The Thanksgiving holiday typically brings families and friends
together in a celebration of common gratitude for all the good things
that have happened during the previous year. People celebrate the
holiday in various ways, with parades, football marathons, and attending
religious services, but food remains the over-arching theme. For
astronauts embarked on long-duration space missions, […]
@HeyeBodo fragte
letzthin, ob Gesinnung weg kann. Kann weg, meiner Meinung nach.
In Hellebarden & Helme habe ich
ja die drei Gesinnungen, welche viele von uns wegen Elric von Melniboné
kennen: Ordnung, Chaos, und die Neutralität. Dazu hat’s eine Seite im
Regelbuch, die mir immer noch gefällt. Die Passage hatte ich schon
2011…
Wähle eine Gesinnung: Ordnung, Chaos oder Neutralität.
Die Priester der Ordnung sagen: „Alleine sind wir schwach und
das Leben ein Jammertal. Gemeinsam sind wir stark. Gemeinsam bauen wir
unsere Häuser. Gemeinsam bestellen wir unsere Felder. Gemeinsam
verteidigen wir unsere Städte und Dörfer. Nur gemeinsam sind wir stark.
Wir bauen Dämme gegen die Flut. Wir bauen Aquädukte gegen die Dürre. Wir
bauen Kanäle gegen die Seuchen. Wir legen die Sümpfe trocken und drängen
das Fieber zurück. Wir füllen die Kornspeicher und besiegen den Hunger.
Wir bestrafen den Verrat und belohnen die Treue. Wir sorgen für Recht
und Gerechtigkeit. Selbst wenn das korrumpierende Chaos und die Anarchie
um sich greifen, bleibt uns immer noch die himmlische Ordnung von den
höchsten Göttern im Himmel bis hin zu den schlimmsten Teufeln in der
Hölle. Sie sorgen dafür, dass Strafe und Belohnung nicht vergessen gehen
– jetzt nicht und bis in alle Ewigkeit nicht. In unserer Welt hat jeder
seinen Platz und es hat einen Platz für jeden – auch für dich. Sieh
diese Bücher: das Wissen der Altvorderen, die Gesetze und Tafeln unserer
Ahnen. Es ist unser Erbe. Lerne soviel du kannst, arbeite hart und
erhebe dein Haupt. Steige auf! Werde ein echtes Mitglied unserer stolzen
Gesellschaft!“
Die Chaos Priester sagen: „Das Leben ist Chaos. Unkraut wächst
im Feld. Der Obstgarten verwaldet. Die Küste wird ins Meer gespült. Das
Chaos sind die tiefen Muster dieser Welt. Die Wolken gleiten jede für
sich im stillen Tanz über den Himmel. Der Fluss fliesst in tausend
Windungen zum Meer. Die Elfen leben in den Bäumen, ohne sie zu fällen
und zu töten, sie in Bretter zu zersägen und diese dann morsch werden
und faulen sehen zu lassen. Nein, die Elfen beobachten die Muster, nach
denen die Bäume wachsen, formen sie langsam, leben mit ihnen. Der Baum
lebt. Der Elf lebt. Die Ordnung ist die Hybris zu glauben, dass man der
Welt seinen Willen aufzwingen kann. Sie verdammt Mann, Frau und Kind zum
Joch. Chaos ist nicht das Niederbrennen der Städte, sondern die
Einsicht, dass es eine Dummheit war, sie überhaupt zu bauen. Cha- os ist
nicht Gesetzlosigkeit, sondern die Einsicht, dass Menschen, wie Bäume,
eine eigene Art zu leben haben. Wer Gesetze aufstellt, ohne dies zu
bedenken, heisst Menschen töten und sie in Bretterkis- ten begraben.
Komm mit! Ich weiss nicht wohin wir gehen, aber wir werden auf dem Weg
so manches lernen.“
Wer sich aus diesem kosmischen Kampf heraushalten will, bekennt sich zur
Neutralität. Es gibt keine Priester der Neutralität.
Dazu hat es noch folgende Liste, welche natürlich einen Zusammenhang mit
der gestern diskutierten Kosmologie
hat.
Charaktere können sich einen auch einen Schutzpatron aussuchen.
Orcus, Herr über die Untoten, lässt Tote wieder auferstehen
Ishtar, Eifersucht und amour fou, Krieg, Abstieg in die
Unterwelt auf der Suche nach dem Liebsten
Nergal, Rache, Ungeziefer, Ratten und Seuchen, Herr der
Unterwelt
Freya, Ernte, Kreislauf des Lebens, Wölfe, Wildnis und freie
Liebe
Marduk, Kampf gegen die Monster, Kriegsfürst, Herrschaft
Mitra, Feuer, Ehrlichkeit, Verträge und Schwüre
Set, Schläue, Heimlichkeit und Mörder
Hekate, Magie, Hexen, Wegkreuzungen
Wie man auch sieht, ist die Liste nicht immer gleich. 😁
Aber eigentlich kann die Gesinnung weg. Wenn auf dem
Charakterblatt steht: “chaotisch”, dann frage ich mich, was das
bedeutet. Und wenn ich darauf eine Antwort habe, dann frage ich mich,
warum das nicht gleich da stand.
Wenn es nur darum geht, zwei Seiten in einem grossen Spiel zu benennen,
ist man besser spezifisch. Man könnte Gondor, Mordor oder Angmar
schreiben. Oder Orks, Elfen, Zwerge und Menschen. Oder Ostblock,
Westblock und Unabhängige. So könnte man sich die ganze Amateurethik
sparen. Was heisst rechtschaffen gut? Rechtschaffen böse? Ja was genau?
Eine ernste dazu ist mir zu langweilig. Nennt es Militärdiktatur. Nennt
es Stasi. Nennt es Geheimpolizei. K&K unter den Habsburgern oder
Nordkorea heute, all diese Alternativen sind bessere Worte, viel
reicher, vielschichtiger, bildungswürdiger.
Selbst die Planescapephilosophen mit Knüppeln sind cooler als die
Neunfeldergesinnung! Andere Worte sind gefragt, angepasst an die
Spielwelt. Wie heissen denn die kosmischen Seiten? Oder wie heissen die
Allianzen im grossen Krieg? Was gibt es für Zwischentöne? Wie steht es
mit Diplomatie und Vermittlung zwischen den unterschiedlichen Polen? All
dies und vieles mehr ist cool. Ich schimpfe nur auf die flache Wortwahl
der Neunfeldergesinnung.
Was meiner Meinung ebenfalls keinen Wert hat, sind Gesinnungen, die
einmal gewählt werden und dann einen Einfluss auf Schutzzauber haben,
oder auf die Verwendungsmöglichkeit dieser oder jener magischen Waffe.
Wie viel davon verlangt interessante Entscheidungen? Falls es keine
Entscheidungen abverlangt, dann bleiben mir nur die spezifischen Regeln
der Welt, die Klassen, die Reaktionswürfen, die Sprachen der heiligen
Texte, die Dialekte des Untergrunds, und so weiter. Doch das gibt es ja
alles auch ohne Gesinnung!
Von dem her: Gesinnung bietet keinen Mehrwert.
Nur das Gesäusel der Priester der Ordnung und der Priester des Chaos
gefällt mir, als eine Beschreibung der Konflikte, die ich gerne
anspiele: Zeit für Unsterbliche, Bauwerke und die Natur, Freiheit und
Kooperation, das sind die Themen, die ich selber aus Ordnung und Chaos
herauslese. Und dieses mehr an Worten macht für mich den Unterschied
aus. Wenn die Gesinnung nur ein oder zwei Worte sind, dann ist das
langweilig. Mehr Worte braucht das Land.
Before airplanes even reach the runway, pilots must file a plan to
inform air traffic controllers where they’re going and the path they are
going to take. When planes are in the air, however, that plan often
changes. From turbulence causing passenger discomfort and additional
fuel use to unexpected weather patterns blocking the original path,
[…]
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p><img src="https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/raspberry-pi-cm4-clone.jpg" width="700" height="auto" class="insert-image" alt="Raspberry Pi CM4 Clones stacked up" /></p>
I’m in the unique position of owning a collection of Raspberry Pi
Compute Modules 4 (CM4).
I also own at least one of every production CM4 clone in existence.
This sets up a quandary: if I have the real thing, what
motivation do I have to care about the clones?
There are
hundreds of
CM4 carrier boards that do everything from restoring retro game
consoles to monitoring remote oil rigs in highly-explosive environments.
Since launch, the CM4 has been difficult—and since early 2021,
impossible—to acquire. The supply constraints are well
documented, and I’m sure a few comments will lament the situation. But
the CM4 is trickling back to
‘in stock’ at many suppliers (about how the Pi 4 was a couple months
ago).
The OpenAI Drama’s Season One is over. Now it’s time to go back to
work or, better yet, spend time with our families over the long
Thanksgiving weekend, instead of binging on every rumor, nuance, and
hiccup. i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days
has been in service of keeping …
Inspiring Students with Ham Radio, Other Educational Programs As an
orbiting microgravity laboratory, the International Space Station hosts
experiments from almost every scientific field. It also is home to
educational programs to encourage young people worldwide to study
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). These programs
aim to inspire the next generation of space scientists […]
date: 2023-11-22, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Thinking about WordPress this morning, APIs and feeds.
This
last year I’ve caught up with WordPress, have been asking questions, and
one of the best thing about
my work with
Automattic is that the doors have been open. I have great teachers
who are encouraging me, and of course are experts in and proud of
WordPress, and as a result I think
FeedLand and
WordPress are going to work
together in some very nice ways. Getting pretty close on some of it.
A year ago I didn’t even know that WordPress still had APIs. At some
point the code I had that worked with WordPress via the
MetaWeblog API broke, and I
assumed that it was the end of the line, and took the feature out of my
linkblogging tool. But I was wrong. And not only that there was
Calypso, a modern
REST interface, that works in the same model I use for FeedLand and
Drummer. It’s all there. I love it.
All kinds of integrations will be possible.
Getting FeedLand to work in the new environment has been a step by step
process. It was built to run on a
Digital Ocean server, with a
file system. I’ve converted now all the pieces we needed, and it seems
finally to run smoothly.
