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Jonathan Corbet

One of the things I have been doing to approve my language skills is reading science fiction in Italian. It's surprisingly hard to find books by Italian SF authors (even though there are many of them) rather than yet another Tolkien translation; this is especially true in Italian bookstores, sadly. Ebooks fill in nicely, though, once you discover who you're looking for.

I recently read WOHPE by Salvatore Sanfilippo. The story, which deals with fears of the AI apocalypse, was a fun read, and it was clear that the author actually had a clue about how systems like language models actually work. I definitely enjoyed it.

Meanwhile, I'm a kernel person, relatively ignorant of areas like databases. So as I was reviewing an upcoming article by another LWN author about the Redis mess, I learned a lot. One thing I picked up was that one of the creators of Redis was ... a certain Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka @antirez) Some searching establishes that it's indeed the same person; no wonder the book was as clueful as it was.

Small world...and people say hackers can't write :)
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@jvoisin So I went to look at your article to see if I missed anything in my LWN piece about this work ... but the low-contrast fonts used there are such that I literally cannot read the text. I honestly don't understand why people do that.
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ðŸŠĶ Vernor Vinge, author of many influential hard science fiction works, died March 20 at the age of 79.

https://file770.com/vernor-vinge-1944-2024/

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@kernellogger Sorry I had to work through a few other docs patches first, or I would have gotten it in sooner...
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Jonathan Corbet

Once upon a time, if I enabled tethering on an Android phone, it would take the phone off the local WiFi network and route traffic over the cellular link

Now, if the phone is on a WiFi network, tethering will route packets from the tethered device over that WiFi network.

I'm guessing that improvements in WiFi interfaces and drivers have enabled this change. But it misses an important point: if I'm tethering a device in an environment where a WiFi network exists, it is almost certainly because said WiFi network sucks and I want to circumvent it. Having the phone continue to use it silently thwarts that purpose.

It's easy enough to work around — just turn off WiFi on the phone — but for slow folks like me that only happens after wondering for a while why the performance is still bad. Does anybody know of a way to disable this behavior permanently?
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@gnomon Interesting, I was not aware of that tool...

Anyway, full-text RSS has been on the list for a while; I just have to figure out how to make the authentication work. I'll try to actually get around to that...meanwhile, though, unfortunately, I don't have anything to offer you.
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@robpike Along with the ability to support electrification, as others have mentioned, heat pumps can reach 3-500% efficiency — better than fossil fuels and vastly better than electric resistance heating.
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@drewdevault You're talking about the practice whereby every instance immediately fetches the page when somebody posts a URL? I've wondered about the thinking behind that for a while...
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@monsieuricon @vbabka Sigh, I guess nobody will need @LWN anymore...
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@lcamtuf I have to say that Tom Christiansen's advice on operator precedence still is the best... https://lwn.net/Articles/382023/
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@torvalds It sounds like a mechanism designed by the same people who ensured that the "I want a battery" scream happens at 3:00AM...
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@coldclimate So I just tried this on my Pixel 7...it stayed cold and quiet. It seems that not all Android phones do that.
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@luis_in_brief When I really want comfort food I go back to the Lensman series by EE Doc Smith...takes me right back to my childhood (where it had already been around for a while - I'm not *that* old!)

What I like to recommend to people is the Terra Ignota series by @adapalmer - a great and (mostly) hopeful look forward by somebody who is clearly far smarter than I am...one of the few things I've reread in recent years.
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Jonathan Corbet

Edited 1 month ago
What a world we have built ... https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/three-million-malware-infected-smart-toothbrushes-used-in-swiss-ddos-attacks-botnet-causes-millions-of-euros-in-damages

Edit: there are suggestions out there that this story is not actually true. So sad, who ever heard of something not being true on the Internet? But does anybody doubt that something like this *will* be true in the near future?
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Jonathan Corbet

On the radar: Debian is launching into its 64-bit-time transition:

https://lwn.net/ml/debian-devel-announce/Zb0WpSukajgythGe@homer.dodds.net/

"By my reckoning, this is the largest cross-archive ABI transition we've ever
had in Debian".
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Jonathan Corbet

Edited 1 month ago
At the risk of spoiling next week's "quote of the week": @monsieuricon 's post on why projects like the kernel and Git continue working over email is definitely worth a read.
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Jonathan Corbet

Edited 1 month ago
Even in January, some days are just too nice to stay at the keyboard
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Jonathan Corbet

Sigh...it seems that almost anything good can be wrecked by adding the finance industry to it...

https://time.com/6565415/rooftop-solar-industry-collapse/

When we put the panels on our house, we dealt with a local installer (which are not in short supply in Boulder) and just paid for it like any other house work. No regrets so far.
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Jonathan Corbet

On the radar: proposals from the C standards committee (as seen in kernelland):

https://lwn.net/ml/linux-toolchains/9162660e-2d6b-47a3-bfa2-77bfc55c817b@paulmck-laptop/
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