Álex Córcoles (coding)

My "production stuff" is listed at https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/README.md#other-usable-projects-of-mine

Hmmm, having issues adding my Delta Chat URL to my Incarnator profile.

Here is it: https://i.delta.chat/#F39B6A2BB323992DB8B897D2B3AD081B56A5FAC6&a=vmupyibe9%40nine.testrun.org&n=Alex2&i=84tOryYQa6e-2qD75_LE5X-r&s=JlQQAedymqJC8rwkSaMC4oa7

BTW, I recently discovered that writing Git hooks for doing stuff on push is easier than I expected. For example, now I do git push to run my static site generator with this:

https://ñix.es/cgit/alex/alexpdp7.git/tree/blog/post-receive?h=master

So 9 days ago, GitHub (I know) warned me of a vulnerability in Black (a Python code formatter). This does not matter, but I like to keep dependencies up to date anyway.

Today I thought... let's switch to... and then I realized.

If you know, you know. This is not ideal.

`git add -u` will add all modified files that are already staged. If you merge, then have to fix a bunch of conflicts, you don't have to add each file as you fix it. Just fix everything and use `git add -u`. I've been using git for over 7 years, and I just now learned this. I will now try to not think of all the time I spent adding files one by one after a conflicted merge.

Well, that was a trek.

I spent Monday night in the hotel QCon put speakers in (the Park Plaza Riverside). The room was very hot. I left the air conditioning set to 16°C overnight and it was loud, but didn't actually cool the room, so I didn't sleep much.

Very tired yesterday and I couldn't face another night of not sleeping, so I decided to check out a day early, skip the speakers' dinner, and go home after my talk (last session of the day).

I made it to Kings Cross just in time to get on the train I'd been aiming for. Only to realise two minutes before it left that it didn't actually stop in Cambridge (I was tired, I mixed up the times of the trains in the two directions). The one I got on went to Peterborough, and a lot of trains to there do stop in Cambridge, but I didn't notice this one didn't until I was on it.

No problem, I got off in time and headed for the correct train. While I was waiting for it to have a platform assigned, I realised something: I had a suitcase when I got on the train, and I no longer had one. I'd put it in the luggage rack above the seats and then forgotten it.

Talked to the platform staff and they called Stevenage, which was the first place it would stop. They agreed to look for it when the train got there and I hopped on the next (very slow!) train that stopped at Stevenage.

Arrived there and they hadn't found it, but they called to Peterborough, where the train stopped and they could do a better search (I wasn't 100% sure which carriage it was in and they'd only looked in the one I thought was most likely).

I then got on the (faster) train to Cambridge. They called me a few minutes later to tell me the Peterborough folks had found it and I could collect it from their lost property office today.

So, this morning, a 40-minute train to Peterborough, five minutes to get the suitcase (yay! They found it and looked after it). Then 40 minutes back.

This has 100% reinforced my belief that trying to do work while tired is counterproductive. The mistakes you make will cost more time to fix than simply doing nothing. I just didn't think that 'going home' was something that counted as work.

The platform staff at the three stations (Kings Cross, Stevenage, and Peterborough) were universally great. Supportive, helpful, and efficient. If I'd remembered which carriage I'd been sitting in when I got off the train, I'd have had the bag in Stevenage.

The processes are not great though. Given the number of trains that go between Cambridge and Peterborough, it would be nice if they'd been able to put it on a train and hand it to the lost-property folks in Cambridge.

@alexhall if it's any consolation, I don't really like the game

@alexhall I'm sighted and I don't use a screenreader. You don't type anything to play. Each game is a few words that you must transform into a target word. You do so by selecting one or many consecutive words, and choosing a transformation.

So you click on "sword" and a few synonyms pop up; you choose one and replace the word. Or click "war runs backwards" and replace it with "raw". I assume the website is unfriendly to screenreaders :(

AI is not inevitable. Nothing in human societies is inevitable because we design them. Healthcare can be free for the public. Books can be bought instead of bombs. Universities can be free for students, and they can even receive a stipend to live off. Don't let companies dictate the future.

Read more in section 3.2 here https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17065099

ALT

Twitter is turning 20 years old this month and we are slowly starting to have a debate about social media regulation (in the form of age restrictions).

I’m looking forward to discussing if and how we should regulate generative AI around 2045.

@liw no way. no way the serde library for yaml is called norway.

for context, the "norway problem":
country_codes:

GB
FR
CH
NO

when loaded becomes ['GB', 'FR', 'CH', false]

May this serve as a corrective for all of us who have apparently been mispronouncing Google chatbot's name. (sound on)

Support for macOS guests is coming
https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/pull/4595

Two trends in online commenting that make your message much less effective to me:

SOTA: yes, state of the art is catchy, but it always has been a buzzwordy flourish. "Best" works equally well, it's not an acronym, and everyone knows it.

"Load-bearing" or "this word|sentence is doing a lot of work". A clever way of saying something is only clever while it's rare. It just tires me. Get to the point; don't classify, jump straight to the explanation.

Pick the best fallacy

More IRCv3 on Libera! https://libera.chat/news/new-and-upcoming-features-3

@aphyr we built out a trap for scanners: LLM bots will crawl the CT logs, so anyone making HTTP requests to the certs requested by our mail servers are fuckin' around and can go directly into the firewall.

@technomancy ++, but there's so many things... (container-*only* distribution, MySQL/MariaDB as a hard requirement...)

I didn't run my own ActivityPub server until I found Takahe/Incarnator (in retrospect, I should've picked GotoSocial :(

When you use shells such as bash (or any other terminal tool that uses readline), there is a magic day when you learn about ctrl+r for incremental search of your history.

Today, I have learned that when you are in a command from history and press ctrl+o, it executes the command and selects the following command in history.

(Unfortunately, IPython has another thing bound to ctrl+o :(

Every time I install a new piece of infrastructure for my homelab as part of becoming more independent from Big Tech, I see a hint on the homepage of that new piece of infrastructure that mentions they received sponsorship from @nlnet almost as if NLNet has been silently preparing Europe for #DigitalSovereignty with Open Source projects ;) I like!

@jimsalter yeah, configuring granular Nagios checks is tedious. I've gone for even more... https://github.com/alexpdp7/ragent/

@mjg59 I found Asterisk too complex and had more success with FreeSWITCH. It has a nice default configuration with some extensions and an echo extension.

Nowadays I've switched to Flexisip- I don't know if it was easier because I had already figured much making FreeSWITCH work.

(I've switched to Flexisip because in theory it can do push to mobile devices.)

I think manipulating the context causes the weird behavior because of https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/e4c596dab8038f332227aa68a72dbc0ee3c68205/Lib/ssl.py#L1091

Also not happy that with a Python ssl.SSLSocket, the following code causes issues:

socket.context = ...
socket.context.x

while the following code works:

context = ...
context.x
socket.context = context

sudo ss -a sport $PORT -K

^^ this command seems to work when you're iterating on a network socket daemon and the port is busy when restarting the daemon.