Robots, high-density planting just some of Young Farmer of the Year’s fresh ideas
Fifth generation apple, pear and stone fruit grower Mitchell McNab says robotics will play a major role in the future to keep production costs down. ⌘ Read more

Also, what a douchebag using the title “Dr.” in his twitter handle. As a general rule, a white dude who isn’t a medical doctor putting “Dr.” in their social media title is a gigantic flashing red flag.

Rebuilding a Solar Powered Website

Image

A screenshot of the markdown file for this page.

During the last months we have been working on switching the solar powered website from one static site generator (Pelican) to another (Hugo). Many readers will not notice the changes right away, as we have not made any major adj … ⌘ Read more

Russia blowing up the Nova Kakhovka dam is an incomprehensible war crime. Among other things, it drains water from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, water that is needed for cooling. They are trying to generate a widespread disaster.

They must be stopped, immediately, without hesitation. This is unacceptable behavior, crossing every red line we have no matter our politics, without any doubt.

Seems to me you could write a script that:

• Parses a StackOverflow question
  
• Runs it through an AI text generator
  
• Posts the output as a post on StackOverflow
  

and basically pollute the entire information ecosystem there in a matter of a few months? How long before some malicious actor does this? Maybe it’s being done already 🤷

What an asinine, short-sighted decision. An astonishing number of companies are actively reducing headcount because their executives believe they can use this newfangled AI stuff to replace people. But, like the dot com boom and subsequent bust, many of the companies going this direction are going to face serious problems when the hypefest dies down and the reality of what this tech can and can’t do sinks in.

We really, really need to stop trusting important stuff to corporations. They are not tooled to last.

Dear Stack Overflow, Inc.

Stack Overflow is being inundated with AI-generated garbage. A group of 480+ human moderators is going on strike, because:

Specifically, moderators are no longer allowed to remove AI-generated answers on the basis of being AI-generated, outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances. This results in effectively permitting nearly all AI-generated answers to be freely posted, regardless of established community consensus on such content.

In turn, this allows incorrect information (colloquially referred to as “hallucinations”) and plagiarism to proliferate unchecked on the platform. This destroys trust in the platform, as Stack Overflow, Inc. has previously noted.

It looks like StackOverflow Inc. is saying one thing to the public, and a very different thing to its moderators.

I don’t really like the term “gatekeeping”, especially when it’s used to describe the general concept of a barrier to entry. The term “gatekeeping” implies to me a “gatekeeper”–a person A who is trying to control if person B can interact with person C. It implies active discrimination, perhaps even bigotry, when in reality the barrier might be a passive issue such as scarcity or inherent complexity. “Gatekeeping” seems an intentionally- and needlessly-charged term.

When first grown in Australia, this exotic tropical fruit was little-known. Now farmers can’t keep up with demand
In the depths of South America’s Amazon Basin, the achachairú, a highly prized tropical fruit, has been cultivated for generations. But it’s on the side of the world, in North Queensland, that the fruit is grown on the greatest scale. ⌘ Read more

<darch> testing out generating twt-hash using php

Google Bard or BingGPT are actually quite useful to answer simple questions without having to scroll through many pages of clickbait and AI-generated babble blogposts. I’m currently preparing for the AWS exam (I finally signed up!) and Google Bard explained the differences between Cognito User Pools and Cognito Identity Pools in a simple and understandable way. Even with a tabular overview and examples how to use both services. Now my knowledge is refreshed again. 😄 ⌘ Read more

Why an iPhone makes a terrible general purpose computer
(when Android makes a pretty good one) ⌘ Read more

Custard apple growers marketing to next generation
Once common in backyards and suburban streets, the super-sweet fruit has almost disappeared from the landscape — but growers are hoping to change that. ⌘ Read more

Siphon
⌘ Read more

Siphon
⌘ Read more

Fiji is a tropical fruit paradise for tourists while locals lack nutrition — but protected cropping could help
Many people think of Fiji as a wonderland of tropical fruit and vegetable — but in reality, premium produce on offer at resorts comes from Australia and New Zealand, while many locals suffer from a lack of wholesome food. ⌘ Read more

von Neumann: I came up with this new system that generalizes probability theory to consider convex sets instead of point estimates. I think that I could use this to prove regret bounds…

How companies are boosting productivity with generative AI
Explore how generative AI coding tools are changing the way developers and companies build software. ⌘ Read more

Push protection is generally available, and free for all public repositories
Announcing the general availability of push protection–a feature that proactively prevents secret leaks in your public and private repositories. ⌘ Read more

GitHub code search is generally available
The world’s code is now at your fingertips. ⌘ Read more

I’ve tried twtxt2atom (https://lien.sus.fr/rUluz) but it doesn’t seem to be generating the body for the post

I get that there are groups of people who don’t have many good options besides Bluesky, so moistly this is griping about how bad social media is generally, and how the lousy people in charge continue to be in charge.

