@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t know! I’ve never used it–only came across it recently.

Question to all you Gophers out there: How do you deal with custom errors that include more information and different kinds of matching them?

I started with a simple var ErrPermissionNotAllowed = errors.New("permission not allowed"). In my function I then wrap that using fmt.Errorf("%w: %v", ErrPermissionNotAllowed, failedPermissions). I can match this error using errors.Is(err, ErrPermissionNotAllowed). So far so good.

Now for display purposes I’d also like to access the individual permissions that could not be assigned. Parsing the error message is obviously not an option. So I thought, I create a custom error type, e.g. type PermissionNotAllowedError []Permission and give it some func (e PermissionNotAllowedError) Error() string { return fmt.Sprintf("permission not allowed: %v", e) }. My function would then return this error instead: PermissionNotAllowedError{failedPermissions}

At some layers I don’t care about the exact permissions that failed, but at others I do, at least when accessing them. A custom func (e PermissionNotAllowedError) Is(target err) bool could match both the general ErrPermissionNotAllowed as well as the PermissionNotAllowedError. Same with As(…). For testing purposes the PermissionNotAllowedError would then also try to match the included permissions, so assertions in tests would work nicely. But having two different errors for different matching seems not very elegant at all.

Did you ever encounter this scenario before? How did you address this? Is my thinking flawed?

@marado@twtxt.net It can’t possibly be defensible, which to me always signals an attempt at a power grab. They never explicitly said “we will use anything we scrape from the web to train our AI” before–that’s new. There is growing pushback against that practice, with numerous legal cases winding through the legal system right now. Some day those cases will be heard and decided on by judges. So they’re trying to get out ahead of that, in my opinion, and cement their claims to this data before there’s a precedent set.

With Youtube testing a “three strikes and you’re out” policy against people who use ad blockers, I’m also wondering whether Web 2.0 is effectively walled off and I should just give up on it entirely and look elsewhere for information and entertainment.

I could use some healthcare right now, but corporate America sucks. You need to have a full-time job while everyone is being replaced by kiosks.

An official FBI document dated January 2021, obtained by the American association “Property of People” through the Freedom of Information Act.

This document summarizes the possibilities for legal access to data from nine instant messaging services: iMessage, Line, Signal, Telegram, Threema, Viber, WeChat, WhatsApp and Wickr. For each software, different judicial methods are explored, such as subpoena, search warrant, active collection of communications metadata (“Pen Register”) or connection data retention law (“18 USC§2703”). Here, in essence, is the information the FBI says it can retrieve:

• Apple iMessage: basic subscriber data; in the case of an iPhone user, investigators may be able to get their hands on message content if the user uses iCloud to synchronize iMessage messages or to back up data on their phone.

• Line: account data (image, username, e-mail address, phone number, Line ID, creation date, usage data, etc.); if the user has not activated end-to-end encryption, investigators can retrieve the texts of exchanges over a seven-day period, but not other data (audio, video, images, location).

• Signal: date and time of account creation and date of last connection.

• Telegram: IP address and phone number for investigations into confirmed terrorists, otherwise nothing.

• Threema: cryptographic fingerprint of phone number and e-mail address, push service tokens if used, public key, account creation date, last connection date.

• Viber: account data and IP address used to create the account; investigators can also access message history (date, time, source, destination).

• WeChat: basic data such as name, phone number, e-mail and IP address, but only for non-Chinese users.

• WhatsApp: the targeted person’s basic data, address book and contacts who have the targeted person in their address book; it is possible to collect message metadata in real time (“Pen Register”); message content can be retrieved via iCloud backups.

• Wickr: Date and time of account creation, types of terminal on which the application is installed, date of last connection, number of messages exchanged, external identifiers associated with the account (e-mail addresses, telephone numbers), avatar image, data linked to adding or deleting.

TL;DR Signal is the messaging system that provides the least information to investigators.

been using the iphone for some days now, and I must say im impressed. I really like it. I will not buy android phone ever again.

I have found a way out of Microsoft Office365, and most of the other cloud services I use to run the company, and its zoho.

They figure that the Can/US should deploy to the Mediterranean sea instead of patrolling our waters.

@prologic@twtxt.net The hackathon project that I did recently used openai and embedded the response info into the prompt. So basically i would search for the top 3 most relevant search results to feed into the prompt and the AI would summarize to answer their question.

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.

Home | Tabby This is actually pretty cool and useful. Just tried this on my Mac locally of course and it seems to have quite good utility. What would be interesting for me would be to train it on my code and many projects 😅

If everybody contemplates the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera Helpful context for thinking about AI

Let’s be clear here. Daniel Penny allegedly choked a black man, Jordan Neely, to death on a subway car. Neely was being loud, but he was not physically threatening anybody and did not have a weapon. In any other context, this would be called “murder”, at the very least, “manslaughter” if one were being gracious. Because of the US’s history, a white man murdering a black man in sight of the public is oftentimes, and rightfully, called a “lynching”. It has a public, political purpose amounting to terrorism.

