social.gl-como.it
Update: it wasn't the ECB blocking gnome-calculator, it was an HTTP library regression breaking the connection to the ECB. Text in [] is incorrect, retained due to RTs etc.
[The ECB have remotely bricked gnome-calculator]
In the latest episode of "Why the 21st Century is impossibly stupid", GNOME calculator contacts the ECB on startup to get currency rates. It just hangs on startup if this fails, the whole calculator not just the currency stuff. [The ECB has blocked GNOME calculator].
To fix this, you can do "dconf write /org/gnome/calculator/refresh-interval 0", whatever tf dconf is, because when I tried it told me dbus-launch is missing, wtf that is, because it doesn't have a package. Turns out it's in "dbus-x11". I dunno why X11, because I use wayland, but I'm past caring at this point. I installed it and it worked.
Now I can calculate how much postage I need to pay for this parcel.
[A bloody OS-shipped desktop calculator, DDoSing a central bank, and blocking on connection failure].
The first thing I noticed was that the pain was gone. The tall, thin, hooded figure let me bask in that for a moment.
IT IS TIME
"Oh," I said, looking down at the frail vessel I had inhabited all my life. "Right."
COME
"Do you remember," I asked as we walked, "everyone you come for?"
YES
"Fondly?"
I DO NOT JUDGE. AS A RULE, I SPEND LITTLE TIME WITH PEOPLE AS THEY LIVE
"No, but you spend some time with them after, like now."
1/2
This post refutes the claim that researchers found a "backdoor" in ESP32 Bluetooth chips. What the researchers highlight (vendor-specific HCI commands to read & write controller memory) is a common design pattern found in other Bluetooth chips from o…Xeno Kovah (Dark Mentor LLC)
I once again did my release work late at night and announced immediately, just so nobody would notice. So:
a convenient lump of my free reads. Image suggested by @jggimi
tiltedwindmillpress.com/produc…
Discworld Rules, & LOTR is brain-rot for technologists
contraptions.venkateshrao.com/…
This post is an extended argument that as a lens for thinking about the world, The Lord of the Rings, is a work that you should “not set aside lightly, but throw across the room with great force,” and that in place of Middle Earth, you should install Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.
Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less
theregister.com/2025/03/07/fos…
Moved from Windows or Linux? Smooth some of the rough edges
<- by me on @theregister
Just learned of this website for European alternatives to well-known services such as Gmail. Really awesome to see that!
We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.European Alternatives
After relaunching GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT in 2019, the site grew to a readership of more than 20 million a month, … Continue reading "The End Of Independent Publishing And Giant Freakin Robot"Joshua Tyler (GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT)
Undocumented backdoor found in Bluetooth chip used by a billion devices
> The undocumented commands allow spoofing of trusted devices, unauthorized data access, pivoting to other devices on the network, and potentially establishing long-term persistence.
The lanky mouse asks the smaller one what they're going to do today.
"Nothing. To want a diseased world is a sickness. Today, we heal ourselves. Do you understand, Pinky?"
"Narf."
The Brain nods. "You do."
The soft, introspective hush falls over Pinky. Pinky *and* the Brain.
A #debian cry for help: I need to update the packaging for #vcsh to modern standards before the freeze hits. It's trivially easy in theory, but I just lack the spoons.
I keep being laughably busy with really meaningful work, but I can't make the time to sit down a few hours and read.
Three major projects will conclude soon, but then it's likely too late.
Any help or co-maintainers appreciated.
Retoots OK; being vulnerable in public is Good Actually(TM).
di Andrea Di Vita “Isaac era autenticamente orgoglioso e felice dei suoi traguardi. Dopo la [...]Carmilla on line
This is the color of infinite hotness.
This is the color something gets in the limit where its temperature approaches infinity. Of course you’d instantly be fried by gamma rays of arbitrarily high frequency, but this would be its spectrum in the visible range.
This is also the color of a typical neutron star. They’re so hot they look the same!
It’s also the color of the very early Universe!
This was worked out by David Madore, and you can find the details at my blog article, including a discussion of whether this is exactly the right color:
johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2…
Luckily, the alternative someone suggested is so close I can't tell the difference.
