Feedback on why I didn’t choose Mattermost (lack of OIDC) · mattermost/mattermost · Discussion – My discussions/feedback on Mattermost’s decision to have certain useful and IMO should be standard features as paid-for features on a per-seat licensed basis. My primary argument is that if you offer a self-host(able) product and require additional features the free version does not have, you should not have to pay for a per-seat license for something you are footing the bill for in terms of Hardware/Compute and Maintenance/Support (havintg to operate it).

Microsoft Ending Support For Windows 10 Could Send 240 Million PCs To Landfills, Study Finds
According to Canalys Research, Microsoft’s plan to end support for Windows 10 could result in about 240 million computers being sent to landfills. “The electronic waste from these PCs could weigh an estimated 480 million kilograms, equivalent to 320,000 cars,” adds Reuters. From the report: W … ⌘ Read more

I am #nethack addicted, but it’s a new moon today. Maybe I should change my computer’s date 😇

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -Robert A. Heinlein

obsdfreqd is saving my computer from burning at 70°C #openbsd

… it just finished and brute-force worked. 18 minutes of computing time on my 11 year old machine, single-threaded.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci predicting weather is literally a step up from the 3 body problem into n-body chaos. AI is just statistics pushed up into chaos. The future of computing is indistinguishable from magical incantations

Diving into vintage games, roms, emulators and raspberry/retropie’s mode.
Now waiting to enjoy Family computer, last acquisition 😍😍

Scientist Claims Quantum RSA-2048 Encryption Cracking Breakthrough
Mark Tyson reports via Tom’s Hardware: A commercial smartphone or Linux computer can be used to crack RSA-2048 encryption, according to a prominent research scientist. Dr Ed Gerck is preparing a research paper with the details but couldn’t hold off from bragging about his incredible quantum computing achievement (if true) on his LinkedIn profil … ⌘ Read more

I’m looking for sites suitable for old computers or terminal browsers like w3m. As example, https://text.npr.org or https://wiby.me. Do you have other examples?

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net F-droid. Getting APKs from developers you trust and side-loading them. Some flavor of Linux. Some distro of the open source parts of Android.

There are lots of options. Bit by bit I divest from anything that’s distributed from Google Play. With my latest phone I find and download APKs so that I could have the app without all the Google crap woven through it. By the time I need to replace this one I’ll be fully free of Google Play. Most of my apps come from F-droid now. You can a perfectly functional phone/pocket computer unless you’re addicted to installing dozens of corporate apps.

@mckinley@twtxt.net Yes, I’m still with jmp.chat, and still very happy with them overall. Their beta period ended and their pricing increased a bit, so that’s worth a bit of consideration. I also managed to get one of their eSIMs. I’m slightly less happy with that aspect of their service, though they seem to be actively working on improving it and I knew in advance this was an early beta kind of thing and likely to have issues.

The only unreliability with calls that I’ve noticed was traceable to the unreliability of my own internet connection. I’ve confused incoming calls by simultaneously making and taking calls from the computer and the phone, but I think it’s understandable that problems might arise and that’s not a real use case for me. Once or twice I did not receive a text transcription of a voice mail, but the support is usually quick to address things like that.

I host my own XMPP server and have for a good decade now, and that’s what I use with jmp.chat. I can’t speak to the quality of their hosting options.

Group texting works fine for me if one of the other parties initiates the group text. I haven’t tried to initiate my own group text in well over a year; last time I did, it didn’t work. That may or may not be a problem for you, and it may or may not have been fixed by now. Worth investigating more if it’s important. I should also say I’ve only ever used group texts with 3 participants, and can’t speak to what happens if there are more nor whether there are upper limits.

Group texts don’t use MUC. Rather, they use a special syntax in the JID, something like “+1XXX,+1YYY,…,+1ZZZ@cheogram.com”, where the + and , are required, the XXX, YYY, through ZZZ are the phone numbers (no dashes or other special chars just digits), and the @cheogram.com at the end is required.

I recommend the cheogram app if you’re on android. It has a lot of nice features on top of the Conversations base. I use gajim on my (linux) computer and it works well with jmp.chat.

I’m happy to answer other questions if you have them!

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net because of course they have.

Emily Bender, a computational linguistic and excellent critic of this generative AI nonsense, uses an analogy of an oil spill to characterize what is happening as a result of generative AI. It’s polluting the world with false information, false images, false “academic” articles, false books. The companies that create this stuff are not cleaning up their misinformation spill; they’re letting the mess spread all over. It’s being used to commit crimes, and that’ll only get worse. Just like an out of control oil spill will destroy entire ecosystems.

Today I’m reading about how to save a copy of your secret keys outside a computer, using analog media, or sharing it by voice. For instance, for TOTP authenticators.

I found BIP39 coming from the crypto-wallets world:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki

The user has to write down this passphrase

fragile mimic expect ketchup truth between thunder visit expose output powder derive process disagree razor
Which is carefully designed to be checksummed and it’s easy to say on a call

Finally deriving it into a set of bytes like

da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709

Do you know some alternatives not related to cryptocurrencies? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net are you trying to reinvent cloud computing?!?

Free Public WiFi: https://computer.rip/2023-07-29-Free-Public-WiFi.html

@prologic@twtxt.net It was super useful if you needed to do the sorts of things it did. I’m pretty sad.

