coder@alex.femto.pub

138d

My "production stuff":

- https://github.com/festivus-es/festivus - public holidays calendars for Spanish cities
- https://github.com/remote-es/remotes - companies hiring in Spain for remote positions

Usable WIPs:

- https://alexpdp7.github.io/selfhostwatch/ - track self-hosting package updates (such as YunoHost)
- https://github.com/alexpdp7/ubpkg/ - package manager for "upstream binaries"
- https://github.com/alexpdp7/termflux - Miniflux terminal client

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149d

@epilys I am a horrible person, because there's only like a 0.000003% chance you are in a scenario where this is not the worst idea ever but... you could invoke a program. pretty sure everything except Linux has a guaranteed known executable you could use, and there might be acceptable strategies if there is not.

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150d

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/#1-operating-system

27.7% of professional developers use Ubuntu as their "primary operating system for work". (Plus a few other Linux are there.) I don't really trust the survey (how can primary choices total more than 100%, and how WSL and Cygwin are there?), but if it's remotely close to reality, that "Linux is not viable for work"...

(Better data welcome.)

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157d

The way that "ChatGPT outputs libel about person X" was solved by adding a kill switch for his specific name doesn't really suggest these AI engineers have much influence over what their models are saying.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/12/certain-names-make-chatgpt-grind-to-a-halt-and-we-know-why/

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256d

Once you're terminally online for a while you realize how much of online discourse is driven by a handful of terminally online people. After you scratch the surface of some "The X community thinks Y" statement, it turns out Y is just the opinion of two guys named John and Mike that are very prolific on some forum, have had a blog for 25 years, and last looked at X in 2012.

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160d

https://etbe.coker.com.au/

Russell Coker's blog is one of the remaining gems from the golden era where following blogs was *the* way to be updated. I still follow it through Planet Debian, which was another *AWESOME* concept that is becoming lost to the mists of time.

The latest link roundup is quite nice. I wasn't aware Nvidia was also on the RISC-V train. I'm not holding my breath, but I'm kinda eager to see if RISC-V shakes things significantly in a couple of years.

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161d

Honestly, we are currently out of ideas on how to restore access to Codeberg.org.

We are fighting with extreme traffic and high load for several hours now, we have done the typical procedure to identify and block misbehaving AI crawlers.

However, we are currently having a hard time figuring out details about the ongoing high traffic situation.

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161d

Tech, education, FediMeta

PSA: Most internet users do not know that there is a distiction between an email provider and an email client.

Gmail users believe the only ways to access a Gmail account are through the official web client at mail.google.com, and the official Gmail app for iOS and Android.

Yahoo Mail users believe the only ways to access a Yahoo email account are the official webmail client and the official Yahoo Mail app for iOS and Android.

Outlook users believe the only ways to access an Outlook email are through the Outlook website, the Outlook desktop app, or the Outlook mobile app. Outlook's inbox search feature doesn't work very well, so as far as most of the internet is concerned, there's no reliable way to search the inbox of an Outlook email account.

Additionally, most email users are completely unaware that their provider blocks emails from other providers that violate their terms of service. They don't know that different email providers may have substantially different moderation policies.

At my university, student emails use Gmail, while faculty emails use Outlook. IT wanted to move everyone to Outlook, and the students revolted in protest, eventually convincing IT to change reverse course. Faculty members are also asking to have Gmail, though we aren't as organized as the students.

The primary reason cited by both students and faculty for preferring Gmail over Outlook is that the user-interface for the Gmail website is much better than its Outlook counterpart. As far as most people are aware, that's the only difference between email providers.

We are explicitly allowed to use 3rd party email clients, but very few students or faculty understand that that's a possibility. Some of my colleagues are amaze that I have the ability to search my own email inbox, since Outlook's search is broken unless you use a 3rd party client.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because if you try to explain the fediverse to someone by saying federation works "like email," you have to understand that most non-tech people's understanding of email is very very different from most of the people here.

If you tell someone that fedi instances are like email providers and that your instance is transfem.social, that creates three expecations in your audience:
1)The main, or possibly only, way to access your fedi account on a desktop is through the transfem.social website.
2)The main, or possibly only, way to access your fedi account on a smartphone is through the transfem.social app. This app is completely separate from the apps that could be used to access a fedi account on another instance.
3)The primary difference between transfem.social and other fedi instances is the UI of the website and app.

Without further explanation, those three incorrect assumptions are going to make it very confusing for them to learn to navigate the fediverse.

When you install a fediverse app on your phone, it asks you for your instance. Most newcomers to the fediverse have never been asked for their provider after installing a client app. When you launch the Gmail app, it doesn't ask you for your email provider: it assumes you are using Gmail. If someone gets confused as to what they have to do, it doesn't help to tell them "it's like picking an email provider," because, as far as most people know, it is not how they picked an email provider.

The situation on the desktop is a little better. Almost every fedi instance hosts their own web client, just like major email providers. Newcomers who are told federation is like email expect to access the fediverse from their provider's website, and that's exactly what they can do.

Even so, if a typical email user thinks fedi providers are like email providers, they are likely to get confused in choosing an instance. People decide between Gmail and Outlook based on the UI of the web client. They likely don't even know the moderation policies of different providers are different. You can certainly use your preference in UI to decide between Mastodon, Akkoma, or Sharkey, but once you've chosen which software, how do you pick an instance?

If you're reading this message, you likely chose your fedi instance based in part on the community, moderation policies, the instance URL, knowing the admin, or some combination. But most people did not take those factors into consideration when choosing an email provider. Telling them "it's just like picking an email provider" isn't enough to help them.