The
IET Honours the Secure 5G Platform with its Communications and IT
Award
date: 2023-11-22, from: Lime Microsystems news
The Secure 5G Platform, a project by Lime, Slipstream Engineering
Design, Arqit, and the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult, has
been awarded at the IET Excellence and Innovation Awards 2023.
date: 2023-11-22, updated: 2023-11-22, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Signal has had the ability to manually authenticate another account for
years. iMessage is
getting
it:
The feature is called Contact Key Verification, and it does just what
its name says: it lets you add a manual verification step in an iMessage
conversation to confirm that the other person is who their device says
they are. (SMS conversations lack any reliable method for
verification—sorry, green-bubble friends.) Instead of relying on Apple
to verify the other person’s identity using information stored securely
on Apple’s servers, you and the other party read a short verification
code to each other, either in person or on a phone call. Once you’ve
validated the conversation, your devices maintain a chain of trust in
which neither you nor the other person has given any private encryption
information to each other or Apple. If anything changes in the
encryption keys each of you verified, the Messages app will notice and
provide an alert or warning…
(I ran iwconfig to confirm that this is my wireless
interface.)
The important part is the IP Number and the netmask. The output above
basically means that my network uses the numbers 192.168.178.0 to
192.168.178.255. Or in CIDR notation: 192.168.178.0/24.
As a note to my future self: CIDR notation indicates the number of bits
set in the netmask. There are four bytes in the netmask, each having 8
bits. The first three bytes of the netmask listed are 255, so there are
three bytes with all bits set. The last byte is 0, so no bits are set.
Thus, the first 3×8=24 bits are set, explaining the /24
part. The part in front of the slash are the remaining bytes. In this
case three bytes with all bits set means that I can use the three bytes
of my own address: 192.168.178.48 → 192.168.178.0.
So now I’m ready to run nmap:
alex@melanobombus ~> sudo nmap -sP 192.168.178.0/24
Starting Nmap 7.93 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2023-11-22 10:33 CET
Nmap scan report for fritz.box (192.168.178.1)
Host is up (0.0033s latency).
MAC Address: 38:10:D5:5D:4D:D1 (AVM Audiovisuelles Marketing und Computersysteme GmbH)
Nmap scan report for Nerd-Cave.fritz.box (192.168.178.26)
Host is up (0.041s latency).
MAC Address: C4:67:B5:08:42:2E (Libratone A/S)
Nmap scan report for Thoracobombus.fritz.box (192.168.178.34)
Host is up (0.037s latency).
MAC Address: 62:7D:AE:7F:D7:19 (Unknown)
Nmap scan report for melanobombus.fritz.box (192.168.178.48)
Host is up.
Nmap done: 256 IP addresses (4 hosts up) scanned in 2.75 seconds
So… which one is it? .1 is the router. .26 is
the speaker playing the music (the wireless network is useless since
it’s getting the audio signal via a cable from the Raspberry Pi).
.34 is the iPad. .48 is the laptop, as we
established at the very beginning.
In short, it seems as if the Raspberry Pi is no longer online. 💩
Perhaps I should switch it out for the Raspberry 4 one of these days.
Then again, let’s see what the router says? Using the web interface:
Name
Connection
IP address
Properties
PC-192-168-179-29
WLAN
192.168.179.29
5 GHz, 650 / 650 Mbit/s
melanobombus
WLAN
192.168.178.48
2,4 GHz, 280 / 300 Mbit/s
raspberrypi
WLAN
192.168.178.47
2,4 GHz, 72 / 29 Mbit/s
Nerd Cave
WLAN
192.168.178.26
2,4 GHz, 53 / 39 Mbit/s
Thoracobombus
WLAN
192.168.178.34
5 GHz, 780 / 702 Mbit/s
Uhm, hello .47??
alex@melanobombus ~> ping 192.168.178.47
PING 192.168.178.47 (192.168.178.47) 56(84) bytes of data.
From 192.168.178.48 icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable
From 192.168.178.48 icmp_seq=2 Destination Host Unreachable
From 192.168.178.48 icmp_seq=3 Destination Host Unreachable
^C
--- 192.168.178.47 ping statistics ---
6 packets transmitted, 0 received, +3 errors, 100% packet loss, time 5097ms
Mit der Kosmologie halte ich es wie mit der
Geschichte. Dort hatte ich gesagt:
Die Geschichte ist nur insofern relevant, als sie als Inspiration für
alte Ruinen und magische Gegenstände dient, auf Buchtiteln und
Inschriften erwähnt wird. Ein genauer Zeitstrahl ist nicht wichtig,
ausser man ist Gelehrter statt Abenteurer.
Bei der Kosmologie sind mir die Portal zu anderen Welten, die Monster
aus diesen Welten und die davon inspirierten Zaubersprüche wichtig. Und
die Götter und Dämonen bestimmen natürlich das Aussehen der Tempel und
das Auftreten der Priesterschaft und ihre Zaubersprüche. Von dem her ist
mir klar, dass es eine Welt des Feuers und eine Welt des Eises geben
muss. Und eine Welt der Dunkelheit. Und so weiter.
Weil ich Planescape zwar in der Theorie super finde, es aber in der
Praxis aber nicht ganz so toll war, habe ich mich entschieden, weniger
Welten neben der normalen Spielwelt zu haben: die nordische Kosmologie
hat knapp unter zehn Welten, man kennt sie aus Sagen (das
Niebelungenlied, der Ring Zyklus von Wagner, die Marvel Universen, The
Wizard Knight von Gene Wolfe) und so hat man sofort ein paar Bilder zur
Hand, wenn man diese Welten anspielt.
Das Hauptproblem bei der Verwendung der nordischen Kosmologie ist der
braune Sumpf, der sich davon angezogen fühlt… So oder so ähnlich hat
@settembrini das
mal ausgedrückt. Deswegen hat Alrik ja
eine andere
Kosmologie. Dort war ja auch zu brücksichtigen, dass die
“Dimensionen” zu den Zaubersprüchen und Monstern von Alrik passen müssen
– genau so wie “meine” Kosmologie ja auch zu “meinen” Zaubersprüchen und
Monstern passen muss.
Im Horte Traktat sieht das dann etwa so
aus wie unten aufgeführt.
Kosmologie
Es heisst, es gäbe neun Welten, doch nur acht davon sind allgemein
bekannt:
Asgard, die Stadt der Götter: blauer Himmel, Sonnenschein,
ewiger Mittag, goldene Hallen, eine Insel in der Astralsee, eine
Regenbogenbrücke, welche den Göttern Zutritt zu den anderen Welten
erlaubt
Alfheim, das Reich der Elfen: blauer Himmel, ewig goldenes
Licht, riesige Bäume, glitzernde Städte, farbige Blumen und wilde Tiere
Midgard, das Reich der Menschen: blauer Himmel, rote
Sonnenuntergänge, Berge, Wälder, Ebenen, Wüsten, Flüsse, Seen, Meere –
die Welt, die wir kennen
Myrkheim, das Reich der Zwerge: dunkle Höhlen, Feuerschalen,
Minen, Goblins, Molche, Spinnen, Pilze, giftige Dämpfe, tiefen Spalten
Jötunheim, das Reich der Riesen: ewige Nacht, strahlender
Vollmond, Wolken, Schatten, Gletscher, Berge, gefrorene Flüsse, Packeis
und ein Ozean voller Eisberge
Vanaheim, das Reich der alten Götter: roter Himmel, blaue
Sonnenuntergänge, Rostwüsten und tief eingeschnitte, grüne Täler
Niflheim, das Reich der Trolle: grauer Himmel, Nebel, Schnee
und finstere Nadelwälder, Stille, Eulen, Wölfe, Schrate
Muspelheim, das Reich der Salamander: schwarzer Himmel, roter
Dunst, Lavaflüsse, Ascheregen, Vulkanausbrüche und ein Meer des Feuers
Es lohnt sich nicht, zu viel Aufwand in die Listen der Götter und
Dämonen zu stecken. Bei den Göttern lässt man sich von Wikipedia
inspirieren und beginnt mit ein paar Namen, beispielsweise die folgende
Mischung aus nordischen, mesopotamischen und ägyptischen Göttern.
Hekate, die Göttin der Magie und der Wegscheiden
Hel, die Göttin der Unterwelt, der Alten und Schwachen
Ishtar, die Göttin der Liebe, Leidenschaft und Kriege
Mitra, die Göttin der Schwüre, Flammen und der Rechtsprechung
Odin, der Gott der Runen, Weissagungen und Raben
Orcus, der Gott der Untoten, der List und der Verstellung
Pazuzu, der Gott der Krankheiten und der Versprechungen
Ra, der Gott der Sonne, der Ordnung und der Gerechtigkeit
Set, der Gott des Chaos, der Stürme, der Umstürze
Thoth, der Gott der Bücher, Bibliotheken und des Wissens
Tsathoggua, der Gott der Amphibien und der Faulheit
Viel wichtiger als die Götter und ihre genauen Aufgaben sind die Tempel
und Priesterschaften, ihre Intriguen, Allianzen, Feindschaften, und die
daraus entstehenden Aufträge und Verwicklungen. So entsteht Abenteuer.
In allen Siedlungen gibt es 1W6+1 Tempel, mit je 1W10
Priester-Magierinnen und Magiern. Die Tempelvorsteherin oder der
Tempelvorsteher hat Stufe 1W4+1W6 (2–10). Diese Stufe bestimmt die
Rangordnung der Tempel. Ihre Zaubersprüche haben einen thematischen
Bezug zur verehrten Gottheit; die anderen Magierinnen und Magiern des
Tempels haben Stufe 1 und einen Zauberspruch des 1. Zirkels aus der
gleichen Liste.
Massive Scoop from The Information: 👉Sam and Greg gave up their
board seats 👉Sam agreed to an internal investigation This is
inconsistent with all narratives about “cloddish” or self-interested
boards, and suggests that something real happened.
There’s a flaw in the design of our social networks. The idea that
there are “conversations” when actually many of the replies you get are
spam. People trying to attach their name to something that they hope
gets them attention and followers. So when someone addresses something
to you it can be confusing, because they aren’t actually talking to you,
they’re talking to the imagined thousands of people over your shoulder
looking for some new tweeter or tooter or threader to adore. When it’s
actually mostly people looking for places to hang their own spam to
catch other people’s attention and followers. Is there anything actually
going on there? Sadly, no.
Top
5 reasons why OpenAI was probably never really worth $86 billion
date: 2023-11-22, from: Gary Marcus blog
The real value was always the people, not the IP, not the data, not
the customer list, not the infrastructure. Elon Musk’s Grok replicated
much (not all) of what OpenAI had done in a few months; Kai-Fu Lee’s new
company similarly was able to replicate a lot in less than a year.
Others may have as well. As a famous essay apparently from Google
said,
date: 2023-11-22, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
A hierarchy of nonsense. But it’s the thought that counts. ❤️
A creative diagram representing a technology stack as a building with
multiple floors. At the bottom floor, label it ‘TCP’. The next floor
above should be labeled ‘HTTP’. Above that, have a larger floor labeled
‘RSS’, with smaller adjacent floors labeled ‘Atom’ and ‘ActivityPub’.