At its core was Sage, a computational mathematics system, and their own version of Jupyter notebooks. So, you could do all kinds of different math stuff in a notebook environment and share that with people. But on top of that, there was a chat system, a collaborative editing system, a course management system (so if you were teaching a class using it you could keep track of students, assignments, grades, that sort of thing), and a bunch of other stuff I never used. It all ran in a linux container with python/conda as a base, so you could also drop to a terminal, install stuff in the container, and run X11 applications in the same environment. I never taught a class with it but I used to use it semi-regularly to experiment with ideas.

Make computers inconvenient again.

@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 talk: “Using computers freely and safely” http://akkartik.name/freewheeling

My desktop computer developed a really annoying vibration-induced buzzing sound a few months ago after I added some hard drives to it. It was one of these where it’d be more or less quiet, and then all of a sudden a buzzing would start. If you tapped the case, it often made the buzzing stop.

One by one I went through my components, and the day before yesterday I finally identified the guilty party, one particular HDD. Currently I have the case open and a piece of cardboard jammed under the drive in its tray. The computer has not buzzed since I did that, so it looks to me like securing that drive better will finally end this madness-inducing sound.

Wild that it takes so long to track down something like this and figure out what to do about it.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net Animals have inner lives. Computers do not.

Are you really so desperate to make this point thst you’re citing Quora??? Believe what you want to believe.

@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 @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.

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah. I’d add “Big Data” to that hype list, and I’m sure there are a bunch more that I’m forgetting.

On the topic of a GPU cluster, the optimal design is going to depend a lot on what workloads you intend to run on it. The weakest link in these things is the data transfer rate, but that won’t matter too much for compute-heavy workloads. If your workloads are going to involve a lot of data, though, you’d be better off with a smaller number of high-VRAM cards than with a larger number of interconnected cards. I guess that’s hardware engineering 101 stuff, but still…

published: A guide to simple and stupid usage of computers for writers (anyone who writes really) https://yctct.com/guide-write

https://www.specnext.com/product/zx-spectrum-next-plus-computer

https://www.specnext.com/product/zx-spectrum-next-plus-computer

There’s only one major regret I have about switching from Windows to Linux for my personal computers, and that regret is that I no longer have Winamp.

Scientific Field Prefixes
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spooky action at a distance. Just remember all computing infra is rocks smashed together in a particular way to move sparkys around in the right statistical modal.

“We build our computer systems like we build our cities - over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.” — Ellen Ullman Ellen Ullman: We Have to Demystify Code (2017) | Hacker News

#event Upcomming Meetup in Copennhagen: algolab(the_art_of_live_coding) @ Støberiet / Computer Klub

next step for https://git.sr.ht/~noizhardware/666cpu/tree/master/item/vm/666MR will be Kur, a new virtual computer system with a variable length audio buffer, let’s see how it plays out #666cpu #nyx #coding #sound

next step for https://git.sr.ht/~noizhardware/666cpu/tree/master/item/vm/666MR will be Kur, a new virtual computer system with a variable length audio buffer, let’s see how it plays out #666cpu #nyx #coding #sound

performed (a)live computing dance on algorave 10th birthday | https://compudanzas.net/alive_computing_dance.html

switched to a second-hand laptop running Trisquel GNU/Linux as my main computer

Cloud Computing and Virtualization Company Citrix To Be Acquired for $16.5B
Citrix, a cloud computing and virtualization company used by companies including Microsoft, Google, and SAP, has revealed plans to be acquired by affiliates of global investment firm Vista Equity Partners, and an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management called Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation. From a report: The all-cash deal i … ⌘ Read more

@fastidious@arrakis.netbros.com the things Gemini has going for it are mutual TLS and lack of JavaScript. Which makes for a secure albeit boring experience (much like gopher). The fake markdown is a bit of a drag.

A render mode for Gemini probably wouldnt be too hard. There are markdown to Gemini libs out there.

With Web3 the whole trust a 3rd party browser ext + high fees + env impact for compute and storage are serious no gos for me.. I have heard one too many horror stories about clicking the wrong link and some script draining your metamask wallet.

I fork bombed my computer! With ed(1)!!! Haven’t done that in a while.

Review Jam, day 2: try a short task in Teliva. https://buttondown.email/reviewjam/archive/advent-of-foc-day-2-brutalist-convivial-computing

Yup, and my answer’s the same: very little. But it’s fun! Have fun with computers!

you’re why we love computers, aren’t you lain?

Imagine a computer harnessing the natural behavior of natural systems and utilizing their behaviors to solve equations. via @devine@wiki.xxiivv.com https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/computation.html

Rendering arbitrary images on the 256-color Mu computer: https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/106671394323266954

sapphire whorf is dead, god is a lie, all computers are virtual, language hopping is an illusion of choice

pcd quito 2021: we had a talk on compudanzas and a workshop on coloring computers. | https://compudanzas.net/talks_and_workshops.html

Live-coding Fizzbuzz on the Mu computer’s prototyping environment: https://archive.org/details/akkartik-mu-2021-06-09

My computer now prints a call stack when it crashes: https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/106239831225295745

Lisp macros in the Mu computer: https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/106195814023586904