The Invention of Anarchism -
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/637

Okay, so whoever picked "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" as the hold melody for the DHL customer service line definitely has a sense of humour 😁

Although of course it's a bit ironic since the reason I'm calling them is that it seems that there *is* in fact a valley low enough to keep them from coming to me... 🤷

No rational person would do this

"Have you considered going commercial yet!?!?!?" Yes and it is a bad idea. Here is why it is actually really hard to give money and support most FOSS projects. In a blogpost rant.

This is probably my second to last blog in that improptu serie about Hobbyists Maintainers, slowly reaching its conclusion of a model of Hobbyists Maintainers situation and how we can actually help them.

Because believe it or not, I know how to say something else than "no" or "it will not work".

https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/hobbyist-gravity-well

@jannem @neil Speaking of nohup'ing individual processes...

It's not the solution _here_, but if you've got a one-off job that you want to run and not have interrupted if your session drops, you can also tell systemd to run it

systemd-run [arbitrary command]

It'll essentially create an ephemeral unit for it, logging output to the journal and keeping it running even if your session dies.

Handy if tmux isn't/can't be installed

"Windows users keep losing files to OneDrive, and many don't know why | TechSpot"

Jeg opdagede forleden at min fars filer var flyttet til onedrive. Jeg troede at han havde godkendt et eller andet. Men nej, det har Microsoft gjort uden at spørge. Vi er enige om at det er tid til at flytte til linux.

Jeg fatter ikke hvordan I der bruger Windows, kan finde rundt og finder jer i at blive behandlet på den måde af Microsoft.

https://www.techspot.com/news/110848-onedrive-backup-feature-making-users-local-files-seemingly.html

@futurebird

I would make a slightly different point, I think.

When I was at university, doing a degree in computer science, the first language they taught us was Pascal. The second was Prolog. I can’t remember which order the third and fourth were taught in, but they were Java and Haskell.

Of these, Java was the only one widely used in industry. In my subsequent career, I have rarely used any of these. But I have used the concepts I learned repeatedly.

The tools change. Eventually, modern IDEs will catch up with 1980’s Smalltalk in functionality. But the core concepts change far more slowly.

And this matters even more for school children, because they’re not doing a degree to take them on a path where the majority will end up as programmers, they’re learning a skill that they can use in any context.

I spent a little bit of time attached to the Swansea History of Computing Collection working to collect oral histories of early computing in Wales. Glamorgan university was the first to offer a vocational programming qualification. They had one day of access to a computer at the Port Talbot steelworks (at the time, the only computer in Wales) each week. Every week, the class would take a minibus to visit the computer. They would each take it in turns to run their program (on punch cards). If it didn’t work, they would try to patch to code (manually punching holes or taping over them) and would get to have another go at the end.

Modern programming isn’t really like that (though it feels like it sometimes). The compile-test cycle has shortened from a week to a few seconds. Debuggers let you inspect the state of running programs in the middle. Things like time-travel debugging let you see an invalid value in memory and then run the program backwards to see where the value was written!

But the concepts of decomposing problems into small steps, and creating solutions by composing small testable building blocks remain the same.

The hard part of programming hasn’t been writing the code since we moved away from machine code in punched tape. It’s always been working out what the real problem is and expressing it unambiguously.

In many ways, LLMs make this worse. They let you start with an imprecise definition of the problem and will then fill in the gaps based on priors from their training data. In a classroom setting, those priors will likely align with the requirements of the task. The same may be true if you’re writing a CRUD application that is almost the same as 10,000 others with a small tweak that you put in the prompt. But once it has generated the code then you need to understand that it’s correct. LLMs can generate tests, but unless you’re careful they won’t generate the right tests.

The goal isn’t to produce children who can write code. It’s to empower the children with the ability to turn a computer into a machine that solves their problems whatever those problems are and to use the kind of systematic thinking in non-computing contexts.

The latter of these is also important. I’ve done workflow consulting where the fact that the company was operating inefficiently would be obvious to anyone with a programming background. It isn’t just mechanical systems that have these bottlenecks.

And this should feed into curriculum design (the Computer Science Unplugged curriculum took this to an extreme and produced some great material). There’s no point teaching skills that will be obsolete by the time that the children are adults, except as a solvent for getting useful transferable skills into their systems. A curriculum should be able to identify and explain to students which skills are in which category.

(And, yes, I am still bitter my schools wasted so much time on handwriting, a skill I basically never use as an adult. If I hand write 500 words in a year, it’s unusual, but I type more than that most days)

@neil
I am constantly impressed by how good Immich is. It's not perfect - there was a bug which killed the server under certain conditions a couple of months ago, but the community quicky came up with a mitigation, and the fix came in an update a few days later.