The top two floors should be labeled ‘Textcasting’ and ‘Artcasting’
respectively. Surrounding the building, depict human-style animals like
dogs, bears, owls, and hamsters, all dressed in business attire. Each of
these characters should be holding signs with the names of tech
companies like Google, Amazon, Tesla, and Salesforce.com. The diagram
should illustrate the hierarchy and importance of each technology layer
in the stack, with a whimsical and engaging representation.
date: 2023-11-22, from: John Naughton’s online diary
A president comes home JFK’s motorcade, driving down Shop Street in
Galway, 29 June, 1963. Quote of the Day “It was almost impossible to
believe that he was anything but a down-at-heel actor resting between
engagements at the decrepit theatres …
Continue
reading →
Even
After Freaky Friday, Microsoft is Still the AI King
date: 2023-11-22, from: Om Malik blog
Why is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella investing so much time and effort
in unraveling the OpenAI mess? It can’t be the prospect of losing a $13
billion investment— peanuts for a company with a market capitalization
of nearly $3 trillion. Here’s my analysis of why he’s working
overtime.
Jason Scott posted the source code for all the Infocom games in 2019.
This was pretty awesome. Everybody who is interested in that stuff
cheered, and now it’s part of the common knowledge of Infocom. If you’re
researching the history of those games, or want to study their design,
you can dig in. So the game source was big news. Infocom’s interpreter
source, however, remained obscure. This was the game-playing software
for each platform: the Apple 2 interpreter, the Commodore 64
interpreter, and so on. A particular Infocom game release (“Zork 3 for
the C64”, say) was a floppy containing the C64 interpreter and the
Zork-3 game file. Boot the floppy, the interpreter starts up; it loads
the game data and the game begins. The code for the interpreter,
however, was never released as open source – until now. Andrew Plotkin
posted all of the code on Github, followed later by an additional code
dump by David Fillmore.
Hacking the
Canon imageCLASS MF742Cdw/MF743Cdw (again)
date: 2023-11-22, from: OS News
There has been quite a bit of documentation about exploiting the
CANON Printer firmware in the past. For some more background information
I suggest reading these posts by SYNACKTIV, doar-e and DEVCORE. I highly
recommend reading all of it if you want to learn more about hacking
(CANON) Printers. The TL;DR is: We’re dealing with a Custom RTOS called
DRYOS engineered by CANON that doesn’t ship with any modern mitigations
like W^X or ASLR. That means that after getting a bit acquainted with
this alien RTOS it is relatively easy to write (reliable) exploits for
it. Having a custom operating system doesn’t mean it’s more secure than
popular solutions.
EE Journal reports: National Instruments (NI) recently released a new
version of its LabView test automation programming environment for the
latest Apple Macintosh computers based on the Arm-based Apple M1 CPU/GPU
SoC. At the same time, NI let its customers know that this release would
be the last one for Apple Macintosh computers, sending a shock through
some portion of the company’s customer base. LabView’s importance to
test and measurement cannot be overstated. It was the first graphical
programming language designed exclusively for test systems. The language
has been continually expanded and improved for nearly 40 years and
features more than 7000 software drivers for instruments from many
vendors as well as support for custom, FPGA-based instruments. LabView
supports many instrument interfaces starting with IEEE-488 and extending
to MXI, PXI, USB, Ethernet, and probably a few more interfaces that
don’t immediately come to mind. It’s a shock to many and will likely
punish higher education students and a chunk of the scientific and
research segment which is still Mac dominant.
ChatGPT was overloaded earlier this evening. I wrote: “I’m losing my
shit here. I feel as lost without it as I would have felt last year
without Google. Anyway here’s the question I need answered. ‘working in
javascript in the browser, a question about using localstorage. are
there any rules about how much storage you can use? would 10MB be too
much? 50MB?’” Believe it or not my friend ChatGPT will have some advice
about that and it’ll be pretty good. You can’t find that through a
search engine, btw, which is why OpenAI is so important.
As humans, we’re surrounded by objects. We pay very little attention to
the vast majority of them but they’re there, they’re all around us.
Dieter Rams famously said that “Good design is as little design as
possible” and he’s not wrong. Good design is design that does its
job without getting in your way. But good design can—and sometimes
should—also stand out because good design is the embodiment of passion,
of caring for a craft, of loving the process.
And that’s precisely why I love everything
Craig
Mod does. I think I first stumbled on his work almost a decade ago
at this point and what really caught my attention was the love for the
process. From the newsletters to the essays to the books, everything is
deliberate and you can just see that he just cares. The feeling I get is
that there’s almost a sense of responsibility when putting something out
into the world and that’s something I can relate to.
Back in late 2016 I backed the
Koya
Bound on Kickstarter and got my signed and numbered (513) copy.
Keeping the dust away from the cover is hard
I loved it. I still love it. I have to admit that what Craig makes lives
at the intersection of way too many things I personally love and am
passionate about: photography, nature, Japan and its culture, and walks.
I’m also a sucker for signed books and limited editions which is why in
2020 I got my copy—number 429—of
Kissa
by Kissa.
I remember finishing the book while sitting under a tree
Kissa is, by far, one of my favorite books. And when I say book I mean
both in terms of content and in terms of the actual book. The cover, the
materials, the print, the typeface, the size, the layout. I love
everything about the book and I am so happy I got my first edition.
Those two books, and everything else Craig does, are the reasons why it
took me literally 1 minute from receiving the email to hitting the buy
button and get a signed copy of his new book,
Things
Become Other Things.
Picture courtesy of Craig Mod
In Craig’s words:
“Things Become Other Things (TBOT)” is a book chronicling a decade of
walking central Japan’s Kii Peninsula and its Kumano Kodō paths. I’ve
walked thousands of kilometers and talked with hundreds of people. This
is a book about farmers and fishermen and kissa owners and adopted inn
proprietors, about okonomiyaki ladies, whispering priests, and
foul-mouthed little kids. It’s about the loss of industry — lumber,
fishing — and what it does to a place. It’s about depopulation and aging
populations. It’s a reflection on why I emigrated to Japan some 23 years
ago. And it’s a remembrance of the life of one lost friend.
Mostly, it’s a book celebrating grace, and documents my searching for
archetypes in landscapes and people — archetypes for how grace can and
should infuse everything, even things coming to an end. Even things
becoming other things.
I’m aware it’s probably silly, but I want more beautiful objects in this
world. Objects made with love, with care. So thank you Craig for making
these books and for caring so much about what you do.
Issues
with Legacy 1Password 6 and 7 from Mac App Store
date: 2023-11-21, from: TidBITS blog
If you’re using 1Password 6 or 1Password 7 from the Mac App Store and
receive an error message about the 1Password app being damaged,
1Password has some possible solutions.
This article is for students grades 5-8. Artemis is NASA’s new lunar
exploration program, which includes sending the first woman and first
person of color on the Moon. Through the Artemis missions, NASA will use
new technology to study the Moon in new and better ways, and prepare for
human missions to Mars. Why Is […]
This article is for students grades K-4. Artemis is a new NASA
program to explore the Moon. These missions will land the first woman
and first person of color on the Moon. With the Artemis program, NASA
will study the Moon in new and better ways. Why Is This Program Called
Artemis? The first astronauts […]
NASA Langley Research Group The research group supporting the SaSa
program includes: Instrumentation Below is a snapshot of instruments
and tools Langley uses to support SaSa student projects and the summer
airborne science campaigns. More information can be found on the NASA
Langley Aerosol Research Group (LARGE) Instruments page. NASA Goddard
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center […]
I
added an item to the
artcasting
test feed, and also added code in FeedLand to
display
them. On an initial browse
around other feeds and collections, it seems a few are using the
enclosure for images in artful ways. Some of it is spammy, of course.
Should’ve seen that coming. Heh. But we limit the vertical space a feed
item gets in the timeline, you can see the whole thing by clicking on
it, and clicking again after having a look. If you want to create a
genuine art feed, then I want to make it look great in FeedLand. And
keep the more rude feeds manageable. If you’re playing around with
artcasting, let me know, I’d like to see how others are doing, and share
interesting stuff with people who follow this feed.
This article is for students grades 5-8 A black hole is a region in
space where the pulling force of gravity is so strong that light is not
able to escape. The strong gravity occurs because matter has been
pressed into a tiny space. This compression can take place at the end of
a star’s […]
This article is for students grades K-4. A black hole is a place in
space where gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out. The
gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space.
This can happen when a star is dying. Because no light can get […]
NASA
Selects 11 Space Biology Research Projects to Inform Biological Research
During Future Lunar Exploration Missions
date: 2023-11-21, from: NASA breaking news
NASA announces the award of eleven grants or cooperative agreements
for exciting new Space Biology research that will advance NASA’s
understanding of how exposure to lunar dust/regolith impact both plant
and animal systems. As human exploration prepares to go beyond Earth
Orbit, Space Biology is advancing its research priorities towards work
that will enable organisms […]
Connect your sci-fi fandom and learn about how NASA explores the
unknown in space for all humanity! Join experts and engagement team
members from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley
at FAN EXPO San Francisco 2023. Visit the exhibit, panels, and more to
hear about NASA’s plans for human exploration at the Moon and […]
In part two of my podcast with Maykel Loomans, we discussed my
creative process and the reasons behind my approach to photography. We
talked about some of the challenges we all encounter in the creative
process and what he looks for when making photographs. I was especially
inspired by Om’s approach to thinking about creative …
My apps (DropDMG, EagleFiler, SpamSieve) are on sale for Black Friday
and Cyber Monday, and here are some other good deals that I found: Apps:
Adobe Affinity Akismet AllTrails Apparent Software Appfigures Astro CYME
Corel Curio Dada Mail Deckset (INDIE-APP-SALES) DisplayBuddy
(INDIEAPPSALES) DEVONtechnologies DevUtils Drafts Ducklet DxO Ergonis
Flexibits Gaia GPS Gentlemen Coders Gitonium GlanceCam […]
The SEC has a long history of refusing to approve spot Bitcoin ETFs, on
the reasonable basis that the Bitcoin market was heavily manipulated.
Crypto-skeptics like
Bitfinex’ed
and
Davd
Gerard have been pointing out obvious instances of manipulation for
many years, and there is a considerable academic literature
demonstrating manipulation, such as
Crypto Wash
Trading by Lin William Cong et al, which
demonstrates:
abnormal first-significant-digit distributions, size rounding, and
transaction tail distributions on unregulated exchanges reveal rampant
manipulations unlikely driven by strategy or exchange heterogeneity. We
quantify the wash trading on each unregulated exchange, which averaged
over 70% of the reported volume.