Riverland families selling off land and diversifying after generations of growing winegrapes
Vineyard owners in South Australia’s Riverland are hitting the market as the wine industry feels the crush of a difficult vintage and China’s tariffs on red wine. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

There is (I assure you there will be, don’t know what it is yet…) a price to be paid for this convenience.

Exactly prologic, and that’s why I’m negative about these sorts of things. I’m almost 50, I’ve been around this tech hype cycle a bunch of times. Look at what happened with Facebook. When it first appeared, people loved it and signed up and shared incredibly detailed information about themselves on it. Facebook made it very easy and convenient for almost anyone, even people who had limited understanding of the internet or computers, to get connected with their friends and family. And now here we are today, where 80% of people in surveys say they don’t trust Facebook with their private data, where they think Facebook commits crimes and should be broken up or at least taken to task in a big way, etc etc etc. Facebook has been fined many billions of dollars and faces endless federal lawsuits in the US alone for its horrible practices. Yet Facebook is still exploitative. It’s a societal cancer.

All signs suggest this generative AI stuff is going to go exactly the same way. That is the inevitable course of these things in the present climate, because the tech sector is largely run by sociopathic billionaires, because the tech sector is not regulated in any meaningful way, and because the tech press / tech media has no scruples. Some new tech thing generates hype, people get excited and sign up to use it, then when the people who own the tech think they have a critical mass of users, they clamp everything down and start doing whatever it is they wanted to do from the start. They’ll break laws, steal your shit, cause mass suffering, who knows what. They won’t stop until they are stopped by mass protest from us, and the government action that follows.

That’s a huge price to pay for a little bit of convenience, a price we pay and continue to pay for decades. We all know better by now. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? It doesn’t make sense. It’s insane.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net

I have to write so many emails to so many idiots who have no idea what they are doing

So it sounds to me like the pressure is to reduce how much time you waste on idiots, which to my mind is a very good reason to use a text generator! I guess in that case you don’t mind too much whether the company making the AI owns your prompt text?

I’d really like to see tools like this that you can run on your desktop or phone, so they don’t send your hard work off to someone else and give a company a chance to take it from you.

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

(1) You go to the store and buy a microwave pizza. You go home, put it in the microwave, heat it up. Maybe it’s not quite the way you like it, so you put some red pepper on it, maybe some oregano.

Are you a pizza chef? No. Do we know what your cooking is like? Also no.

(2) You create a prompt for StableDiffusion to make a picture of an elephant. What pops out isn’t quite to your liking. You adjust the prompt, tweak it a bunch, till the elephant looks pretty cool.

Are you an artist? No. Do we know what your art is like? Also no.

The elephant is “fake art” in a similar sense to how a microwave pizza is “fake pizza”. That’s what I meant by that word. The microwave pizza is a sort of “simulation of pizza”, in this sense. The generated elephant picture is a simulation of art, in a similar sense, though it’s even worse than that and is probably more of a simulacrum of art since you can’t “consume” an AI-generated image the way you “consume” art.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I also think it is best called fake. Art is created by human beings, for human beings. It mediates a relationship between two people, and is a means of expression.

A computer has no inner life, no feelings, no experience of the world. It is not sentient. It has no life. There’s nothing “in” there for it to express. It’s just generating pixels in patterns we’ve learned to recognize. These AI technologies are carefully crafted to fool people into experiencing the things they experience when they look at human-made art, but it is an empty experience.

Isode: Red/Black 2.0 – New Capabilities
This major release adds significant new functionality and improvements to Red/Black, a management tool that allows you to monitor and control devices and servers across a network, with a particular focus on HF Radio Systems.  A general summary is given in the white paper Red/Black Overview

Support added for Switch type devices, that can connect multiple devices and allow … ⌘ Read more

Private vulnerability reporting now generally available
Open source maintainers and security researchers embrace a new best practice to report and fix vulnerabilities. ⌘ Read more

On LinkedIn I see a lot of posts aimed at software developers along the lines of “If you’re not using these AI tools (X,Y,Z) you’re going to be left behind.”

Two things about that:

1. No you’re not. If you have good soft skills (good communication, show up on time, general time management) then you’re already in excellent shape. No AI can do that stuff, and for that alone no AI can replace people
   
2. This rhetoric is coming directly from the billionaires who are laying off tech people by the 100s of thousands as part of the class war they’ve been conducting against all working people since the 1940s. They want you to believe that you have to scramble and claw over one another to learn the “AI” that they’re forcing onto the world, so that you stop honing the skills that matter (see #1) and are easier to obsolete later. Don’t fall for it. It’s far from clear how this will shake out once governments get off their asses and start regulating this stuff, by the way–most of these “AI” tools are blatantly breaking copyright and other IP laws, and some day that’ll catch up with them.
   

That said, it is helpful to know thy enemy.

Cosmological Nostalgia Content
⌘ Read more

Cosmological Nostalgia Content
⌘ Read more

I’m not super a fan of using json. I feel we could still use text as the medium. Maybe a modified version to fix any weakness.