For computer screens and cell phones this color is approximately #98b5ff.
Perhaps we should call it "baby blue" - for the early universe.
Two things I learned this week about #MSVC / #VisualStudio:
1. If vcvars64.bat is not behaving itself for some reason, you can set VSCMD_DEBUG=1 and it will print more diagnostics. 2 and 3 print more still: 3 is an "OMG redirect to a file and sort through it later" level of verbosity.
2. If you do this, the script stops for a noticeable time just after printing "Sending telemetry". One of the reasons it's so slow is that it's phoning home! You can set VSCMD_SKIP_SENDTELEMETRY=1 to turn that off, improving speed as well as privacy.
This is commented in one of the sub-scripts VsDevCmd.bat with the command
REM Send Telemetry if user's VS is opted-in
but, of course, I have no memory of seeing any opt-in box to tick.
today, i have IP-blocked the entirety of alibaba cloud’s IPv4 range (47.80.0.0/13, 47.74.0.0/15, 47.76.0.0/14). And you could ask - domi, what the hell, that’s kinda sorta a lot of addresses?
fucking watch this: that’s sakamoto Mk5, my Ryzen 9 7950X3D server. Never before have I seen forgejo taking this much CPU.
They’ve generated 9GB of access logs (!) and 230GB of generated tarballs (!!!) before I got to my laptop, investigated and ip-banned them. I’m positive that most forgejo deployments in existence wouldn’t survive this.
If you needed another reason to fuck generative AI today - here’s one
I've seen Alibaba too, had their IP range redirected to an infinite maze of garbage for a while.
They usually hit me with about 300 requests / sec from a few thousand IP addresses, with varying user agents, and happily ignore robots.txt, and don't care about 429 (with a Retry-After header) either. They just come and blast.
They seem to be very keen on ingesting garbage, though, and have made about 2 million requests against my system just yesterday.
Easily the most aggressive crawler I've seen, even worse than OpenAI, Claude, Google and Facebook combined.
E comunque gli skiantos sono degli zii fuori di testa ❤️❤️❤️
#Skiantos #arci #arcibellezza #live #livemusic
The Mastodon accounts of some projects that preserve, modernize, and reimagine classic operating systems and system software environments:
9Front (Plan 9)
@9front@mastodon.sdf.org (unofficial)
@9front@brands.town (unofficial)
FreeDOS (MS-DOS)
@freedosproject
Haiku (BeOS)
@haiku
Medley Interlisp (Interlisp-D)
@interlisp
Inside a combustion chamber, temperature fluctuations can cause sound waves that also disrupt the flow, in turn. This is called a thermoacoustic instability. In this video, researchers explore this process by watching how flames move down a tube. The flame fronts begin in an even curve that flattens out and then develops waves like those on a vibrating pool. Those waves grow bigger and bigger until the flame goes completely turbulent. Visually, it’s mesmerizing. Mathematically, it’s a lovely example of parametric resonance, where the flame’s instability is fed by system’s natural harmonics. (Video and image credit: J. Delfin et al.; research credit: J. Delfin et al. 1, 2)
#2024gofm #combustion #combustionInstability #flame #flowVisualization #fluidDynamics #instability #parametricResonance #physics #resonance #science #thermoacousticInstability #turbulence
Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen
theregister.com/2025/02/19/del…
The FOSS world has replicated most of it in Lazarus
<- by me on @theregister
@gbschenkel
This...
wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mango…
... And this?
github.com/benjamimgois/goverl…
...?
I am sorry but I've never heard of them before. What is an overlay? It doesn't explain.
GOverlay is an opensource project that aims to create a Graphical UI to help manage Linux overlays. - benjamimgois/goverlayGitHub
Dev'essere in collaborazione con il ministero della coerenza.
EDIT/disclaimer: la foto non è mia, unica altra corrispondenza che ho trovato è un post su reddit.com/r/italia. Per quanto ne so potrebbe benissimo essere un buontempone che ha pensato bene di stampare un foglio e appiccicarlo su un pallet a caso.