The court’s panel of judges said Grayscale showed that its proposed
bitcoin ETF is “materially similar” to the approved bitcoin futures
ETFs. That’s because the underlying assets— bitcoin and bitcoin futures
- are “closely correlated,” and because the surveillance sharing
agreements with the CME are “identical and should have the same
likelihood of detecting fraudulent or manipulative conduct in the market
for bitcoin.”
With that in mind, the court ruled that the
SEC was “arbitrary and capricious” to reject the filing because it
“never explained why Grayscale owning bitcoins rather than bitcoin
futures affects the CME’s ability to detect fraud.”
The prospect of the SEC approving this ETF and others from, for example,
BlackRock and Fidelity led to something of a buying frenzy in Bitcoin as
shown in the “price” chart, and in headlines such as
Bitcoin
ETF Exuberance Drives Four-Week ‘Nothing for Sale’ Rally:
Bitcoin is climbing for a fourth consecutive week, with the digital
token’s price lingering just below an 18-month high of $38,000, as more
investors bet that US exchange-traded funds that hold the largest
cryptocurrency are on the verge of winning regulatory approval.
Below the fold I look into where this euphoria came from, and why it
might be misplaced There
already are spot Bitcoin ETFs, just not in the USA. I believe the
first
launched in:
February 2021, when the
Purpose
bitcoin ETF launched in Canada. Unlike GBTC, which trades
over-the-counter, Purpose trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange, close to
NAV. At 1%, its management fees are half that of GBTC. Within a month of
trading, Purpose quickly absorbed more than $1
billion worth of assets.
</blockquote>
So why would a US-based Bitcoin ETF be a big deal? The thesis is that by
making it easier for US <strike>investors</strike>gamblers
to put money into BTC it would increase demand and thus the price. This
anticipated flood of retail money would solve the long-standing problem
for cryptocurrency exchanges and whales, the <a
href="https://blog.dshr.org/2022/11/greater-fool-supply-chain-crisis.html"><i>Greater
Fool Supply-Chain Crisis</i></a>. There is a <a
href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-11/ftx-bankruptcy-one-year-later-here-s-how-crypto-has-changed?srnd=cryptocurrencies-v2">shortage
of suckers</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
The number of over-the-counter desks has declined, with mainly the more
conservative ones remaining, according to Tegan Kline, co-founder of
Edge & Node, which developed a crypto project called The Graph.
That, combined with the erosion of leverage, has sapped liquidity.<br
/>
<br />
“Leverage is gone,” Kline said. “A lot of people have pulled money out
of the system or they have money stuck at FTX.”
</blockquote>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container"
style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td
style="text-align: center;"><a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxNdf6HWfgyFgRJKIgFmK4_pdS8Gw6SQW2OOrXyBw0OiJ2Zyj1QHX5ocDC67b52I-PF8m3sbb8zeByxY-43tUx3DLYLIGXzWpyFVdepJs0tZN0W0EcyP4KIriuZxjTlWZHEsN-83Wk2dvozfoEyxRjypNO29T_5zv-rf4jH_ejT_8Wrgp3xreWRltdrCgI/s958/CoinbaseTradingVolume.png"
style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="538"
data-original-width="958" height="113"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxNdf6HWfgyFgRJKIgFmK4_pdS8Gw6SQW2OOrXyBw0OiJ2Zyj1QHX5ocDC67b52I-PF8m3sbb8zeByxY-43tUx3DLYLIGXzWpyFVdepJs0tZN0W0EcyP4KIriuZxjTlWZHEsN-83Wk2dvozfoEyxRjypNO29T_5zv-rf4jH_ejT_8Wrgp3xreWRltdrCgI/w200-h113/CoinbaseTradingVolume.png"
width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td
class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a
href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-11/coinbase-coin-trading-volume-is-likely-lowest-since-before-public-debut">Source</a></td></tr></tbody></table>
The "price" has been soaring, even though the anticipated flood of
retail dollars hasn't yet, and may never, show up. That is the real
problem, as shown in the graph of Coinbase's trading volume. Volume, and
thus liquidity, has collapsed since the heady days of 2021. In <a
href="https://amycastor.com/2023/11/07/coinbase-q3-earnings-regulatory-clarity-is-all-we-need-and-a-miracle-or-two/"><i>Coinbase
Q3 earnings: Regulatory clarity is all we need. And a miracle or
two</i></a>, Amy Castor and David Gerard lay out the recent
history of Coinbase's income from trading fees, which I have
re-formatted into a table.<br />
<br />
<table align="right" border="5" cols="4">
<thead>
<tr><th>Quarter</th><th>Retail<br
/>$M
Institutions $M
Institutions %
Q4 2021
2,185.8
90.8
4.2
Q1 2022
965.8
47.2
4.9
Q2 2022
616.2
39.0
6.3
Q3 2022
346.1
19.8
5.7
Q4 2022
308.8
13.4
4.3
Q1 2023
352.4
22.3
6.3
Q2 2023
310.0
17.1
5.5
Q3 2023
274.5
14.1
5.1
The numbers show three things clearly:
Retail trading fee income has collapsed, down 87% from its peak.
Institutional trading fee income has collapsed 84% from its peak.
Coinbase is wholly dependent upon retail traders, who account for around
95% of its fee income.
Trading volume is the lifeblood of a crypto exchange — and Coinbase’s is
through the floor. The exchange saw $76 billion in total trading volume
in Q3, down from $92 billion in Q2. (They did $547 billion in trading
volume in Q4 2021, their last profitable quarter.)
The problems are exacerbated by the fact that last June the
SEC
sued Coinbase for:
selling unregistered securities and running an exchange, a
broker-dealer, and a clearinghouse as part of the same operation — and
without registering any of these.
If the SEC wins, Coinbase may have to stop trading in any cryptos other
than CFTC-regulated commodity coins such as bitcoin. There isn’t enough
volume in those for Coinbase to live on.
This is why
Coinbase is so insistent on trading blatant unregistered securities —
it’s all they have left for a business model.
JC: … The last iteration that you just touched upon is the hope by
aspects of Wall Street that crypto gets institutionalized because the
one thing that Bitcoin really has — and we’ve pointed this out to our
clients — is ridiculous levels of transaction fees associated with it.
So Coinbase, for example, which is one of our shorts, charges customers
over 4% per round trip trade to transact in a so-called currency.
LP: Why would people be willing to pay that?
JC: Well, exactly. They think the asset price is going to go up. It’s
like a Nasdaq stock, not a currency. So they’ll pay, and Wall Street
wants the fees. The cost structure in crypto is quite high and so the
fees are really high. You need retail investors because institutions
aren’t going to be paying 4% per round trip to buy and sell Bitcoin. Mom
and Pop are, so Wall Street needs to keep the public interested in the
crypto space. The paradox, of course, is that if BlackRock and Vanguard
and whoever do get ETFs, it’s actually going to force fees down, not up,
because ETF fees will be a fraction of the cost of what Coinbase or
Binance charge. It’s like mutual fund fees and stock trading fees:
they’ve all converged to zero.
So, even if there is a flood of retail money into Bitcoin ETFs,
the exchanges’ fee income isn’t going to recover. Chanos’ students share
his
skepticism
about the industry:
LP: Are your Wisconsin students still excited about crypto?
JC: They were much more enthusiastic in 2021, 2020, 2019. There’s
a lot less enthusiasm now in terms of students going to work for a
crypto startup or whatever. I had a number of them in 2020 and 2021 who
said they were going to work in the digital currency or blockchain
space. I don’t hear that as much anymore.
LP: How about
your Yale students?
JC: The last two springs, they’ve
been skeptical. During the spring semester of 2022, Bankman-Fried’s
now-infamous interview with Bloomberg dropped about an hour before my
class started. I ran to the audiovisual department to see if I could get
the interview up on our screen because to me it was such a bombshell.
This was where Bankman-Fried basically called the crypto ecosystem a
giant Ponzi scheme. I told the class it was very rare to get an industry
leader telling you that his industry is a Ponzi scheme. That was seven
months before the collapse.
Craig Murray, who estimates he made almost $200,000 in the market, says
he escaped losing everything to FTX by a hair after friends in the
industry heard whispers about its imminent collapse. By that point, the
23-year-old — who lives in New York and recently dropped out of
Vanderbilt University — had made up his mind.
“That kind of
put me over the edge,” Murray said. “I just decided it wasn’t worth it.
Why would I have my money in this space when there’s a chance that one
day it could just all go away?”
Another sign that retail
investing in crypto isn’t returning to previous levels can be seen in
weekday versus weekend volumes, with the presumption that the typical
person trading on a weekend is a day trader.
“It’s not
unusual nowadays to see weekday trading volume average 50% higher values
than weekend trading volume, whereas in the past this ratio was almost
1:1,” said Fredrick Collins, chief executive and founder of crypto data
platform Velo Data.
So it seems unlikely that there will be a huge flood of retail dollars
into the market. Even if there were, they would go into Bitcoin ETFs,
which would present the exchanges with two big problems:
much less retail trading, because it would migrate to ETFs for low fees
and the security of dealing with institutions like BlackRock,
and a much higher proportion of very low fee institutional trading.
It seems likely that even if the cryptosphere’s hopes for ETFs
materialize the exchanges will end up in an even worse position than
they now are.
I’m using the following shortcode (saved as gallery.html) in Hugo to
generate a gallery containing both video and photos. Comments in the
code. May it be helpful for you. It comes (of course) with no support.
The cover photo handling is done by my Hugo theme (terminal) btw. <!–
All img/*.{webm,ogv} video files are taken and simularly
the caption file is used to generate a video control. –>
{{- $videos := .
(Ich rede natürlich von der Welt im Rollenspiel und vom meinen
Horte Traktat im besonderen.)
Die Geschichte ist nur insofern relevant, als sie als Inspiration für
alte Ruinen und magische Gegenstände dient, auf Buchtiteln und
Inschriften erwähnt wird. Ein genauer Zeitstrahl ist nicht wichtig,
ausser man ist Gelehrter statt Abenteurer.
Die Kriege liefern beispielsweise die “Erklärung” für gewisse
magische Waffen – und umgekehrt
verleihen die Zusätze bei den magischen Waffen der Welt etwas Tiefe. Das
ist, wie wenn man von Geschichte keine Ahnung hat und zum ersten Mal von
den Kriegen unserer Welt hört.