Daniel Penny was allowed to go free for awhile after this event. He is only now facing accountability, having been recently indicted (arrested and charged with a crime) as he should have been day of. And here is racist right-wing toadie Ben Shapiro saying that Daniel Penny–the white alleged killer–is the one being lynched. Not the black man who was allegedly murdered by Penny in view of the public, and who is now dead. Penny himself, who is still very much alive.

@prologic@twtxt.net, I don’t know how you go on defending Ben Shapiro, but in the context of US society, what Shapiro is saying is reprehensible and unacceptable. He’s a right-wing troll with disgusting, not to mention flat out stupid, opinions.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de If I understand it correctly, gtk4 renders using OpenGL. That means some of that RAM that appears to be allocated is actually some trick of the OpenGL driver so that it can map address in RAM space to the GPU’s VRAM (depends a lot on your setup though).

What happens if you run it with GSK_RENDERER=cairo set?

A GTK 4 application showing an empty window uses about 160 MB of RAM:

$ wget https://movq.de/v/138ab3e622/win.c
$ cc -Wall -Wextra -o win win.c $(pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk4)
$ ./win

It also takes several seconds to start on my machine because it is compiling shaders and initializing DRI (it’s faster on the second run, unless you happen to lose ~/.cache/mesa_shader_cache/). This might be a hint as to why it’s using so much memory: There’s obviously much more going on behind the scenes these days, not just a little bit of internal housekeeping and then creating a window.

Iceberg
⌘ Read more

I have used Linux for most my life, and it hat been my daily driver for nearly two decades now. I have been bugged recently how when I exit the terminal buffer has not been cleared leaving whatever contents available to the next user to view.

a quick man zsh I found the STARTUP/SHUTDOWN FILES, and then a quick search on resetting the termianl buffer led me to <esc>c or printf "\033c".

In five minutes something which has bothered me for who knows how long was resolved. Just needed some motivation to figure it out.

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.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de wow. I’d trade crow sounds for car sounds, or jet sounds, or leaf blower sounds, or lawn mower sounds, or…..100% of the time.

As far as fighting the birds goes, maybe they’re right, but probably it’d be better to re-balance the ecosystem so that crows aren’t so dominant? At least there are things to try. When it comes to reducing how much air travel people use, it takes a terrorist attack or a pandemic to affect it.

“if you can find a way to solve a real problem effectively enough so that a billion people or more would want to use it twice a day you are bound to make a lot of money. much more money than if you were to build the next photo sharing app.” - mo gawdat

@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.

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.

I came across the phrase “long fuse, big bang” used to describe large-scale issues with tipping points facing humanity, like climate change, and it feels pretty apt.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci buuuuut it show when winter!

In the time scale viewed from the planets perspective, the climate has changed many many times.. The issue is whether that change that will inevitability come is hospitable to us meat bags. Or if we are doomed to take part in the next mass extinction event.

I played with nlpodyssey/verbaflow: Neural Language Model for Go today a little bit today…. First I had to download a ~2GB file (the model), then convert that to a format the program verbaflow understands which came out to roughly ~5GB. Then I tried some of the samples in the README. My god, this this is so goddamn awfully slow its like watching paint dry 😱 All just to predict the next few tokens?! 😳 I had a look at the resource utilisation as well as it was trying to do this “work”, using 100% of 1.5 Cores and ~10GB of Memory 😳 Who da fuq actually thinks any of this large language model (LLM) and neural network crap is actually any good or useful? 🤔 Its just garbage 🤣

Are you using lynx?

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

Debt Collectors Want To Use AI Chatbots To Hustle People For Money

Starting to get ugly already.

👋 Hello @ocakuvoe@anthony.buc.ci, welcome to Buccipod, a Yarn.social Pod! To get started you may want to check out the pod’s Discover feed to find users to follow and interact with. To follow new users, use the ⨁ Follow button on their profile page or use the Follow form and enter a Twtxt URL. You may also find other feeds of interest via Feeds. Welcome! 🤗

Crystal Ball
⌘ Read more

🌠 PDF improvements & More AI Options
Check out some great guides on how to create folder and tag systems, and how to use the Strange New Worlds & bookmarks plugin! ⌘ Read more

Bought a used 2020 Leaf EV for the wife.

@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?

Metaverse Could Contribute Up To 2.4% of US GDP By 2035, Study Shows
A study commissioned by Meta has found that the metaverse could contribute around 2.4% to U.S. annual GDP by 2035, equating to as much as $760 billion. Reuters reports: The concept of the metaverse includes augmented and virtual reality technologies that allow users to immerse themselves in a virtual world or overlay information digitally on … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net

Let’s assume for a moment that an answer to a question would be met with so many words you don’t know what the answer was at all. Why? Why do this? Is this a stereotype of academics and philosophers? If so, it’s not a very straight-forward way of thinking, let alone answering a simple question.

Well, I can’t know what’s in these peoples’ minds and hearts. Personally I think it’s a way of dissembling, of sowing doubt, and of maintaining plausible deniability. The strategy is to persuade as many people as possible to change their minds, and then force the remaining people to accept the idea because they think too many other people believe it.

