Erlang Solutions: IoT Complexity Made Simple with the Versatility of Erlang and Elixir

The world is on the brink of a transformative industrial revolution known as Industry 4.0. This fourth industrial revolution is revolutionising our lives, work, and interactions on an unprecedented scale. The convergence of technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled highly sophisticated and interconnected systems. The … ⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: Unleashing the Power of SNMP: Exposing Your Embedded Elixir/Erlang (Nerves, GRiSP) Apps to the World
Did you know that Erlang/OTP ships with built-in SNMP  (Simple Network Management Protocol) support? Using SNMP is a great way to integrate your Elixir or Erlang application into an industrial environment. This will be of particular interest for those working with embedded … ⌘ Read more

We Thank the Stack Overflow Community for Ranking Docker the #1 Most-Used Developer Tool
Stack Overflow’s annual 2023 Developer Survey engaged nearly 80,000 developers to learn about their work, the technologies they use, their likes and dislikes, and much, much more. As a company obsessed with serving developers, we’re honored that Stack Overflow’s community ranked Docker the #1 most-desired and #1 most-used developer tool. Since our inclusion in the […] ⌘ Read more

Summer Solstice
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Summer Solstice
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Lunduke declares war on A.I.
“Hey A.I.! Want to copy my work? Prepare to get fined.” ⌘ Read more

Record number of Pacific Islanders now work in Australia helping supply your next meal
This fruit picker is supporting his family in Vanuatu to recover from cyclones. He hopes changes to the Pacific worker program will help him send more money home. ⌘ Read more

Rebuilding a Solar Powered Website

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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

hrxi: Windows support for Dino
Hello, I’m back!

It’s been four years since I participated in my first Google Summer of\
Code. I’m hrxi, a mathematics student from Germany. I got accepted
into this year’s Google Summer of Code program with the XMPP software\
foundation as the mentoring
organisation. I chose the extended\
timeline, so I am
going to work on [ … ⌘ Read more

‘It made me proud to be Australian’: The fence that saved a family home from flood
When the River Murray began to rise, the Schultz family built a fence from vineyard posts, bits of tin and shade cloth to save their home — and it worked. ⌘ Read more

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter May 2023
Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again! This issue covers the month of May 2023.
Many thanks to all our readers and all contributors!

Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, please consider saying thanks or help these projects! Interested in supporting the Newsletter team? Read more [at the … ⌘ Read more

Does the ‘honour system’ still work? These farm stall operators say it most certainly does
Country drivers are familiar with increasingly common roadside produce stalls with bargain prices and farmers are grateful that people almost universally do the right thing. ⌘ Read more

@mckinley@twtxt.net backintime for my desktop and work files. A combination of rsync, zfs snapshots, and redundancy for “at rest” type things.

Erlang Solutions: How ChatGPT improved my Elixir code. Some hacks are included.
I have been working as an Elixir developer for quite some time and recently came across the ChatGPT model. I want to share some of my experience interacting with it.

During my leisure hours, I am developing an open-source Elixir initiative, Crawly, that facilitates the extraction of structured data from the internet.

Here I want to demonstrate how … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net that would work if it was using shamir’s secret sharing .. although i think its typically 3 of 5 so you get 3, one to the company, and one to the “third party”. so you can recover all you want.. but if the company or 3rd wants to they need one of your 3 to recover.

but still .. if they are providing them then whats the point of trusting they don’t have copies.

Comment on ‘Household Brands’ Interested In Ubuntu for Phones and Tablets, Says Shuttleworth by Nathan Ramirez
The advocacy work of Black Lives Asia is paving the way for a more inclusive and accepting society. ⌘ Read more

I setup Joplin with caddy as the WebDAV server. Works okay. The e2e encryption can get messed up sometimes. Supports markdown and images.

@prologic@twtxt.net You more or less need a data center to run one of these adequately (well, train…you can run a trained one with a little less hardware). I think that’s the idea–no one can run them locally, they have to rent them (and we know how much SaaS companies and VCs love the rental model of computing).

There’s a lot of promising research-grade work being done right now to produce models that can be run on a human-scale (not data-center-scale) computing setup. I suspect those will become more commonly deployed in the next few years.