Kriege der Vergangenheit
Drachenkriege, als Elfen gegen Drachen gekämpft haben; so
sollen die Elfen die erste Magie gelernt haben
Echsenkriege oder Die Dunklen Tage, als gegen
Schlangenmenschen und Nagas aus Myrkheim gekämpft wurde; hier wurden die
Zugänge zu den anderen Welten entdeckt
Befreiungskriege, als gegen die Echsenmensche und ihre Magie
gekämpft wurde; hier ist die Zivilisation der Echsenmenschen
untergegangen
Waldkriege, als Elfen und Baumhirten gegen Maschinenbau und
Stahl gekämpft haben; das ist der Grund, warum die grossen Maschinen
nicht mehr funktionieren und das Wissen um die Mechanik verloren
gegangen ist
Philosophenkriege, als Sprengstoff und Maschinen gegen
Magieschulen und Tempelherrschaft gekämpft haben; deswegen gibt es nun
überall Magie und Aberglauben, Götteranbetung und Wunder
Vampirkriege, als gegen Vampire aus Niflheim gekämpft wurde;
deswegen ist klar, dass die Vampire bis ans Ender der Zeit die Feinde
der Menschheit sind
Winterkriege oder Das Jahr ohne Sommer, als gegen
Frostriesen und Eiswölfe gekämpft wurde; deswegen ist der Übergang in
die Welt von Eis und Schnee noch so oft möglich
Befreiungskriege, Die Landnahme, Der
Aufstand, Die Schweinekriege und andere Kriege der Orks;
dies erklärt die grosse Feindschaft zwischen Menschen und Orks, da die
Missverständnisse, Ungerechtigkeiten und Gräueltaten seit Jahrhunderten
nicht enden wollen
Reiche der Nekromantie
Dies sind die Hexen und Nekromanten, die zur Unsterblichkeit gefunden
haben und sich dann bekriegt haben. Ihnen ist gemeinsam, dass sie an
Pässen Wachtürme gebaut haben, die durch Zauberei geschützt waren,
flammende Inschriften bezeugen noch immer alte Grenzen und untote
Wächter bewachen noch immer die alten Zugänge.
Alice, Herrin über die Kinder, deren Geist sie knechtete
Childebert, Herr der Schlachtfelder, wo er die Toten wieder
erweckt hat
Constance, Herrin der Zeit, die Freunde und Feinde in gläserne
Särge goss
Galswintha, Herrin von Schlaf und Benebelung, Lähmung und
Unfruchtbarkeit
Gundobad, Herr des Wahnsinns, grosser Expedition, die allesamt
verloren gingen
Gundred, Herrin der Opfer und der Scheiterhaufen, dem Land der
Asche
Herlewin, Herr der Verträge, Seelenkäufer und Teufelsanbeter
Isolda, Herrin der verlorenen Seelen, der hoffnungslosen Liebe
und ewiger Melancholie
Osbert, Herr der eifrigen Jugend, der Irreführung, der Kriege
und der Massaker
Sybilla, Herrin der Prophezeiung, die immer wusste, wo ihre
Feinde waren, und sie dort hat umbringen lassen
date: 2023-11-21, updated: 2023-11-21, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Google’s Threat Analysis Group
announced
a zero-day
against the Zimbra Collaboration email server that has been used against
governments around the world.
TAG has observed four different groups exploiting the same bug to steal
email data, user credentials, and authentication tokens. Most of this
activity occurred after the initial fix became public on Github. To
ensure protection against these types of exploits, TAG urges users and
organizations to keep software fully up-to-date and apply security
updates as soon as they become available.
The vulnerability was discovered in June. It has been patched…
URLs is a dear subject of mine on this blog, as readers might have
noticed. “URL” is this mythical concept of a string that identifies a
resource online and yet there is no established standard for its syntax.
There are instead multiple ones out of which one is on purpose “moving”
so it never actually …
Continue
reading URL parser performance→
Every day is backup day. I use BorgBackup to backup up my laptop to one
of two external disks. One of these is always at the office, so there
are three copies: on my laptop, on a backup disk at home and on a backup
disk at the office. It’s important that those three are never in the
same location.
I do concede, however, that it’s tricky setup.
For my wife, I’ve set up the Mac to backup the laptop and an external
disk with media files to one of two external disks. Again, one of these
is always at the office. So, same deal, except now I’m using TimeMachine
instead of BorgBackup. Somehow, that makes it take a very long time. But
it seems to work.
Still, plugging in backup disks, carrying them to the office, bringing
the other one back, plugging it in again… as you can imagine, we don’t
do this nearly often enough.
So I need a quick way to backup stuff. Like, super quick. Super cheap.
The simplest option I can think of is to use rsync on the local disk
because it has an option to create links for files – and while a link
doesn’t take zero space, it takes a lot less space than making a copy.
So what I wanted was a quick command that I can run in the directory I’m
in and it creates a backup using rsync.
I’ve used the following bash script. Let me know if it can be improved.
#!/usr/bin/bash
d=$(basename $(pwd))
t=$(date --iso-8601)
echo Creating a snapshot of $d in ../$d-$t
rsync --link-dest "../$d" --archive . "../$d-$t/"
That is, if the current directory is /home/alex/src/wiki:
it creates the backup in /home/alex/src/wiki-2023-11-19
(appending today’s date)
from there, the links all point to the original (where the command was
invoked)
When I use ls -l, this is what it looks like:
drwxr-xr-x 67 alex alex 749568 18. Nov 23:56 wiki/
drwxr-xr-x 67 alex alex 548864 17. Okt 23:43 wiki-2023-10-17/
drwxr-xr-x 67 alex alex 548864 19. Okt 22:47 wiki-2023-10-19/
drwxr-xr-x 67 alex alex 552960 30. Okt 13:18 wiki-2023-10-30/
It’s not great, but it works.
For a file that hasn’t changed, you’ll see that ls -l says
there are four links to this file. This is correct: one link for every
directory. The data exists only once, on the disk.
> ls -l w*/2000-03-10_Elendor.md
-rw-r--r-- 4 alex alex 16313 28. Apr 2017 wiki/2000-03-10_Elendor.md
-rw-r--r-- 4 alex alex 16313 28. Apr 2017 wiki-2023-10-17/2000-03-10_Elendor.md
-rw-r--r-- 4 alex alex 16313 28. Apr 2017 wiki-2023-10-19/2000-03-10_Elendor.md
-rw-r--r-- 4 alex alex 16313 28. Apr 2017 wiki-2023-10-30/2000-03-10_Elendor.md
For a file that changes all the time, ls -l shows that
there is just one link for every file, meaning that these files are
distinct. And for a lay person, that is confirmed by the different file
size and last modified timestamp.
> ls -l w*/changes.md
-rw-r--r-- 1 alex alex 1997 17. Okt 16:28 wiki-2023-10-17/changes.md
-rw-r--r-- 1 alex alex 2123 19. Okt 22:36 wiki-2023-10-19/changes.md
-rw-r--r-- 1 alex alex 5847 30. Okt 13:18 wiki-2023-10-30/changes.md
-rw-r--r-- 1 alex alex 4255 18. Nov 23:54 wiki/changes.md
As
@edavies and
@Sandra have pointed
out, this only works if the editing you do always recreates the files
you’re editing (because then these files get a new inode even if their
names stay the same). Examples where this is a problem: database files
are updated in place; some editors allow you to decide how backups are
created. Emacs, for example, has the option
backup-by-copying which is nil by default. When you save a
file, the original is renamed to the backup and a new file is written.
If you set the option, however, the backup is copied first, and then the
original is changed in-place (like a database file, without getting a
new inode). Now you’ve changed the file in all the “cheap backup”
directories, since the links keep pointing to the same inode and that
inode now points to the new file.
Possibly a better solution that uses copies for the first backup and
then future backups link to the old backups (and never to the originals)
would be the following:
#!/usr/bin/bash
d=$(basename $(pwd))
t=$(date --iso-8601)
p=$(find .. -maxdepth 1 -type d -name "$d-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]" -prune | sort | tail -n 1)
if [ -z "$p" ]; then
echo Creating a snapshot of $d in ../$d-$t
rsync --archive . "../$d-$t/"
else
echo Creating a snapshot of $d in ../$d-$t with links into $p
rsync --link-dest "$p" --archive . "../$d-$t/"
fi
Note that now, in case you just need a single backup, you might just as
well just make a copy using your favourite file manager. Not so cheap
any more, eh? 🤨
Evolving
our online courses to help more people be computing educators
date: 2023-11-21, from: Raspberry Pi (.org)
Since launching our free online courses about computing on the edX
platform back in August, we’ve been training course facilitators and
analysing the needs of educators around the world. We want every course
participant to have a great experience learning with us — read on to
find out what we’re doing right now and into…
@enfors recently
wondered about “important aspects of sandboxes that one can iterate over
and add to.”
I’m reminded of the term “Gygaxian Building Blocks”. I think I first
heard this phrase from
@settembrini in
episode
1 of Zock
Bock Radio, a mostly German, sometimes English podcast about
role-playing games. “Gygaxian Building Blocks” are the things one can
add individually to the rules and therefore everybody can participate in
the game as a creator by writing spells, items, monsters, classes, and
so on. These things stand on their own and aren’t usually influenced by
other such blocks. Adding them is easy. Conversely, the core game
without the lists of spells, items, monsters and classes can be
relatively short. It’s a beautiful way of organizing the game.
For a sandbox campaign, the things that have that same quality and which
I’d call my “sandbox campaign building blocks” would be:
powerful people: names, titles and retainers including spells and magic
items
settlements: names, a small number of interesting buildings such as
defensive structures and temples, the number of people ready to fight in
case of a battle
ruins: mostly dungeons, big or small, often just three to five zones
that may or may not map to “rooms” with monsters and treasure
magic schools: these are spell collections by legendary magic users that
facilitate writing up spell selections for other magic-users since I can
select the school they’re from and pick an appropriate subset of spells
(this is what my Spellcasters project is all
about)
secret societies: names, leaders, and then for each settlement figure
out if the secret society has a presence and if so, who the
representative is
gods & demons and their temples: names, themes, and then for each
settlement figure out if there is a shrine or temple and if so, who the
head priest is
monsters: I usually like to focus on a subset that is intelligent, with
settlements and plans of their own, almost always humanoids
legendary items: as a consequence of treasure allocation for the above,
some powerful magic items entered the sandbox and I need them on a
separate list so that there can be rumours and quests pointing players
towards them
permanent portals to other planes: names of these realms, powerful
beings that can be reached (for spells, prayers, summonings…),
environmental effects, rumours and pointing players towards them,
preparing for the high level game
rough events in the past: names of wars, sides, immortal necromancer
kings & queens, but only insofar as they help flesh out locations
and magic items etc. – there is no need for a timeline and years, as far
as I am concerned (trying to imagine what I would know without schools
and books – practically nothing except for “Germans bad because of the
World War” and that’s it, I guess?)