Che non arrivino le bufale anche qui 😅✌️
Today, February 12, is loyal beagle Gromit's birthday. Happy birthday, Gromit! (The Wrong Trousers, 1993)
#Movies #Film #Cinemastodon #Letterboxd #Gromit #TheWrongTrousers #WallaceAndGromit #StopMotion #Claymation
OpenAGPS is a project to create a open-source assisted-GNSS service, compatible with existing GNSS systems.openagps.net
Interesting experience... I have not done a Friendica only presentation for some time. During the recent years it was mostly introductions to the Fediverse or more topic orientated talks / workshops. First iteration of the slides for the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM (Saturday 15:30 to 16h) is done 🚀
There are definitely many real-world issues and problems where we could benefit from significantly more quantitative (and mathematical) analysis and thinking than we do currently. But, at the same time, there are certain dimensions of our modern society where we overcorrected for this, and allowed quantitative reasoning to dominate at the expense of other important modes of thought, or to be deployed in a highly imbalanced fashion.
As anyone who has encountered a word problem in their high school math classes knows, the first step in quantitative reasoning is to assign numerically precise metrics as proxies for one's goals, parameters, and variables. Most of our wants and needs are quite qualitative in nature: happiness, comfort, security, companionship, and the like. But these are too fuzzy to be optimized and analyzed by the mathematics of quantitative reasoning. Which, to oversimplify things, leaves us with basically two options: either use more qualitative modes of thinking, such as "gut feelings", emotional responses, or drawing on past experiences of similar situations, accepting any cognitive biases that result from doing so; or to create quantitative proxies for these goals, and then optimize those proxies in a more dispassionate (and hopefully more objective) fashion. (1/5)
An ancient example is the invention of money, which allowed individuals and organizations to measure more and more of their capital in terms of a single number (in modern terms, one's "net worth"). Now, one could try to pursue one's material goals through the quantitative optimization of one's numerical net worth, for instance by analyzing different business strategies and selecting the one that would generate the most expected profit.
This strategy is initially very successful; below a certain threshold, there is a strong correlation between net worth and one's general happiness and wellbeing, and increasing one tends to increase the other. But as one gets closer to fulfilling both of these these objectives, the qualitative goal and the quantitative proxy begin to pull in divergent directions: pursuit of the next incremental increase in net worth can lead to increasing dissatisfaction, stress, and conflict in one's broader life. One begins to fall victim to Goodhart's law that metrics lose their effectiveness when they are targeted too strongly; after exhausting the "low-hanging fruit" of actions that improve both the metric and the underlying goal, one begins to perform increasingly unwise trades in which one gains in the direction of the metric at the expense of one's more fundamental goals. (2/5)
The ongoing process of "enshittification" in corporations and other institutions can also be viewed through this lens. Companies (and other complex organizations) have gained access to increasingly sophisticated metrics to measure their user activity, and now have the technology to optimize those metrics for their own benefit (in the near-term, at least). Initially, this sort of optimization can add value for both the provider and consumer of the service; but the majority of their customer base are not playing the optimization "game", and many would have initially signed up for an experience that was more qualitative and less optimized, and containing more of the intangible benefits that even the most advanced metrics fail to capture.
So, are metrics good or bad for individuals and communities? It is a very complex question. In some areas, we are under-using metrics; in others, we are over-using them; and in yet other areas, they are being deployed in too imbalanced a fashion to be beneficial in the long term. Perhaps what we need is more of a discussion of meta-goals and meta-metrics: not just how to pursue a goal or to optimize a metric, but to try to analyze (both qualitatively and quantitatively) how similar or distinct these two objectives actually are, and to locate a stable balance between them that can be broadly accepted within the community in question. (5/5)
In principle, an efficient and liquid market does provide precisely this dimension reduction (and is one of the key distinctions between an economic system and a physical system). If one possesses a multidimensional vector of various goods and services, then by trading in such a market, one can exchange this vector for other vectors. If one makes the (sometimes justifiable) assumption that the efficient frontier of such exchanges forms a differentiable hypersurface around one's current state vector, then the normal to that hypersurface naturally determines the "price" of each good, and one can then measure (marginal) increase or decrease in one's effective wealth (modulo this efficient market) by the one-dimensional metric of taking the dot product with this state vector.