So while chatting with a colleague this week about putting base64 images into email, I jokingly said

“you know though, i wonder if i can craft an image which turns into readable LLM prompts when encoded as base64 🤔”

Well. Turns out I can

https://drewmayo.com/1000-words/

Calling Wilcox’s cartoon “unacceptable” misunderstands both satire and journalism. Political cartoons are meant to be provocative, compressed and confronting. They exaggerate power relationships to expose hypocrisy and danger, not to offer polite balance.
This cartoon does exactly that. It highlights unchecked US imperial behaviour and the hollow language of “freedom and security” used by institutions like NATO while aggression proceeds regardless. Discomfort is not a flaw, it is the point.
If a cartoon criticising military power is deemed unacceptable simply because it offends those aligned with that power, then the problem is not the cartoon. It is a shrinking tolerance for dissent and satire in public debate.

Wilcox is doing a great job.

#politicalcartoons #satire #pressfreedom #imperialism #media #theage

RE: https://phpc.social/@syntaxseed/115863080846737985

Exactly. I don't care too much about the "unicorns", I want small to medium companies that do one thing really well, everyone is fairly compensated and can go home early on Friday.

You want a civil discussion about AI? The best time for that would have been five years ago, when this shit first started taking off. It's a fuck of a lot harder to have that discussion now, after years upon years of bad faith bullshit and denials.

So yeah. Making some noise is where we're at.

You want that to stop? Then stop making things worse, stop sabotaging what political power F/OSS has left, and come to the table.

From the mid-90's to the mid-2000's videogames would scream their own name at you in the attract mode.

RESIDENT, EVIL 😡
THE HOUSE. 😮 OF THE DEAD 💀
Sega, Rally Championship! 👋☺👋
FATAL FRAME 2, CRRRIMSONBUTTERFLY 😨
Residentevil... 😡 FOURRRR!

I need a supercut video of lots of those title screens with the games screaming their names.

Fedi, please boost, does this already exist? Are you in fact the one who made it?

I'm asking not out of a desire for amusement but to help my daughter with her enunciation. Some of these voices had to carry across an arcade with all the games set to the same volume and so had to be Very Very Clear, but also with a Certain Flair

Guten Morgen ☕

Das freie GraphenOS macht Schlagzeilen:
Die spanische Polizei nennt es "Geister-Betriebssystem". Und:

" 'Jedes Mal, wenn wir ein Pixel sehen, denken wir, es könnte ein Drogendealer sein' "
"Abhörmaßnahmen wirkungslos"
"Staatliche Malware funktioniert nicht wie geplant"

"Da die katalanische Polizei aber laut eigenen Angaben ohnehin jeden Pixel-User für einen Dealer hält, ist es wahrscheinlich günstiger, selbst gleich GrapheneOS zu installieren."

;-)

https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000278495/katalanische-polizei-geht-gezielt-gegen-nutzer-von-pixel-smartphones-vor

Names for avid readers 📚 by language -

English: Bookworm

Danish: Reading horse (Lesehest)

French: Ink drinker (Buveur d'encre)

German: Read-rat (Leseratte)

Indonesian: Book flea (Kutu buku)

Romanian: Library mouse (Șoarece de bibliotecă)

Norwegian: Reading horse (Lesehest)

Serbian/Polish: Book moth (Knjiški moljac / Mól książkowy)

Finnish: Reading maggot (Lukutoukka)

Swedish: Read-louse (Läslus)

Vietnamese: Bookwormweevil (Mọt sách) 

#books #reading

“I don’t know how to stop the bully [US gov’t] from beating people [oil states like Venezuela] up for their lunch money [oil energy] —but what if lunch [energy] was free, and no one was carrying lunch money?” Great allegory by @billmckibben.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy billmckibben.substack.com/p/just-possi...

Just possibly it's the oil?

Wanna know what the #Linux core developers discussed recently on this years #kernel #maintainers summit?

Then check out the great @lwn coverage from the event now freely available:

https://lwn.net/Articles/1049982/

It includes:

* Toward a policy for machine-learning tools in kernel development – https://lwn.net/Articles/1049830/

* Best practices for linux-next – https://lwn.net/Articles/1050027/

* The state of the kernel #Rust experiment (aka the session where it was decided that the experimental stamp is coming off) – https://lwn.net/Articles/1050174/

* Better development tools for the kernel – https://lwn.net/Articles/1050177/

* Development-process discussions – https://lwn.net/Articles/1050179/

Wanna know what's in store for #Linux 6.19, which is expected on February 1, 2026?

Then check out these great @lwn articles that are not freely available:

* The beginning of the 6.19 merge window – https://lwn.net/Articles/1048869/

* The rest of the 6.19 merge window – https://lwn.net/Articles/1049424/

#LinuxKernel #kernel