Anyway, I think those are the things I am concerned about when I start a
new campaign. As the campaign progresses, I find it easy to add just
one more thing to one of the lists. 😄
If you have a blog post with a similar topic, let me know and I’ll add a
link!
With today’s game drop, Catalog now lists over 100 Playdate
titles—our curated selection of games has grown beyond our most
ambitious dreams. Here are the games we added this month: 🍺 Root Bear,
a hilarious and quick game where you are the Root Bear serving bears
their root beer, always in search of the Perfect Pour. Made by TEAM
ROOT. 🪀 Yoyozo. Be a space yo-yo, gracefully guided in a cosmic
ballet.
After a few minor delays, FreeBSD 14.0 has officially been released.
The highlights according to the FreeBSD team itself: For more details,
you can dive into the release notes, and if you’re already using FreeBSD
you know exactly how to upgrade.
YouTube
says new 5-second video load delay is supposed to punish ad blockers,
not Firefox users
date: 2023-11-21, from: OS News
Firefox users across the internet say that they are encountering an
“artificial” five-second load time when they try to watch YouTube videos
that exists on Firefox, but not Chrome. Google, meanwhile, told 404
Media that this is all part of its larger effort against ad blockers,
and that it doesn’t have anything to do with Firefox at all. I’m sure it
doesn’t, Google.
While Elementary OS commits to Wayland, the development team of the
Budgie desktop is changing course and will work with the Xfce developers
toward Budgie’s Wayland future. There is general consensus now that the
future of graphical desktops on Linux lies in Wayland rather than X11,
but the path is still not a smooth and easy one. While in Latvia for the
Ubuntu Summit, the Reg FOSS desk met with the developers behind Ubuntu
Budgie, who told us that the Budgie project is charting a new course
toward the brave new Wayland world. It seems that using EFL – the
Enlightenment Foundation Libraries – wasn’t the right choice for Budgie,
and so they’re now exploring working with Xfce on their Wayland efforts,
instead. Considering Enlightenment’s desktop Linux presence is
negligible, at best, joining forces with Xfce so that both Xfce and
Budgie can make progress on Wayland faster seems like the more optimal
choice for the wider desktop Linux community.
Have you attended any of our annual meeting sessions this year? Ah, yes
– there were many in this conference-style event. I, as many of my
colleagues, attended them all because it is so great to connect with our
global community, and hear your thoughts on the developments at
Crossref, and the stories you share.
Let me offer some highlights from the event and a reflection on some
emergent themes of the day. You can browse the recordings and slides
archived on our
Annual Meeting
page.
Ginny Hendricks opened the meeting by reminding everyone about the
research nexus vision, and the work that’s underway to bring us closer
to it. Ginny went on to highlight progress in metadata and relationships
being registered by our members, and mentioned members that have
particularly rich metadata records – with the special joint recognition
for learned societies of South Korea. Participation statistics can be
reviewed in our
Labs Member
Metadata Metrics Tables.
Since 2018 we’ve seen a 512% increase in the number of abstracts
included in the metadata; with Wiley’s recent addition of millions of
abstracts to their records largely contributing to this change. On the
relationships side, in the same period, we’ve noted a staggering 3004%
growth in preprint-to-article links, and we’re pleased to report a
growing number of funding relationships being made available thanks to
more and more funders registering Crossref DOIs for grants.
For those who couldn’t join us at such an early hour, Ed Penz included
some of these highlights in his own strategic update later in the day.
However, he focused on our activity and plans towards fulfilling our
four strategic goals:
To contribute to an environment where the community identifies and
co-creates solutions for broad benefit
To be a sustainable source of complete, open, and global scholarly
metadata and relationships
To be publicly accountable to the Principles of Open Scholarly
Infrastructure (POSI) practices of sustainability, insurance, and
governance
To foster a strong team—because reliable infrastructure needs committed
people who contribute to and realise the vision, and thrive doing it
Speakers from across our global community shared their initiatives
too. Most of these talks have been accompanied by
posters
or abstracts shared on our Community Forum and still available for
preview and discussion:
Making data citations available at scale: The Global Open Data Citation
Corpus by Iratxe Puebla;
“Who Cares?” Defining Citation Style in Scholarly Journals by Vincas
Grigas and Pavla Vizváry;
DOI registration for scholarly blogs by Martin Fenner;
Enhancing Research Connections through Metadata: A Case Study with AGU
and CHORUS by Tara Packer, Kristina Vrouwenvelder, Shelley Stall;
Index Crossref, Integrity, Professional And Institutional Development by
Engjellushe Zenelaj;
Brazilian retractions in the Retraction Watch Database - RWDB by Edilson
Damasio; and
Now that you’ve published, what do you do with Metadata? - by Joann
Fogleson.
In addition to these updates, we’ve heard from:
Izabela Szyprowska (OP, European Commission), Nikolaos Mitrakis (RTD,
European Commission), and Paola Mazzucchi (mEDRA) talked about the
process and rationale of implementing Crossref DOIs for grants at the
European Commission; and
Amanda French from ROR/Crossref about the new ‘ROR / Open Funder
Registry overlap’ tool.
We also assembled a diverse panel and invited the community to discuss
“What we still need to build a robust Research Nexus?”
The discussion ranged from how different parts of our community
currently use existing metadata, to how we can come together to make
improvements, especially in the area of standards and equitability, and
touched on metadata priorities. I’ll highlight some of the threads
below, but it’s certainly worth engaging with the
full
recording of the discussion, and offering your own perspective on
the Community Forum, commenting below.
Having participated in the whole day of talks, I found that a few themes
emerged as popular in the community: data citations, making it easier to
register metadata, making better use of metadata, retractions, and
equity of participation in the research nexus.
Data citations
With the advances in the Crossref API relationships endpoint, Martyn
Rittman demonstrated how we’re now providing more comprehensive support
for data citations. You can follow his demonstration in the
Collab
Notebook he used for the demo and shared for your perusal. He also
mentioned that the developments in this feature of our API will soon
replace the current service provided via the Events API. Feel free to
connect with Martin on the community forum and comment with questions
and suggestions.
As mentioned above, DataCite’s Iratxe Puebla mentioned the Make Data
Count initiative and the leaky pipeline of data citations we’ve got at
the moment in the scholarly literature, obscuring the true picture of
data reuse. This prevents the community from recognising and
incentivising data creation and reuse appropriately. One way of
addressing this is the Global Open Data Citation Corpus. Crossref and
DataCite collaborate closely in connecting and making that data
available.
Linking datasets, as well as software, was reported as part of the AGU
and CHORUS initiative in Enhancing Research Connections through
Metadata.
Data sharing and citing is as much a culture as a technology problem. As
Iratxe Puebla admitted, there are many norms and processes for capturing
and sharing that information,and DataCite is interested to hear about
different use cases. As highlighting data’s relationship with works is a
growing interest for our community, hopefully more understanding and
perhaps even commonality can be built soon.
Making it easier to register metadata
As part of the Demonstrations session, we’ve seen two developments to
support members with registering their metadata more easily.
Crossref’s Lena Stoll shared plans for the new version of the Crossref
Registration Form, the helper tool for manual registration of metadata,
which translates the submission into XML, for inclusion in the Crossref
database. At the moment, the form only accepts grant registrations, but
it will be bolstered before the end of the year to include journal
articles then other content types in time.
Erik Hanson from PKP demonstrated the latest OJS version, commenting on
specific changes made in the new version in response to the key pain
points reported by users of the previous release.
In addition, we’ve heard of two independent projects by Martin Fenner
and Esha Data to enable metadata registration and Crossref DOIs for
scholarly blogs.
Making better use of metadata
Supported by the beginner’s demo of our REST API by Luis Montilla, there
were many voices about opportunities for making good use of Crossref’s
open metadata. Nikolaos Mitrakis of the European Commission talked about
the implementation of Crossref IDs for grants as a step towards tracing
and connecting the grants with not just academic but also societal
outcomes of the awards, and the plans for using those in the evaluation
and steering of their funding programmes.
Joann Fogleson of the American Society of Civil Engineers gave a buzzy
metaphor of publishers’ role in their work with metadata being
comparable with that of a pollinator – collecting the metadata at one
end, then registering, displaying and making it available to different
services, in order to enable a reacher scholarly environment for
discovery.
Many of the major themes have found their way to the discussion of what
is still needed to build a robust network of connections between
scholarly objects, institutions and individuals. One of the ways Ludo
Waltman of CWTS, Leiden University, intends to use our open metadata is
as part of the upcoming open-source version of the Laiden rankings and
he invited the community to contribute and help optimise this project to
provide an alternative to closed and selective databases.
Panellists also spoke of new opportunities in the light of data mining
and machine learning. Ran Dang, Atlantis Press, as a publisher shared a
concern about the standard of metadata across cultures and disciplines,
and the need to digitise past publications – which can then help better
leverage multi-lingual scholarship. Matt Buys of DataCite, pointed out
to the Global Data Citation Corpus they are developing, which leverages
a SciBERT model to pull out data citations, which is brought together
with Crossref/DataCite citation metadata.
Opening the data is essential to enabling its wider use, and here Ludo
gave the example of the fantastic outcome for references metadata, which
has been made open by default for the entire corpus of
Crossref-registred works. He hopes that this can inspire us to make
similar progress in other areas.
A little on a tangent with regards to metadata use, yet speaking of
excellent examples of the community making progress together, Ginny
pointed out ROR, how this
is becoming a new standard for solving a longstanding problem of
standardising affiliations metadata.
Retractions
Perhaps not entirely surprising, given the recent
acquisition
of the Retraction Watch database by Crossref and making the data
openly available, retractions featured in a few different talks at the
meeting. First, Lena Stoll and Martin Eve from Crossref, shared how that
data can be accessed – that is as the csv file from
https://api.labs.crossref.org/data/retractionwatch?[your-email@here](add
your email as indicated), and the Crossref Labs API also displays
information about retractions in the /works/ route when metadata is
available. There are plans for incorporating this information with our
REST API in the future.
Ed and Ginny have shown stats for increases in retraction metadata
registered in Crossmark but commented on limited participation in
Crossmark overall. Recording retraction information in this way is still
important, alongside the Retraction Watch data, this allows for multiple
assertions of that information, and increases confidence in its
accuracy. We’re preparing to consult with the community at large about
the future direction of the Crossmark service, to make it easier to
implement and more useful for the readers.