New repository: aquilax/calendars - Go packages for working with different calendars

Inside GitHub: Working with the LLMs behind GitHub Copilot
Developers behind GitHub Copilot discuss what it was like to work with OpenAI’s large language model and how it informed the development of Copilot as we know it today. ⌘ Read more

How GitHub Copilot is getting better at understanding your code
With a new Fill-in-the-Middle paradigm, GitHub engineers improved the way GitHub Copilot contextualizes your code. By continuing to develop and test advanced retrieval algorithms, they’re working on making our AI tool even more advanced. ⌘ 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

Proof-of-work has been merged into Tor. Should help a lot with DoS issues: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/merge_requests/702

Hectic time for chrysanthemum growers as harvesting for Mother’s Day ramps up
Tasmanian chrysanthemum grower Vaughn Kemsley is working around the clock to deliver flowers for mums. ⌘ Read more

“…still working on the frugal priors though”

@prologic@twtxt.net I think those headsets were not particularly usable for things like web browsing because the resolution was too low, something like 1080p if I recall correctly. A very small screen at that resolution close to your eye is going to look grainy. You’d need 4k at least, I think, before you could realistically have text and stuff like that be zoomable and readable for low vision people. The hardware isn’t quite there yet, and the headsets that can do that kind of resolution are extremely expensive.

But yeah, even so I can imagine the metaverse wouldn’t be very helpful for low vision people as things stand today, even with higher resolution. I’ve played VR games and that was fine, but I’ve never tried to do work of any kind.

I guess where I’m coming from is that even though I’m low vision, I can work effectively on a modern OS because of the accessibility features. I also do a lot of crap like take pictures of things with my smartphone then zoom into the picture to see detail (like words on street signs) that my eyes can’t see normally. That feels very much like rudimentary augmented reality that an appropriately-designed headset could mostly automate. VR/AR/metaverse isn’t there yet, but it seems at least possible for the hardware and software to develop accessibility features that would make it workable for low vision people.

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no @prologic@twtxt.net @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club I love VR too, and I wonder a lot whether it can help people with accessibility challenges, like low vision.

But Meta’s approach from the beginning almost seemed like a joke? My first thought was “are they trolling us?” There’s open source metaverse software like Vircadia that looks better than Meta’s demos (avatars have legs in Vircadia, ffs) and can already do virtual co-working. Vircadia developers hold their meetings within Vircadia, and there are virtual whiteboards and walls where you can run video feeds, calendars and web browsers. What is Meta spending all that money doing, if their visuals look so weak, and their co-working affordances aren’t there?

On top of that, Meta didn’t seem to put any kind of effort into moderating the content. There are already stories of bad things happening in Horizon Worlds, like gangs forming and harassing people off of it. Imagine what that’d look like if 1 billion people were using it the way Meta says they want.

Then, there are plenty of technical challenges left, like people feeling motion sickness or disoriented after using a headset for a long period of time. I haven’t heard announcements from Meta that they’re working on these or have made any advances in these.

All around, it never sounded serious to me, despite how much money Meta seems to be throwing at it. For something with so much promise, and so many obvious challenges to attack first that Meta seems to be ignoring, what are they even doing?

How we work: inclusive retrospectives for the GitHub Accessibility leadership team
Learn about tools and processes the GitHub Accessibility leadership team uses for retrospectives that fully engage every team member. ⌘ Read more

Building a culture of innovation in your business with GitHub
Consider the typical software development practices in an organization. Projects are commonly closed, and causes friction across engineering teams. But open source communities work asynchronously, openly, remotely and at global-scale. What if our internal teams could reuse those same practices? ⌘ Read more

Artificial Intelligence… is really just “Someone Else’s Intelligence”
Someone else’s writing, painting, coding, speaking… someone else’s work. ⌘ Read more

Kaidan: Kaidan 0.9: End-to-End Encryption & XMPP Providers

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It’s finally there: Kaidan with end-to-end encryption via OMEMO 2, Automatic Trust Management and support of XMPP Providers!
Most of the work has been funded by NLnet via NGI Zero PET and NGI Assure with [public … ⌘ Read more

Manage your application security stack effectively with the tool status page
Code scanning’s tool status gives you a bird’s eye view of your application security stack, allowing you to quickly confirm everything is working, or troubleshoot any tool in your application security arsenal. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net

Taking Jordan Peterson asn an example, the only thing he “preaches” (if you want to call it that) is to be honest with yourself and to take responsibility.

This is simply untrue. Read the articles I posted, seriously.

In a tweet in one of the articles I posted, Peterson states there is no white supremacy in Canada. This is blatantly false. It is disinformation. Peterson has made statements that rape is OK (he uses “fancy” language like “women should be naturally converted into mothers” but unpack that a bit–what he means is legalized rape followed by forced conception). He is openly anti-LGBTQ and refuses to use peoples’ preferred pronouns. He seems to believe that women who wear makeup at work are asking to be sexually harassed.

