cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 165 Posts
  • 389 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • The network never went down.

    You say that but, everything I ever posted on identica (and also on Evan’s later OStatus site Status.Net, which i was a paying customer of) went 404 just a few years later. 😢

    When StatusNet shut down I was offered a MySQL dump, which is better than nothing for personal archival but not actually useful for setting up a new instance due to OStatus having DNS-based identity and lacking any concept for migrating to a new domain.

    https://identi.ca/evan/note/6EZ4Jzp5RQaUsx5QzJtL4A notes that Evan’s own first post is “still visible on Identi.ca today, although the URL format changed a few years ago, and the redirect plugin stopped working a few years after that.” … but for whatever reason he decided that most accounts (those inactive over a year, iiuc, which I was because I had moved to using StatusNet instead of identica) weren’t worthy of migrating to his new pump.io architecture at all.

    Here is some reporting about it from 2013: https://lwn.net/Articles/544347/

    As an added bonus, to the extent that I can find some of my posts on archive.org, links in them were all automatically replaced (it was the style at the time) with redirects via Evan’s URL shortening service ur1.ca which is also now long-dead.

    screenshot of Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in the 1982 film Blade Runner, during his "Tears in rain" monologue. (no text)

    imo the deletion of most of the content in the proto-fediverse (PubSubHubbubiverse? 😂) was an enormous loss; I and many other people had years of great discussions on these sites which I wish we could revisit today.

    🪦

    The fact that ActivityPub now is still a thing where people must (be a sysadmin or) pick someone else’s domain to marry their online identity to is even more sad. ActivityPub desperately needs to become content addressable and decouple identity from other responsibilities. This experiment (which i learned of via this post) from six years ago seemed like a huge step in the right direction, but I don’t know if anyone is really working on solving these problems currently. 😢




  • Do tech journalists at the New York Times have any idea what they’re talking about? (spoiler)

    'We’re going to talk about these stories.'

    The author of this latest advertorial, Kevin Roose, has a podcast called “Hard Fork”.

    Here he and his co-host attempt to answer the question “What’s a Hard Fork?”:

    kevin roose: Casey, we should probably explain why our podcast is called “Hard Fork.”

    casey newton: Oh, yeah. So our other names didn’t get approved by “The New York Times” lawyers.

    kevin roose: True.

    casey newton: And B, it’s actually a good name for what we’re going to be talking about. A “hard fork” is a programming term for when you’re building something, but it gets really screwed up. So you take the entire thing, break it, and start over.

    kevin roose: Right.

    casey newton: And that’s a little bit what it feels like right now in the tech industry. These companies that you and I have been writing about for the past decade, like Facebook, and Google, and Amazon, they’re all kind of struggling to stay relevant.

    kevin roose: Yeah. We’ve noticed a lot of the energy and money in Silicon Valley is shifting to totally new ideas — crypto, the metaverse, AI. It feels like a real turning point when the old things are going away and interesting new ones are coming in to replace them.

    casey newton: And all this is happening so fast, and some of it’s so strange. I just feel like I’m texting you constantly, “What is happening? What is this story? Explain this to me. Talk with me about this, because I feel like I’m going insane.”

    kevin roose: And so we’re going to try to help each other feel a little bit less insane. We’re going to talk about these stories. We’re going to bring in other journalists, newsmakers, whoever else is involved in building this future, to explain to us what’s changing and why it all matters.

    casey newton: So listen to Hard Fork. It comes out every Friday starting October 7.

    kevin roose: Wherever you get your podcasts.

    This is simply not accurate.

    Today the term “hard fork” is probably most often used to refer to blockchain forks, which I assume is where these guys (almost) learned it, but the blockchain people borrowed the term from forks in software development.

    In both cases it means to diverge in such a way that re-converging is not expected. In neither case does it mean anything is screwed up, nor does it mean anything about starting over.

    These people who’s job it is to cover technology at one of the most respected newspapers in the United States are actually so clueless that they have an entirely wrong definition for the phrase which they chose to be the title of their podcast.

    “Talk with me about this, because I feel like I’m going insane.”

    But, who cares, right? “Hard fork” sounds cool and the times is ON IT.


  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    The primary purpose of those buttons is of course to let those sites track everyone’s browsing activity across every site that uses them, which does not require that anyone ever click on them.

    Even if less than 0.0001% of people click them, anyone with an SEO/spammer “grindset” will assure site operators that the potential benefit of someone sharing a link they otherwise wouldn’t have is still at least theoretically non-zero. And, since there is absolutely no cost at all besides an acceptable number of extra milliseconds per pageload, really, it would be downright irresponsible not to have them there!






  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.mlWhat was Linux like in the 90s
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    1 month ago

    encryption would prevent the modem from seeing it when someone sends it, but such a short string will inevitably appear once in a while in ciphertext too. so, it would actually make it disconnect at random times instead :)

    (edit: actually at seven bytes i guess it would only occur once in every 72PB on average…)



  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.mlEU OS
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    As I wrote in the thread about this last month on !linux@lemmy.ml:

    I wonder how much work is entailed in transforming Fedora in to a distro that meets some definition of the word “Sovereign” 🤔

    Personally I wouldn’t want to make a project like this be dependent on the whims of a US defense contractor like RedHat/IBM, especially after what happened with CentOS.

    and, re: “what do you mean ‘redhat is a defense contractor’?!”: here are some links.

    screenshot of RedHat PDF saying: Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge.
Deploy on any aircraft, pod,
sensor, or C2 node
 Ability to comply with
cybersecurity requirements
Executive summary
The U.S. Air Force and its mission partners are fielding new mission capabilities on airframes and
command-and-control (C2) nodes to compress the kill chain. The find, fix, track, target, engage,
assess (F2T2EA) process requires ubiquitous access to data at the strategic, operational and tactical
levels. Red Hat® Device Edge embeds captured, analyzed, and federated data sets in a manner that
positions the warfighter to use artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to increase the
accuracy of airborne targeting and mission-guidance systems. Challenges of edge computing on
aircraft and other tactical C2 edge nodes include delivering consistent capabilities on diverse
hardware (new and old, connected and disconnected), meeting airworthiness security requirements,
and efficiently sustaining software at scale. The Air Force can meet these requirements with
Red Hat Device Edge, the edge-optimized software platform that is hardware agnostic.
Opportunity: Use edge technology to defeat the adversary
The Air Force and its partners are developing innovative capabilities on airborne and ground systems
to gain battlespace advantage, including:
 Coalescing and stratifying data to feed AI/ML at the edge to increase the accuracy of
targeting and mission-guidance systems and compresses the mean time to detect (MTTD),
make sense and act across all warfighter domains.
 Delivering near real-time data from sensor pods directly to airmen, accelerating the
sensor-to-shooter cycle.
 Supporting Agile Combat Employment (ACE) in the highly contested
21st-century battlespace.
 Sharing near real-time sensor fusion data with joint and multinational forces to increase
awareness, survivability, and lethality.
“With Red Hat Device
Edge Lockheed Martin
is leading the infusion
of cutting-edge
commercial technology
into military capabilities
that deliver advanced
solutions to our
customers. Unlocking
these AI technologies
can help national
security decision
makers stay ahead of
adversaries, enabling
a safer and more
secure world.”
Justin Taylor
Vice President, F-22 technology,
Lockheed Martin 1
1 Red Hat press release. “Lockheed Martin, Red Hat Collaborate to Advance Artificial Intelligence for Military Missions,”
25 Oct. 2022.

    (source)