Finally, Edilson Damasio from State University of Maringá-UEM, Brazil,
and a long-time Crossref Ambassador, presented the analysis of Brazilian
records in the Retraction Watch data, and he promises further analysis
to come, comparing the situation across geographies.
Equity of participation in the research nexus
Amanda Bartell opened the research nexus discussion with a reminder of
what that vision entails and pointing out commonality of goals in the
community – “Like others, Crossref has a vision of a rich and reusable
open network of relationships connecting research organisations, people,
things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can
build on forever, for the benefit of society. We call this
interconnected network the Research Nexus, but others in the community
have different names for it, such as knowledge graph or PID graph.”
The richness of this network depends upon the participation of all those
who produce and publish scholarship, so naturally the topic of equality
emerged in that discussion. In addition to Ran Dang’s concern for
multilingualism and digitisation of past publications from all parts of
the world, Mercury Shitindo of St Paul’s University, Kenya talked of the
need for more education, training and accessible resources for her
community, to be able to participate more effectively in this ecosystem.
She can see that affiliations and citations are of priority there, as
these enable transparency and facilitate collaborations. Matt Buys of
DataCite echoed her point, talking about the importance of the role of
contributors “It’s important not to lose sight of people and places – to
recognise the importance of contributor roles in the PID-graph”.
Earlier in the day, we mentioned the launch of our Global Equitable
Membership, or GEM programme. Since January, 110 new organisations from
eligible countries have joined Crossref fee-free. Ginny was quick to
admit that the need for a fee-waiver programme like this stems from the
regular fees schedule not being in tune with our global membership, and
she mentioned the upcoming fees review.
Financial barriers are often what get attention, yet reducing barriers
to participation with technology is equally important for building a
robust research nexus. With the planned changes to our registration
form, we’ll make it easier to register works for those who don’t
regularly use XML.
Johanssen Obanda took time to show the examples of community activity
and events organised by our global network of Ambassadors, and to thank
all our advocates and partners for their tireless work. They are also
helping tackle barriers, supporting our members to actively participate
in the research nexus with their metadata, and help enable the community
to make good use of the network of relationships that data denotes.
Showcasing our “One member one vote” truth, the Board election was the
focal point of the annual meeting, as always. We closed the ballot and
announced the results, with seven members selected to join the Board in
2024.
The event went very smoothly overall. Talks were delivered efficiently,
the panellists shared diverse perspectives and we elected our new Board
members. Huge thanks to Rosa Clark, our Communications and Events
Manager, who orchestrated the event and has been a constant
behind-the-scenes presence supervising the entire show. I’m grateful to
all colleagues at Crossref, who helped make it an enjoyable experience
and an informative event for our community. Finally – it wouldn’t be a
real meeting without the active participation of the speakers and
panellists, who shared their metadata stories, and even joined us for
some relaxed unplugged chats.
I won’t pretend to know what the hell is happening at OpenAI. The
story is changing by the hour. It’s chaos though. And that’s a good
thing. For the past few years, OpenAI has told a near-perfect story: The
company was founded by tech luminaries — people skilled at noticing
developing technologies and operating as though the future had already
arrived. They recognized that we were on the cusp of a breakthrough that
would transform, well,
NASA
to Talk Science Highlights of First Artemis Robotic Moon Landing
date: 2023-11-20, from: NASA breaking news
NASA will host a What’s on Board media teleconference at 2 p.m. EST
Wednesday, Nov. 29, to discuss the science payloads flying aboard the
first commercial robotic flight to the lunar surface as part of the
agency’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative under the
Artemis program. Carrying NASA and commercial payloads to the Moon,
[…]
Adam Engst: Apple began adding a globe icon to the Fn keycap a few
years ago and, starting in macOS 14 Sonoma, began to call it the Globe
key. This is likely for consistency with iPad keyboards, which dropped
the lowercase “fn” letters entirely in favor of a globe icon.[…]Because
Apple doesn’t include the Fn […]
HandBrake (Hacker News): Improved performance on arm64 / aarch64 /
Apple Silicon architectures[…]Added support for drag and drop of
multiple files at once[…]Added support for VideoToolbox H.265/HEVC,
H.264/AVC, ProRes, and VP9 hardware decoders on macOS 13 and
later[…]Added GPU accelerated Crop & Scale, Rotate, Pad, Yadif,
Bwdif, Chroma Smooth, Unsharp, Lasharp, Grayscale filters[…]Improved
SVT-AV1 encoding […]
The
Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
date: 2023-11-20, from: Michael Tsai
Thomas Stringer (via Hacker News): But… in the back of my mind I know
that I have open source projects that need some attention. One happens
to be heavily used. I’m nearly 3/4 million downloads, and it’s something
that people seem to think has some level of usefullness. Those are the
good parts. The bad […]
Ric Ford: It’s now clear that a new Mac, purchased directly from
Apple, can fail completely and suddenly without any warning after
running fine for a few weeks. Apple’s proprietary storage design means
that a Mac failure is now also a storage failure that will prevent you
from accessing any of your files in any […]
(#3x6bsna)
But I manged to send myself a webmetion using `curl -i -d
“source=http://algorave.dk&target=http://darch.dk”
https://webmention.io/da …
date: 2023-11-20, updated: 2023-11-20, from: Darch (sørenpeter)
neotxt blog
But I manged to send myself a webmetion using curl -i -d
"source=http://algorave.dk&target=http://darch.dk"
https://webmention.io/darch.dk/webmention since I got a link on
algorave.dk to darch.dk
@prologic<em>@twtxt.net is
there a feature flag to add for webmention support or how does it
work? I excepted if I mentioned my feed on darch.dk
@sorenpeter<em>@darch.dk then it
would send a webmention to that domain, but where is the link on the
yarn pod, that confirms the mention?
date: 2023-11-20, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Matt
Mullenweg: “Sales of the 100-year plan so far: 0. Hundreds of people
filled out the form, though. I think we really messed something up in
the follow-up, including not making it self-serve to start. Will review
and try again. It’s an important promise to us.”
I’m very much a customer for this service. It would be worth $10K for to
buy 100 years of persistence for my web writing. A simple easy to
understand service that helps get the process started.
I transfer scripting.com to
Automattic as registrar.
I upload the contents from S3 to Automattic server. Static files, HTML,
feeds, images, code.
Automattic provides an API to keep the files updated and so I can add to
them as long as I’m still writing.
The files are publicly accessible over HTTP.
Automattic agrees to renew the domain for 100 years, and manage access
to the files, with reasonable limits and acts of god accounted for, etc.
I pay you $10K on signing.
Why should you do it – simple, easy benefit, i think you’d sell a lot of
contracts, and you could start the business now, and get started serving
customers and learning what they want, how they work, and get ideas for
where to go next.
A team of engineers participate in simulation training for the Polar
Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) on Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023,
inside the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s
Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The purpose of the training is to get
the integrated PRIME-1 team – engineers with PRIME-1’s MSOLO (Mass
Spectrometer […]
We’re taking the next email issue of TidBITS off to celebrate
Thanksgiving, although we’ll continue to publish articles on our
website. You can look forward to the next email issue on 4 December
2023.
A star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is seen in
exceptional detail in this image from Nov. 20, 2023, thanks to the
Near-Infrared Camera instrument on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. An
estimated 500,000 stars shine in this image of the Sgr C region, along
with some never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain.
[…]
20 November 2023 Dear European leaders, The recent events at OpenAI
are likely going to lead to considerable, unpredictable instability. The
schisms on display there highlight the fact that we cannot rely purely
on the companies to self-regulate AI, wherein even their own
A Journey of Support and Community Impact Small Business Saturday is
an annual holiday that encourages shoppers to support local businesses.
Taking place on the Saturday following Thanksgiving, it stands as a
dedicated day to celebrate and rally support for the contributions small
businesses make to their communities. This year, amid the challenges
posed by […]
NASA to
Highlight Inclusion During Bayou Classic Event
date: 2023-11-20, from: NASA breaking news
NASA is bringing a clear message to the 50th Annual Bayou Classic
Friday, Nov. 24 and Saturday, Nov. 25 – while exploring the universe for
the benefit of all, it is equally invested in ensuring the participation
of all in the agency and its discovery work. The commitment will be on
full display during NASA’s […]
NASA’s
Webb Reveals New Features in Heart of Milky Way
date: 2023-11-20, from: NASA breaking news
The latest image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a
portion of the dense center of our galaxy in unprecedented detail,
including never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain.
The star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is about 300
light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole,
Sagittarius A*. Image: Sagittarius C […]
Flashback:
how Symbian Anna tried to bring an old OS into the modern touchscreen
world
date: 2023-11-20, from: OS News
Today we want to focus on what came next, Symbian Anna, which arrived
a year after the launch of Symbian^3 (Symbian^2 launched only in Japan).
Anna was unveiled in early 2011 alongside the Nokia X7 and Nokia E6. The
E6 was a bar phone with a QWERTY keyboard (and a 2.45″ touch display),
but the X7 was all touch (4.0″ display). Even better, owners of certain
older Nokias would receive Anna as an update, that was the case for the
Nokia N8 and E7. The Nokia C7 and C6-01 got it too. I have a few Symbian
Anna and Belle (its successor) devices, and they’re not exactly great.
The software is slow, cumbersome, clunky, and unpleasant to use, and
simply no competition for the iPhone and Android, even at the time they
came out. They’re fun novelties to play with now, but I genuinely feel
sorry for the people who bought into these things back when they were
new, thinking they’d get something on the level of the iPhone or
Android.
The seL4 microkernel is currently the only kernel that has been fully
formally verified. In general, the increased interest in ensuring the
security of a kernel’s code results from its important role in the
entire operating system. One of the basic features of an operating
system is that it abstracts the handling of devices. This abstraction is
represented by device drivers – the software that manages the hardware.
A proper verification of the software component could ensure that the
device would work properly unless there is a hardware failure. In this
paper, we choose to model the behavior of a device driver and build the
proof that the code implementation matches the expected behavior. The
proof was written in Isabelle/HOL, the code translation from C to
Isabelle was done automatically by the use of the C-to-Isabelle Parser
and AutoCorres tools. We choose Isabelle theorem prover because its
efficiency was already shown through the verification of seL4
microkernel. Some light reading that would’ve been for the weekend had I
not gotten sick and unable to work on OSNews much.
date: 2023-11-20, updated: 2023-11-20, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Generative AI is going to be a powerful tool for data analysis and
summarization. Here’s an
example
of it being used for sentiment analysis. My guess is that it isn’t very
good yet, but that it will get better.
