel tipo di interazione. È impossibile aprire le loro app senza imbattersi in qualcosa di oltraggioso, inaccettabile, disgustoso. Trattenersi dal leggere oltre, o peggio, commentare, è sempre più difficile.
Non cadiamoci. Questa roba è fatta apposta per avvelenarci lo spirito, per farci sentire inermi e frustrati, per farci chiudere ancora di più in noi stessi, con gli occhi fissi nel vuoto luminoso dei loro feed. Prendiamoci cura di noi, perché per loro siamo solo carne da engagement.
La Cassazione ha ammesso la richiesta di referendum da parte del Comitato che a gennaio ha raggiunto le firme necessarie e formulato il nuovo quesito (che si differenzia dal precedente solo perché indica le disposizioni costituzionali).
Ciò avrebbe eventualmente richiesto che si spostasse la data del referendum di due o tre settimane. Invece il Governo ha confermato la data già fissata.
Nessuno voleva boicottare nulla. Queste continue fake news si ritorceranno contro chi ne sta abusando
Today seems like a good day to for the Nth time share the only Bloom County strip I ever clipped out of a newspaper's Sunday comics section. It ran February 26, 1989, and oh, how I wish it didn't still seem so relevant all these years later.
TIL that SSDs can lose data if left unplugged for long periods of time (only required to hold data up to 1 year), unlike HDDs which as long as the material holds it can take years.
SSDs may be faster and have fewer moving parts than hard drives, but one thing they're not good at is data preservation. Here's why and what you can do.
“Welcome to the first Long Links of this so-far-pretty-lousy 2026. I can’t imagine that anyone will have time to take in all of these, but there’s a good chance one or two might brighten your day.” tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/20…
This time out, featuring lots of books, cryptography, and open-source clothing.
Please, I beg, if you're posting about a new release of the cool thing you made, include a small description of what it is and what it does.
It's hard to boost "libencarbulator turbo++ 2.8a release is now available! Now supports configuring reticulation of splines" in a vacuum, and I want nothing more than to boost the cool thing you made
Many worthy causes crowdfunding now, but this one's dear to my heart: collective action by Florentine workers to turn an old car factory into a worker-owned solar panel factory
The goal is to prevent mass-layoffs since factory was going to shut down, & I've been supporting them through years of amazing teamwork of unions, eco-activists, & Italy's classic anarchist movement
Their pay portal is endearingly glitchy like many grassroots orgs so be patient, it does work!
I am so tired of people in engineering gushing about AI.
A bunch of developers that wouldn’t even know how to speak about natural language processing are pretending that writing some instructions is gonna always work in a predictable way because…
Because they forgot that they are usually the AI that needs to transform natural language instructions into a lasting actionable and acting knowledge. Because they forgot how fucking hard that is. Because bullshitting beats admitting ignorance…
I wonder when ChatGPT starts asking for donations. “You know, if you find me useful, or you appreciate me treating you like a predestined meta human, please consider giving me some extra financial support this month.” Maybe the failed model push will inadvertently normalize investment in “free” or shareware, open source support.
I disagree. WinRAR is proprietary software that is great at making proprietary-format archives that are difficult to decompress using FOSS (unrar-free and 7-zip still stumble on a good portion of the format due to licensing restrictions). OpenAI has made a bigger impact on open research: fast, accurate transcriptions (whisper), RL (gym), and of course LLMs (starting with GPT-2, and of course ChatGPT and the "gpt-oss" models).
Learning about the upcoming git-history(1) command alone would have been worth this year #FOSDEM trip. It's heavily inspired by #Jujutsu UX and aims to implement in native #Git its most notable commands.
Tangentially related (to other parts of this email), there's already an implementatin of git absorb github.com/tummychow/git-absor… and it is a very useful feature indeed!
absolutely unsearchable! I had no idea it was a thing either before the talk. I suggest checking out the recording of the talk when available (main track, Jansen, the future of Git something something).
Disclaimer: None of this is written by AI, I’m still a real person writing my own blog like its 1999 I finally figured out how to do Gigabit Ethernet over my existing phone wires. Powerline adapter…
@withaveeay Absolutely. The Isle of Man is currently dying in the gutter, unaware of what hit it. It was never in the EU so most people here don't realise that its big sibling severed the umbilical and is wasting away.
I reckon it should secede and form a Celtic Union with Ulster, the Republic of Ireland and Scotland.