But for goods that are illiquid or only available in inefficient markets in which arbitrage opportunities exist, then this dimension reduction is no longer available, and price becomes a much more complicated notion (for instance, there can be non-trivial spreads between bid and ask prices). In particular, problems can arise when some goods are priced in a liquid fashion, but others (e.g., environmental goods such as clean air and water) are not; then optimizing value using market prices can lead to one sacrificing illiquid goods for liquid ones in a non-beneficial fashion.
@SylviaFysica - on a vaguely related note, I'm enjoying some ideas in Will Storr's book "Status Games", which posits that after satisfying some basic needs we're primarily motivatived by the search for status, which he loosely divides into:
• Dominance games: Status is imposed by force or fear.
• Virtue games: Status is awarded for moral behaviour and adherence to group norms.
• Success/competence games: Status is given for skill, talent, or achievement.
I think he'd claim the quest for money is, once basic needs are satisfied, largely a proxy for status - so, maybe some sort of mixture of a success game (money as a way of demonstrating success) and dominance game (money as a means to achieving dominance).
As with all pop psychology/sociology, there's lots of criticize about this, but I think a lot of economics could use a bit more attention to the underlying psychological/sociological aspects. More here:
decentred.co.uk/status-and-vir…
Will Storr's book The Status Game , explores the role of status in human behaviour and society. It examines the universal nature of status games, the differentRob Watson (Decentered Media)
@SylviaFysica
I recently learned about the fallacy of the average pilot, which somehow eluded my awareness until then!
Collapsing complex multidimensional systems into single dimensional metrics is almost certainly always a bad idea. The representational volume of defined ranges over the space will occupy an exponentially smaller volume of the total space as the dimensionality of the space grows linearly. It follows that the inverse is true: a single metric can capture only an exponentially vanishing proportion of the total variance of the system as the dimensionality grows linearly.
mastodon.gamedev.place/@demofo…
As time goes on, i am more and more convinced i am neurodirevergent, but it's unclear in what way. (My wife is an educational psychologist and agrees with this). Then again, i think just like the "there's no average pilot" story (https://www.Gamedev Mastodon
Reminds me of a quote:
"Given the opportunity, gamers will optimize the fun out of your game."
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, professor! Another banger post, as usual.
Tre settimane fa dormiva sul pavimento di cemento di una cella iraniana, sapendo di poterci rimanere mesi o anni. Ora è libera e a Kyiv e ha già pubblicato la migliore intervista a #Zelensky che abbia letto o visto in tre anni su un media italiano, che ə compagnə della mozione #colpadellaNato farebbero bene a leggersi invece di farsi indottrinare dalle troll farm paranaziste russe su Telegram.
#CeciliaSala #Ucraina #Russia #Putin #Nato #Merkel
ilfoglio.it/esteri/2025/01/25/…
unpaywalled: bin.disroot.org/?6fe881aa473e8…
[EDIT]Qui il video integrale dell'intervista, sottotitolata in italiano: youtube.com/watch?v=8X3_rAXSXu…
Il presidente ucraino ci parla delle sue speranze sulla presidenza americana, ci spiega cosa vuol dire “non commettere più gli errori del passato” e fa l’elenco di tutto ciò che è necessario per un accordo.Il Foglio
Death halted.
THERE WAS ONE, TEN YEARS AGO. HE TAUGHT ME A LOT ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN
"To be where the rising ape meets the falling angel?"
AH. I HEAR YOU HAVE MET HIM TOO
2/2
#GNUTerryPratchett #MicroFiction #TootFic #fanfiction
And I cry, before seven in the morning.
(Thank you.)
Thank you for this, though it made me cry. He taught a lot of humans what it means to be human as well. His stories will forever be woven into the minds and souls of many, surely into mine.
#GNUTerryPratchett
🥹
The moment I read that "IT IS TIME* I got goosebumps all over and a smile on my face.
Thank you, I think I am going to re-read everything again. #GNUTerryPratchett
Thank you.