I suspect the lack of widespread understanding as to how email works also contributed to one past piece of fedi meta. During the some of the big waves of users joining after leaving Twitter, some of them were absolutely outraged to discover an instance could block another instance. Several of them said some variation of

I thought Mastodon instances were supposed to be like email providers? Can you imagine how absurd it would be if your email provider told you you couldn't send a message to someone because of who their provider was?

These newcomers use Gmail or Outlook, and they were completely unaware that their email provider already does exactly that.

The TL:DR is that if you are explaining the fediverse to a non-tech person, "it's like email" is not a sufficient explanation.

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162d

Pet peeve: do not create a repo on GitHub (or your favorite forge) until you have at least a README with a "why". (I normally wait until I have a small usable piece of code, even if it has no UI and needs to be used as a library or through a REPL.)

Or, well, do... I can always fantasize :D

(To me, GitHub is more of a social network :D)

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164d

just found out someone is building an independent JS-supporting terminal web browser in a memory-safe language: https://git.sr.ht/~bptato/chawan/

looks promising because so far all the other independent browsers other than Firefox are stuck using C or C++, which like ... have we learned nothing?

but also there's completely unhinged stuff like https://git.sr.ht/~bptato/chawan/tree/master/doc/localcgi.md (and I haven't thought about it enough to figure out whether "unhinged" is a compliment or not yet)

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165d

"If it's free you are the product" is up there with "you know Google once said 'don't be evil'" in the list of vapid clichés in 'critical' tech writing. Open software is free. Are users of any given open source system the product? Not really, eh? How about readers of free books and articles? Yeah, just stop repeating that. Being free isn't the problem. The business model of the entity offering the good is the problem.

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166d

I made a thing. Please do not hesitate to point me in the direction of more forms to fill. https://wtf-8.xn--stpie-k0a81a.com

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167d

I feel this in my bones.

"Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist." -George Carlin

ALT

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167d

Well, Visual Studio Code is in the Pop!_OS repositories as a .deb too. Only defaulting to that in the Pop!_Shop is an issue. Once you install the JDK and VS Code using the terminal and apt, there are few issues.

Graphical applications to install software on Linux have always been a source of pain.

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167d

At least, once installing JDK 21 from the Pop!_OS package repositories, the Visual Studio Code "Extension Pack for Java" that is offered has a decent experience in getting a Spring Boot application started using Spring Initializr.

(Not ideal because it creates a completely empty application that just displays an error, but otherwise the process is reasonably intuitive.)

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167d

Visual Studio Code offers a wizard to set up Java. It detects there's no JDK and prompts to download one. This means invoking the browser to download a .tar.gz and... that's it, 0 indication of what to do with the download.

Pop!_OS, in the latest supported version 22.04 has a valid OpenJDK 21 package that could be easily installed instead.

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167d

I like Flatpaks in principle. But precisely the *only* problems I have had with them is in "development" tools, which often require breaking out of the sandbox.

Computers are unnecessarily complex. My perception is that Linux is a viable operating system for general purpose computing (and even offers perceivable advantages over macOS and Windows), but for introductory software development I still run into too many papercuts.

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167d

Preparing to help to work with Java to someone that uses Pop!_OS and Visual Studio Code. The Pop!_Shop offers by default Visual Studio Code as a Flatpak. The Flatpak does not seem to provide reasonable instructions to install the JDK in a Flatpak situation. I revert and install Visual Studio Code through their official website, which offers a .deb package (which in my experience is easier). The integrated package installer hangs indefinitely installing the package.

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168d

@coder I created Django views to publish the scraped data. However, I did not want to expose this to the Internet.

So today, I set up a daily Kubernetes job that scrapes the website from the same cluster, and pushes it to GitHub Pages.

24 years later, I managed to top myself with an even more janky setup, by adding Kubernetes and GitHub Pages.

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168d

Around 2000, my university provided web hosting for students. This was static web hosting, of course. I wanted my website, and setting it up using HTML was too tedious. So I decided to create my website using PHP, run wget --mirror to scrape it, and upload it to the static web hosting service.

(I don't think that was a novel idea even back then.)

My current personal project is implemented with Django and I run with Kubernetes. This project scraps data and stores it in a PostgreSQL database.

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169d

@drewdevault@fosstodon.org I don't think it's such a hot take. My observation is that many successful big open source projects have "megacorp" contributors that do not intend to profit from the project *directly*. When they intend to benefit *directly* is when it tends to get messy.

Open source project governance is still a hard problem, of course. But a lot of software needs to be so large that megacorps are kinda required for sustainability.

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170d

OK, I think I have most of the YunoHost catalogue "scraped"; I have the version history of the applications on YunoHost, and the matching Git tag history for the related repos. Daily scraping should get this updated.

Next step is to set up publishing of the data for use by others, and some static website for easy browsing of this information.

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170d

@technomancy in IRC, you better not have a nickname that can accidentally be a substring in a message, for instance. I kinda see the point of "tags as explicit objects", although no solution satisfies me completely.

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170d

Just added jj support to my package manager ( https://github.com/alexpdp7/ubpkg ).

It took me a long time to finally switch from Subversion to Git. But once I did, I never looked back. It will likely take me another very long time to switch to jj, but installing it is a first step :-p

I have some doubts about jj's governance, but I'm crossing my fingers the situation improves.

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172d

oh no! Carmen Sandiego has stolen your: ability to resist posting a take about encrypted messengers

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174d

Perhaps it's time to use this last hour before dinner to fool around with making a Visidata video. I learned it has interesting JSON support recently.

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Álex Córcoles (coding)