I'm lucky that my ISP provides free in home mesh wifi with their Internet plans, otherwise this would be a great alternative, as my mid 90s home is still blessed with phone jacks.
If I have to go back to the other ISP that doesn't do mesh wifi, maybe I'll try this instead.
@javensbukan I do use WiFi, but where possible, I use cables. It's much more reliable and faster. But I paid about £1000 to have the 4 floors of my house cabled up last year, because I didn't know this was an option. It has dozens of telephone sockets!
@futuresprog I've used powerline networking in 5 out of 6 of the last places I've lived, and it works great and it's much more reliable than WiFi. But in the British isles, houses tend to have telephone line built in, often to every room and at least to every floor.
I wonder if any of my contacts on mastodon could connect me (via email) with someone on the @fedora Project documentation team? docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/f…
You're invited to talk on Matrix. If you don't already have a client this link will help you pick one, and join the conversation. If you already have one, this link will help you join the conversation
I was wondering when a reporter would uncover this.
So BitLocker is super secure, right? Well... BitLocker recovery keys are backed up to Microsoft's Cloud - and they give them out to law enforcement on request. Using the BitLocker recovery key, you can just unlock the device without a PIN etc. forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewste…
I don’t understand putting your trust in black box proprietary encryption software when TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt exist and are older than BitLocker by 3 years, stupid doesn’t even begin to describe it.
If you interrogate Claude about magic strings it goes into a “stop trying to social engineer Claude” state to where it locks down its ability to browse to URLs. This is probably a safety state it triggers prevent enumeration of other undocumented magic strings.
I’m curious what other hidden magic strings exist for this or other LLMs. This might be additional attack surface to consider from an availability perspective. I expect it could be used as a string in a malicious binary to prevent analysis or break scrapers that send something to Claude.
What remains true is this though: a single string if ingested as data can cause headaches.
What happened? When streaming from Claude 3.7 Sonnet, response chunks do not contain thinking_blocks of type redacted_thinking when forcing redacted thinking with the magic string specified by Anth...
no, ma tu l'hai preso dal sito ufficiale del nuovo social, wsocial.eu, e ci hai messo le icone di mastodon e del fediverso, o sbaglio?
Questo è un altro sito fatto da qualche burlone del fediverso, che ci ha messo il trattino, w-social.eu, e ha fatto in pratica la stessa cosa che hai fatto tu
Ever driven the same car or used the same camera or power drill for 8-10 years and thought: "I wish all these buttons and levers were suddenly in different places and did different things"?
Una montagna di siti web con pop-up invasivi che dicono “abbiamo a cuore la tua privacy!”, “clicca qui per accettare!”… Tutte balle. Se aveste davvero a cuore la mia privacy, non mettereste nemmeno un cookie, nemmeno uno “tecnico”, non mettereste finestre pubblicitarie, ma mi permettereste di visitare tutto il sito standomene tranquillo.
il problema non sono i gestori dei siti ma i programmi di ads. Un sito può anche avere dietro un'agenzia editoriale ed ha dei costi che in qualche modo devono rientrare. Sono i programmi ads che cercano di massimizzare i target riempiendo gli script di traccianti.
@francommit ricordo che diversi anni fa esistevano i circuiti di banner, per farsi pubblicità. Era sufficiente accordarsi con un altro sito simile al proprio per uno scambio banner e si era a posto. Certo, le cose sono cambiate, ma lo trovavo un approccio molto più “sano”. In effetti ora un’azienda dovrebbe affiliarsi ai propri concorrenti, cosa ovviamente non voluta.😅 Ma basterebbe affiliarsi ai siti delle riviste del proprio settore, per esempio. Pubblicità gratis per tutti.
When Le Guin talks about genre writers as “the realists of a larger reality” we surrender the power of that when we narrow our work to only depict one type of future. We have great power to restore…
I think we may have been led here by imagining too many dystopias. Billionaire #scifi fans seem to have taken them as guidebooks, while the billions of the rest of us may not have imagined enough about our power to create better alternatives
LOL. FIFA - who infamously awarded Trump a made-up Peace Prize, is in the throes of FAFO: "Tens of thousands of fans cancelled their tickets to the 2026 World Cup over the weekend amid safety fears, political protests, and human rights concerns in the U.S., leading FIFA to schedule an emergency meeting this week." ticketnews.com/2026/01/nearly-…
@amministratore non trovando il "box suggerimenti" provo a mettere qui un paio di cose che a mio avviso andrebbero sistemare su owncast.it per evitare fraintendimenti e non dare adito a chi potrebbe male interpretare i vostri intenti.