Let’s say you want, for whatever reason, to get a lot of people to accept an idea that you know most people find horrible. The last thing you should do is express the idea clearly and concisely and repeat it over and over again. All you’d accomplish is to cement people’s resistance to you, and label yourself as a person who harbors horrible ideas that they don’t like. So you can’t do that.

What do you do instead? The entire field of “rhetoric”, dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle (400 years BC), is all about this. How to persuade people to accept your idea, even when they resist it. There are way too many techniques to summarize in a twt, but it seems almost obvious that you have to use more words and to use misleading or at least embellished or warped descriptions of things, because that’s the opposite of clearly and concisely expressing yourself, which would directly lead to people rejecting your idea.

That’s how I think of it anyway.

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, dunno about the recency of that line of thought. I suspect though that given his (recent or not) history, if someone directly asked him “do you support rape” he would not say “no”, he’d go on one of these rambling answers about property crime like he did in the video. Maybe I’m mind poisoned by being around academics my whole career, but that way of talking is how an academic gives you an answer they know will be unpopular. PhD = Piled Higher And Deeper, after all right? In other words, if he doesn’t say “no” right away, he’s saying “yes”, except with so many words there’s some uncertainty about whether he actually meant yes. And he damn well knows that, and that’s why I give him no slack.

There are people in academia who believe adult men should be able to have sex with children, legally, too. They use the same manner of talking about it that Peterson uses. We need to stop tolerating this, and draw hard red lines. No, that’s bad, no matter how many words you use to say it. No, don’t express doubts about it, because that provides justification and talking points to the people who actually carry out the acts.

@xuu@txt.sour.is LOL omfg.

This is the absurd logical endpoint of free market fundamentalism. “The market will fix everything!” Including, apparently, encroaching floodwater.

I do have to say though, after spending awhile looking at houses, that there are a crapton of homes for sale for very high prices (>$1 million) in coastal areas NASA is more or less telling us will be underwater in the next few decades. I don’t get how a house that’s going to be underwater soon is worth $1 million, but then I’m never been a free market fundamentalist either so 🤷 Maybe they’re all watertight.

Commemorative Plaque
⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net When you unpack what he’s saying in that video (which I’ve watched, and just now re-watched), and strip away all his attempts to wrap this idea in fancy-sound language, he is saying: it would be better if women were viewed as property of men, because then if they were raped, the men who owned them would get mad and do something about it. Because rape would be a property crime then, like trespassing or theft. Left unspoken by him, but very much known to him, is that the man/men who “own” a woman can then have their way with her, just like they can freely walk around their yard or use their own stuff. In his envisioned better world, it’d be impossible for a husband to rape his wife, for instance, because she is his property and he can do almost anything he wants (that’s literally what “property” is in Western countries).

It’s so fucked up it’s hard to put into words how fucked up it is. And this isn’t the only bad idea who bangs on about!

@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.

The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small | Defector

It’s annoying to see millions of dollars thrown at making more-or-less literal dupes of internet
companies that everyone is already using begrudgingly and with diminishing emotional returns. It’s maybe more frustrating to realize that the goals of these companies is the same as their predecessors, which is to
make the internet smaller.

Looks like Google’s using this blog post of mine without my permission. I hate this kind of tech company crap so much.

❤️ 🎶: The Moments Of Us by MRCH

@Phys_org@feeds.twtxt.net using the phrase “machine learning” in this article is misleading and bandwagoning. They used a neural model, which neuroscientists were doing long before “machine learning” became a popular term.

Tapetum Lucidum
⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net yes, I agree. It’s bizarre to me that people use the thing at all let alone pay for it.

BlueSky is cosplaying decentralization

I say “ostensibly decentralized”, because BlueSky’s (henceforth referred to as “BS” here) decentralization is a similar kind of decentralization as with cryptocurrencies: sure, you can run your own node (in BS case: “personal data servers”), but that does not give you basically any meaningful agency in the system.

I don’t know why anyone would want to use this crap. It’s the same old same old and it’ll end up the same old way.

I was listening to an O’Reilly hosted event where they had the CEO of GitHub, Thomas Dohmke, talking about CoPilot. I asked about biased systems and copyright problems. He, Thomas Dohmke, said, that in the next iteration they will show name, repo and licence information next to the code snippets you see in CoPilot. This should give a bit more transparency. The developer still has to decide to adhere to the licence. On the other hand, I have to say he is right about the fact, that probably every one of us has used a code snippet from stack overflow (where 99% no licence or copyright is mentioned) or GitHub repos or some tutorial website without mentioning where the code came from. Of course, CoPilot has trained with a lot of code from public repos. It is a more or less a much faster and better search engine that the existing tools have been because how much code has been used from public GitHub repos without adding the source to code you pasted it into?

@thecanine@twtxt.net wow this is horrifying. What happened to Opera? It used to be my favorite browser but now they’re like that one cousin who started getting into drugs, and then got in trouble with the law, and then before you know it they’re scamming old ladies out of their pension money.