What if instead of signing each twt individually we generated a merkle tree using the twt hashes? Then a signature of the root hash. This would ensure the full stream of twts are intact with a minimal overhead. With the added bonus of helping clients identify missing twts when syncing/gossiping.

Have two endpoints. One as the webfinger to link profile details and avatar like you posted. And the signature for the merkleroot twt. And the other a pageable stream of twts. Or individual twts/merkle branch to incrementally access twt feeds.

How generative AI is changing the way developers work
Rapid advancements in generative AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot are accelerating the next wave of software development. Here’s what you need to know. ⌘ Read more

Generative AI-enabled compliance for software development
Explore how generative AI may soon help enable optimizing some of the foundational components of compliance. ⌘ Read more

Show: testcerts - Go package with an easy-to-use suite of functions for generating test certificates
1 points posted by madflojo ⌘ Read more

orthogonality of substrate and structure in general

What developers need to know about generative AI
Generative AI has been dominating the news lately—but what exactly is it? Here’s what you need to know, and what it means for developers. ⌘ Read more

So. Some bits.

i := fIndex(xs, 5.6)

Can also be

i := Index(xs, 5.6)

The compiler can infer the type automatically. Looks like you mention that later.

Also the infer is super smart.. You can define functions that take functions with generic types in the arguments. This can be useful for a generic value mapper for a repository

func Map[U,V any](rows []U, fn func(U) V) []V {
  out := make([]V, len(rows))
  for i := range rows { out = fn(rows[i]) }
  return out
}


rows := []int{1,2,3}
out := Map(rows, func(v int) uint64 { return uint64(v) })

I am pretty sure the type parameters goes the other way with the type name first and constraint second.

func Foo[comparable T](xs T, s T) int

Should be

func Foo[T comparable](xs T, s T) int

What’s new with GitHub Sponsors
GitHub Sponsors is now generally available for organizations. Also, new tooling for bulk sponsorships and an update on how we’re ensuring sustainability for GitHub Sponsors. ⌘ Read more

Writing doesn’t just clarify your existing ideas; it generates more of them. Engineers Need to Write | Hacker News

Introducing self-service SBOMs
Developers and compliance teams get a new SBOM generation tool for cloud repositories. ⌘ Read more

Alexander Gnauck: XmppDotNet announcement
I want to announce the availability of the XmppDotNet XMPP library.
XmppDotNet is the new name and next generation of our MatriX vNext XMPP library.

Why changing the name?

It was never intended to keep vNext in the name forever. And there is a lot of confusion between MatriX and MatriX vNext at some of our existing customers. Most of them expect both libraries to be fully API compati … ⌘ Read more

Alexander Gnauck: XmppDotNet announcement
I want to announce the availability of the XmppDotNet XMPP library.
XmppDotNet is the new name and next generation of our MatriX vNext XMPP library.

Why changing the name?

It was never intended to keep vNext in the name forever. And there is a lot of confusion between MatriX and MatriX vNext at some of our existing customers. Most of them expect both libraries to be fully API compati … ⌘ Read more

GitHub celebrates the ingenuity of developers with disabilities in new video series
Learn how developers with disabilities are pushing the boundaries of accessibility with ingenuity, open source, and generative AI on The ReadME Project. ⌘ Read more

Shifts in weather are causing Italian families to rethink an inter-generational tradition
Italian-Australian communities are facing uncertainty over whether they’ll be able to keep their annual sauce-making tradition this year due to a tomato shortage. ⌘ Read more

GitHub Enterprise Server 3.8 is now generally available
With updates to GitHub Actions, repositories, and GitHub Advanced Security, this new version of GitHub Enterprise Server is focused on bringing the best developer experience to companies. ⌘ Read more

Isode: M-Guard 1.4 New Capabilities
M-Guard 1.4 is a platform support update release for M-Guard Console and M-Guard Appliance. M-Guard Appliance has been updated to use UEFI instead of BIOS for key system services.

The M-Guard Appliance now supports running on Netgate 6100 and 6100 MAX appliance systems.

M-Guard Appliance on Hyper-V now uses Generation 2 virtual machines.

M-Guard Appliance on VirtualBox now uses EFI.

Use of BIOS for booting is deprecated in favor of UEF … ⌘ Read more

Unleash your potential with GitHub Octernships: a path to a thriving tech career
Empowering the next generation of students in tech with real-world industry experience. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net it is from the generator. But in the actual go implementation methods are represented with a unsigned short. So 65k is the hard limit in go.

GitHub Actions Importer is now generally available
We’re excited to announce the general availability of GitHub Actions Importer. GitHub Actions Importer helps you plan, forecast, and automate migrations from Azure DevOps, CircleCI, GitLab, Jenkins, and Travis CI to GitHub Actions. This product is an extension of the official GitHub CLI and is available for free to any GitHub user starting today. Migrating […] ⌘ Read more