Lo faccio in pubblico sia perché non vedo indicato un contatto mail per owncast.it, sia perché essendo un argomento che anche altri hanno sollevato magari possono sfruttare il thread per altri suggerimenti da darvi 😊
1. Disclaimer (ben visibile) che indichi che NON siete Owncast e quale sia lo scopo di owncast.it. Qualcosa tipo "questo sito non è in alcun modo affiliato al progetto Owncast (con link), ma ha lo scopo di diffondere e coltivare la community italiana che lo utilizza". (ovviamente sapete meglio voi come/cosa scrivere).
Questo non solo aiuta a chiarire lo scopo della pagina (evitando fraintendimenti e confusione), ma fa sì che interessatx possano andare a dare un'occhiata upstream.
2. Crediti. Oltre a creditare il progetto stesso (ma l'abbiamo smarcato al punto precedente), ha senso dare il merito a cose come l'Emoji Wall che linkate. Anche qui manca un link diretto o un qualche tipo di spiegazione/chiarimento anche solo sul fatto che sia qualcosa di non vostro, ma creato e mantenuto da altre persone.
Una sezione crediti sarebbe la cosa migliore, ma anche banalmente un paio di link in più migliorano un sacco la situazione.
3. Sarebbe carino che i testi non fossero scritti da AI, ma se decidete di farlo occorre una piccola review per refusi come "Certo! Ecco un capitolo strutturato con le best practice per promuovere uno stream su Mastodon (ad esempio tramite Owncast.it) nel contesto del Fediverso:" (Conclusione al termine del paragrafo OBS).
4. C'erano anche altre cosine, ma vedo che avete iniziato a sistemare un po' (rispetto all'ultima archiviazione su archive.org almeno) la pagina aggiungendo il link alla directory ufficiale e a dove scaricare owncast.
Non penso sia sufficiente e non credo copra i punti sopra indicati, ma si apprezzano sempre le modifiche in positivo. Se posso aiutare a sistemare la pagina sono assolutamente a disposizione, non sia mai che si critichi senza aver voglia di contribuire.
@cicciofritz Stando lontano dal PC mi stavo perdendo tutto questo dramma ^^ Risposta veramente da signore, che oltre a farmi venire voglia di mangiare i casoncelli mi dà la possibilità di postare per la prima volta nel 2026 questa immagine ^^
Il sito nasce come raccolta di anni di appunti, configurazioni e suggerimenti, poi impacchettati e riscritti per essere comprensibili alle persone normali. Il fatto che oggi Google lo mostri come secondo risultato cambia tutto: è evidente che vada ripulito dai loghi ufficiali e linki a risorse utili necessarie per aiutare i curiosi che capitano per caso da google in quanto è l'unica documentazione italiana sul progetto. Oltre ad aggiungere link per supportare il progetto economicamente.
spero gli appunti qui sopra siano serviti a darvi un paio di spunti su come evitare di far cadere in errore un navigatore distratto che leggendo quella pagina ne comprende male il senso e fraintende le vostre buone intenzioni. Se vi va fatemi/ci sapere quando è aggiornata che un'altra mano la do/diamo volentieri!
ps: vi anticipo e vi dico che no, non serve uno screenshot del mio toot dove mi ringraziate per tenere pulito il Fediverso 😊
Detto questo, al di là di refusi o possibili dimenticanze, senza alcuna offesa, la valutazione sulla correttezza del sito spetta solo ed esclusivamente al team di Owncast, cui compete anche esprimere un giudizio sull’iniziativa ed eventualmente chiarire eventuali ambiguità se presenti.
Per il resto il servizio nostream non è un nostro canale ufficiale ma un servizio che viene usato da chi ne fa richiesta, può capitare che qualche admin capiti come ospite live ma non è mai utilizzato da noi.
assolutamente nessuna offesa, come detto sono suggerimenti da persona che è capitata su quella pagina: non sono la polizia del fediverso o altro, ma in uno spazio aperto come questo trovo sia utile potersi aiutare a vicenda a crescere.
un'ultima cosa, non pensi/pensate che per onestà intellettuale sarebbe il caso di sistemare un attimo il toot sul vostro profilo? O secondo voi il mio comportamento resta un attacco mirato a sparare fango invece di una critica costruttiva?