He’s using his platform in academia to pretend that straight, white men are somehow the most aggrieved group in the world and everyone else is just whining and can get fucked. The patron saint of Men’s Rights Activists and incels. I find him odious.

works like magic https://lien.sus.fr/qyEP6

I have no interest in doing anything about it, even if I had the time (which I don’t), but these kind of thing happen all day every day to countless people. My silly blog post isn’t worth getting up in arms about, but there are artists and other creators who pour countless hours, heart and soul into their work, only to have it taken in exactly this way. That’s one of the reasons I’m so extremely negative about the spate of “AI” tools that have popped up recently. They are powered by theft.

Trying to work out if it is possible to churn out an atom file to update mastodon with twtxt

a shitty config file parser in fennel

2023-04-28 21:51

i’m working on rewriting my blog enging again (lol) in fennel (again), and made
this simple config file parser for the following config file format:

name = someone's name
domain = verycoolwebsite.com
email = awsick@cool.com

it turned out to be pretty easy too! i made use of fennel’s threader macro,
->, which just takes an initial value and an arbitrary amount of functions,
and passes the initi … ⌘ Read more

Viewing PDFs in Firefox works again
A few months ago I complained about Firefox not being able to open PDFs without downloading them. Recently, I also wanted to start developing a custom Firefox addon to fix this behavior. ⌘ Read more

There is a “right” way to make something like GitHub CoPilot, but Microsoft did not choose that way. They chose one of the most exploitative options available to them. For that reason, I hope they face significant consequences, though I doubt they will in the current climate. I also hope that CoPilot is shut down, though I’m pretty certain it will not be.

Other than access to the data behind it, Microsoft has nothing special that allows it to create something like CoPilot. The technology behind it has been around for at least a decade. There could be a “public” version of this same tool made by a cooperating group of people volunteering, “leasing”, or selling their source code into it. There could likewise be an ethically-created corporate version. Such a thing would give individual developers or organizations the choice to include their code in the tool, possibly for a fee if that’s something they want or require. The creators of the tool would have to acknowledge that they have suppliers–the people who create the code that makes their tool possible–instead of simply stealing what they need and pretending that’s fine.

This era we’re living through, with large companies stomping over all laws and regulations, blatantly stealing other people’s work for their own profit, cannot come to an end soon enough. It is destroying innovation, and we all suffer for that. Having one nifty tool like CoPilot that gives a bit of convenience is nowhere near worth the tremendous loss that Microsoft’s actions in this instace are creating for everyone.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net That’s a dissembling answer from him. Github is owned by Microsoft, and CoPilot is a for-pay product. It would have no value, and no one would pay for it, were it not filled with code snippets that no one consented to giving to Microsoft for this purpose. Microsoft will pay $0 to the people who wrote the code that makes CoPilot valuable to them.

In short, it’s a gigantic resource-grab. They’re greedy assholes taking advantage of the hard work of millions of people without giving a single cent back to any of them. I hope they’re sued so often that this product is destroyed.

Erlang Solutions: Re-implement our first blog scrapper with Crawly 0.15.0
It has been almost four years since my first article about scraping with Elixir and Crawly was published. Since then, many changes have occurred, the most significant being Erlang Solution’s blog design update. As a result, the 2019 tutorial is no longer functional.

This situation provided an excellent opportunity to update the original work and re-implement the Crawler using the new version of Cra … ⌘ Read more

yey it did work - https://lien.sus.fr/wntAn - not sure why the individual post page isn’t working tho

I hope it will work as it seems like a super good idea to integrate it to sus.fr

**RT by @mind_booster: 1/3 🚨Recent @POLITICOEurope leak revealed that US & EU officials have agreed to cooperate on measures to turn public opinion against #encryption.

Experts’ statements by @edri & @globalencrypt have called out against this plan

➡️https://edri.org/our-work/eu-us-plan-offensive-to-legitimise-police-access-to-data-civil-society-responds-amid-growing-fears-press-release/
➡️https://www.globalencryption.org/2023/04/statement-on-eu-us-cooperation-against-encryption/**
1/3 🚨Recent [@POLITICOEurope](https … ⌘ Read more

@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.

ProcessOne: ejabberd 22.10
This ejabberd 22.10 release includes six months of work, over 140 commits, including relevant improvements in MIX, MUC, SQL, and installers, and bug fixes as usual.

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This version brings support for latest MIX protocol version, and significantly improves detection and recovery of SQL connection issues.

There are no breaking changes in SQL schem … ⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: Re-implement our first blog scrapper with Crawly 0.15.0
It has been almost four years since my first article about scraping with Elixir and Crawly was published. Since then, many changes have occurred, the most significant being Erlang Solution’s blog design update. As a result, the 2019 tutorial is no longer functional.

This situation provided an excellent opportunity to update the original work and re-implement the Crawler using the new version of Crawl … ⌘ 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.

[LIVE] How would de-extinction work? And what’s the point? | Whose Gene 16 ⌘ Read more

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