A volte è bene ricordare che i consigli si danno senza ricorrere a post indignati utili solo a creare flame e a trascinare la propria community a urlare “parassita”. Il fatto che quel commento sia rimasto visibile conferma che non si tratta di un incidente, e francamente non sorprende. Evidentemente, su livello segreto il confronto lascia spazio all’insulto: va bene così, è la dimostrazione del livello dialettico dell'istanza, e non è manco la prima volta che succede.
Now is a great time to force-feed your CTOs on the writings of Niklaus Wirth (inventor of Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon among other things, and proponent of "less is more" in software—he wrote an entire operating system with GUI in about 4000 lines of code.). mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11584856…
Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code but that means it's producing 10,000 more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
@jackwilliambell @ravenonthill Pascal was missing a few things it really needed (the variable-length string as a fundamental type that Borland added via Turbo Pascal would have been perfect) but it was a really good first step, and solid enough that OSs were written in it (LisaOS and early MacOS among others).
@jackwilliambell @ravenonthill Back in the day, at least one model of X.25 packet switches from Hughes were programmed in Pascal. This was when Pascal was the big teaching language. As it was explained to me when I asked "why not C?", Pascal was fast enough to meet the requirements and they could hire new grads who knew Pascal without having to train them in C.
The FAA's NADIN II packet switching network (long since retired) used these switches.
@jackwilliambell let's be honest: the absolute majority of 'developers' these days can't read K&R and would burst into flames upon being presented with Perl. Brooks, Wirth, it doesn't matter, they'll refuse, fail to comprehend, and insist that it's too old and only they have the brilliance for modern programming.
Met a nephew at Christmas. He did a software engineering course at university and had just got his first graduate job and he was working mainly with Pascal.
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code" - Ken Thompson.
I saw that handwritten in red pen on Ken's review copy of the first 8 chapters of the manuscript of The Art of Unix Programming which he mailed back to Eric in 2003.
The quotes in catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/ht… mostly came from Eric having sent (physical printout) review copies to people, who scribbled margin notes on them which Eric then incorporated verbatim. (Apparently a thing publishers did back then.)
@jackwilliambell @ravenonthill "OSs were written in it" is not necessarily a good metric. PR1MEOS was mostly written in early style FORTRAN and I don't think BLISS should be mentioned in polite company.
Pascal has some interesting limits but then so did early C, Just PASCAL tended towards "you can't easily do that" and C tended towards "thats dumb, but if you aim at your feet and pray go for it"
@seachaint @elmar @rootwyrm @jackwilliambell Perl since the late 90s had regexps that supported inline whitespace and comments so they were self-documenting and highly readable.
@elmar @rootwyrm @jackwilliambell Yea, the old joke about "write only Perl" was always unfair, because Perl so strongly emphasised regexes and they're responsible for a lot of the reputation. And I agree that the real blame out to lie with "write only developers" :)
@seachaint @rootwyrm @jackwilliambell Perl was never a write-only language but lots of write-only developers were using Perl in its day. Now lots of the new breed of write-only developers use JavaScript and it shows.
Neither Perl nor JavaScript are "beautiful" languages out of the gate, but both are powerful enough that with discipline they allow for well-structured, maintainable code. One core tenant of the "less is more" argument is that you should understand all of the code you write and hence it must be small enough that this is possible. AI defeats that goal unless you use AI only to teach you about programming. In my experience this is ultimately more work than learning directly from the manuals.
With old languages (C, Perl, JavaScript, ...) it was hard to be disciplined enough to write maintainable code. Newer languages (Go, Rust, Swift, ...) were developed to help with that (and they do!) but it is depressing to see that so many projects are writing sloppy code while pretending that the new languages automagically lead to "good" software.
(btw. I went through my education at ETH but am just too young to have been to lectures by Niklaus Wirth himself. However, his influence still showed through his disciples and the curriculum.)
@seachaint @elmar @jackwilliambell yup. There were ISPs up until about, oh, 4 years ago that ran their entire provisioning system on Perl. That was it. Just Perl.
@rootwyrm @seachaint @elmar @jackwilliambell Perl is dying out slowly because Larry made *one* stupid decision in the late 1990s—to call his follow-on language "Perl 6", thus blocking iterative development of Perl from using a recognizably larger version number. Thus rendering it pitch-deck hostile, rather than actually unfit for purpose. (The former Perl 6 is now known as Raku—it's the C++ to Perl 5's C—while Perl development is still ongoing, in its own direction.)
Hey Guys, gals, people and pets, Satya Nadella is getting tired of people calling AI Slop output AI Slop. If everyone can stop that's be great as it is upsetting Microslops share holders.
Don't start calling Microslop Microslop or use the #microslop tag as it might burst the AI bubble and then Microslop might have to take SlopPilot out of Windows. As you know, that would be terrible.
We should do as Microsoft's CEO wants and stop calling AI garbage Slop. Instead we should call it Nadella, to show him our appreciation of all he's done for us!
In the 1980s there were an incredible number of personal computers of all shapes, sizes, and operating system types, and there was very little interoperability. Unlike today’s Windows-Mac duo…
A few days ago, I saw a nice approximation to the arcsine function by @eniko
asin(x) ≈ a(x) = x + (π/2-x)(1-√[1-x^2])^2
I won’t bother plotting a(x) against asin(x), because the two curves are indistinguishable to the eye, but the proportional error is plotted below.
I spent some time trying to figure out if there’s an underlying *geometric* reason why this works so well ... in the same sense that there is for, say:
asin(x) ≈ chord(x) = √[2(1-√[1-x^2])]
the length of the chord that subtends the angle asin(x).
There are some obvious nice features built into a(x): it clearly must agree with asin at x=0 and 1, and less obviously it will match derivatives at those points as well.
But surely there had to be some special geometric relationship too, to make it work so well?
If so, I never did find it. Maybe someone else will (or already has). But I found another approximation, roughly as simple and roughly as good:
asin(x) ≈ b(x) = ½(π-4)x^2 + x + 1 - √[1-x^2]
which also matches values and derivatives with asin(x) at x=0 and 1, and whose proportional error is the gold curve in the plot below. [Note that it matches values with asin exactly at an additional, intermediate point, asin(1/√2) = b(1/√2) = π/4.]
That partly cured me of my conviction that there had to be a nice geometrical account for any approximation this good. Maybe all that’s really needed is a low-degree polynomial and one function, √[1-x^2], with an infinite derivative at x=1 the same as asin(x).
@futurebird If I were at a computer, I'd be extremely curious to compare this implementation against Skia's asin approximation. They look similar but Skia has a much more involved polynomial in the middle.
I retract that. It "IS" Cecil Hastings "sheet 35". Couldn't find it on RAND's website but it's in "APPROXIMATIONS FOR DIGITAL COMPUTERS" 1955, page 160
That approximation is almost three orders of magnitude better than the ones I described as a(x) and b(x)!
Though they choose *not* to make it exactly match asin at the endpoints (as you can see from the error curve they plot for the function ψ), which leads to huge *proportional* errors close to x=0. If that was a problem, it would be easy to tweak it, making a_0 in their polynomial exactly π/2, which would roughly double its maximum absolute error elsewhere.
keep in mind that as @eniko pointed out there are exponent to the c=1-sqrt part that make the curve fit even better. We did some testing and it turned out to peak around 1.93 for some reason (1.9296...). I wonder what *that* means.
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![Two curves showing the proportional error, |(asin(x)-f(x))/asin(x)|, for two approximations to the arcsine function.
The first curve, x + (π/2-x)(1-√[1-x^2])^2, rises from 0 to a max around 0.0085 at x=0.4, dips to around 0.004 at x=0.8, rises again to almost 0.0085 again close to x=1, then rapidly drops back to 0.
The second curve, ½(π-4)x^2 + x + 1 - √[1-x^2], rises faster than the first to a slightly higher maximum, 0.009 at x=0.3, drops all the way to 0 at x=0.7, then rises to around 0.003 at x=0.9 before falling to 0.](https://social.gl-como.it/photo/preview/640/4910344 "Two curves showing the proportional error, |(asin(x)-f(x))/asin(x)|, for two approximations to the arcsine function.
The first curve, x + (π/2-x)(1-√[1-x^2])^2, rises from 0 to a max around 0.0085 at x=0.4, dips to around 0.004 at x=0.8, rises again to almost 0.0085 again close to x=1, then rapidly drops back to 0.
The second curve, ½(π-4)x^2 + x + 1 - √[1-x^2], rises faster than the first to a slightly higher maximum, 0.009 at x=0.3, drops all the way to 0 at x=0.7, then rises to around 0.003 at x=0.9 before falling to 0.")
Prendiamoci cura di noi, perché per loro siamo solo carne da engagement.