Support
for new computing teachers: A tool to find Scratch programming
errors
date: 2023-11-20, from: Raspberry Pi (.org)
We all know that learning to program, and specifically learning how to
debug or fix code, can be frustrating and leave beginners overwhelmed
and disheartened. In a recent blog article, our PhD student Lauria at
the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre highlighted the
pivotal role that teachers play in shaping students’ attitudes towards
debugging.…
[resending to some readers, sorry for glitch] Posted this a few
minutes ago, giving my theory of what transpired over the last few
hours: and then, perhaps in keeping with my surmise that Sam’s bluff was
called, negotiations broke down altogether. Sam’s out, presumably Greg
is too. Mira’s no longer interim CEO. Probably a lot of employees will
leave. The $86B secondary sale to Thrive is presumably unlikely to
close.
(#plb77ba)
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org
hmm yeah, also not sure how this should work for multi-user pods. It
should only trigger an email when it show …
date: 2023-11-20, updated: 2023-11-20, from: Darch (sørenpeter)
neotxt blog
@lyse<em>@lyse.isobeef.org hmm
yeah, also not sure how this should work for multi-user pods. It should
only trigger an email when it show that they do not follow you and, it
should not be an automatic one. If spam becomes an issue you could use a
forward email address for this feature.
BTW, I read in a news article the other day that I developed iPodder,
the first podcasting client in 2004. This is not true. The first
podcasting client was
Radio
UserLand in 2001. I did not write
iPodder,
it was a community effort.
Brilliant
post about RSS from Colin Walker. I agree with all of it. When a
protocol or format is much more complicated that it needs to be, there’s
usually a reason, the proponents want to say they’re compatible and open
without having actual
interop.
date: 2023-11-20, from: John Naughton’s online diary
If there’s one thing to be said for single-glazing… … it’s nice photo
opportunities when one wakes up. Quote of the Day ”Every decent man is
ashamed of the government he lives under.” H.L. Mencken Relevant to the
UK at …
Continue
reading →
Perspectives:
Luis Montilla on making science fiction concepts a reality in the
scholarly ecosystem
date: 2023-11-20, from: Crossref Blog
Hello, readers! My name is Luis, and I’ve recently started a new role as
the Technical Community Manager at Crossref, where I aim to bridge the
gap between some of our services and our community awareness to enhance
the Research Nexus. I’m excited to share my thoughts with you.
My journey from research to science communications infrastructure has
been a gradual transition. As a Masters student in Biological Sciences,
I often felt curious about the behind-the-scenes after a paper is
submitted and published. For example, the fate of data being stored in
the drawer or copied and forgotten in the hard drive after the paper is
online. I come from a university that shares its name with at least
three
completely different universities in Latin America, and that also is
pretty similar to another one with multiple offices across
the region,
which made me wonder if there was a standard way of identifying our
affiliations. And then we have the topic of our names in hispanoamerica.
We use two family names, and more often than not, we have a middle name
(and then I could tell you stories about multiple-word middle names),
which inevitably leads to authors having many combinations of full names
and hyphenations.
This curiosity led me to volunteer in the Journal of the Venezuelan
Society of Ecology. This role has been a transformative experience
because my goal was to learn more about the publishing aspect of
science. Still, today I realize that this is a fraction of what the
scholarly ecosystem represents. The experience allowed me to grasp the
importance of having a community with a sense of belonging, the
relevance of multilingualism, and the importance of having access to an
open infrastructure that allows smaller communities to be participants
in the global dynamics. Moreover, it seemed to me that a research paper
is more than the capstone of a building that we place and then move on
to the next project or the next experiment; instead, it is a node in the
vast network of human knowledge, connected to other papers through
references, but also to all the other elements that are produced as part
of the research, namely datasets, protocols, code, presentations,
posters, preprints, peer-review reports and more. In short, the
research metadata extends the life of the research output and
makes it visible to the rest of the community.
This brings us to my onboarding to the Crossref team. At Crossref, I
became part of a team and a driving force whose idea of
the Research
Nexus1
aligns perfectly with my aspirations. And to explain myself better, I’ll
draw an analogy using one of my favorite authors. In Isaac Asimov’s
Second Foundation, a character shows to another a wall covered to the
last millimeter with equations and writings. He describes his
contribution to “The Plan” as follows: “…Every red mark you see on the
wall is the contribution of a man among us who lived since
Seldon”.2
This idea sounded fascinating to me and only possible in a sci-fi book;
a massive integrated research ecosystem where scientists focused more on
how their contributions fit in the big picture. Today I have come to
think that metadata helps materialize this idea by interconnecting all
knowledge, and more importantly, in stark contrast to Asimov’s plan
developed and guarded by a secret society, Crossref’s research nexus is
a “reusable open network,” “a scholarly record that the global community
can build on forever.” In a world with undeniably unequal access to
resources, providing open access and fostering community efforts to
contribute to this growing collective effort is a fundamental condition
to empower and visualize underrepresented voices.
We make available a series of tools to access and probe this data,
including our REST API, but we know its potential is far from being
realized. As Technical Community Manager at Crossref, my primary
responsibility is to understand the needs of our community members who
interact with our REST API. I aim to build and maintain relationships
with new and existing metadata users to promote the effective usage of
our API. I will also be working closely with organizations such as
hosting platforms, manuscript submission systems, and general publisher
services. In essence, I want to ensure that our community across the
globe is aware of the vast possibilities that imply using and
contributing to the Research Nexus.
I am committed to fostering an engaged and collaborative technical
community. As we move forward, I look forward to sharing insights,
experiences, and knowledge with all of you. Stay tuned for more updates,
and let’s explore the world of APIs, metadata, and scholarly communities
together!
Every time I stumble on a discussion about blocking ads on the web I ask
myself if there even is a compelling argument against it. I block ads on
the web. Safari is set to prevent cross-site tracking and to hide my IP,
I have
1Blocker
running on both my Mac and my iPhone and I also have
NextDNS
enabled. If I can prevent ads and tracking from showing up on my device,
I’m gonna do it. Why? Because ads provide literally no value to my life.
But that’s the easy part. Things become a lot more complex when you
start dealing with all the other factors that are attached to the ads
world. For example, you can find this kind of argument:
People who don’t pay and block ads are scamming YouTube, or scamming
advertisers.
Or even this kind of argument:
And more importantly, they are scamming the content creators. They are
not usually a massive company, but working alone, with YouTube revenue
as their main income.
Am I scamming YouTube because I block their awful ads? Would I be
scamming YouTube if I muted the video and looked at something else while
ads were playing? What’s the scam here? Who is getting scammed?
One might even argue that I’m doing YouTube a favor and saving them
bandwidth by not allowing pointless ads to be served to me. Also,
scamming the content creators? If I pay for YouTube Premium I’d still be
served in video ads by the creators themselves. Should I be complaining?
Am I getting scammed then? I’m paying for no ads after all.
No matter the case, ads on the web will always be tricky and live in
this bizarre gray area. And until someone comes up with a really
compelling argument for allowing ads I’ll keep running ad-blockers
because I just can’t stand ads.
date: 2023-11-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Imagine a Silicon Valley board meeting with a young entrepreneur wearing
shorts and a baseball cap, drinking beer, while the investors are
wearing ski vests and their attention is focused on their laptop
screens.
I
admire Jeff
Jarvis for his
spunk, and on
matters of journalism it’s amazing how often I fully and
enthusiastically agree with his point of view. But I have to just as
strongly
disagree
with him about OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. I don’t go for
hype in tech, I’m very much a
Show
Me kind of guy. Every time I think of a new use for ChatGPT I’m
blown away by what a
breakthrough
it is. Not just impressive tech, which it certainly is, but how
incredibly useful it is. And how it understands my questions. And its
infinite patience and good manners. I’m not trying to change Jeff’s
mind, but just to say I think my friend got this one wrong.
Ich schreibe wieder mal an Horte. Heute
mit magischen Waffen.
Mörderdolch, ein goblinischer Dolch +1 mit einem Griff, der mit
Rattenzähnen und Echsenhaut verziert ist
Büchsenöffner, ein goblinischer Dolch +1/+3 gegen gerüstete
Gegner, mit einer Gravur, die zeigt, wie Bauern einem Ritter den Dolch
durch das Helmvisier rammen
Königmörder, ein goblinischer Dolch +1, gesegnet von Set und
verziert mit Schlangen; wer getroffen ist, muss einen Rettungswurf gegen
Tod bestehen oder sterben
Herzensfresser, ein Dolch +1/+3 gegen Menschen, mit Gravuren,
die ein Menschenopfer für Set zeigen
Himmelswächter, ein elfischer Dolch +1/+3 gegen Teufel und
Dämonen
Orcushammer, ein Streitkolben +1 mit einem Stahlkopf in der
Form eines gehörnten Widderkopfes, gesegnet von Orcus
Schicksal, ein goblinischer Kurzbogen +1 mit jede Menge Kerben
Mörderbolzen, eine goblinische Armbrust +1 aus schwarzem Stahl,
gesegnet von Set
Eisennagler, eine zwergische Armbrust +2, die pro Runde zwei
Schüsse erlaubt
Pelzjäger, ein serpentinischer Speer +1/+3 gegen Säugetiere aus
den Zeiten der Echsenkriege, gesegnet von Pazuzu
Hundespiess, ein orkischer Speer +1/+3 gegen Elfen aus den
Zeiten der Waldkriege
Schuppenfresser, ein Speer +1/+3 gegen Reptilien (aber nicht
gegen Drachen), gesegnet von Marduk
Drachentöter, ein Speer +1/+3 gegen Drachen, gesegnet von
Pazuzu
Blitzschlag, ein Wurfspeer, gesegnet von Ninurta, explodiert
beim Aufprall und verursacht 6W6 Schaden, Rettungswurf gegen Drachenodem
für die Hälfte
Wallspalter, ein orkischer Zweihänder +1/+3 gegen Stadtbewohner
aus den Zeiten der orkischen Befreiungskriege
Affenschnitter, ein orkisches Schwert +1/+3 gegen Menschen aus
den Zeiten der grossen Landnahme
Mondschein, ein Schwert +1/+3 gegen Gestaltwandler, mit
Silberrunen des Todes und der Verbannung, geschmiedet von den
Inquisitoren der Hexenkönige in Uruk.
Rasierklinge, ein Schwert +1/+3 gegen Magierinnen und Magier
aus der Zeit der Philosophenkriege
Engelsfeuer, ein Schwert +1/+3 gegen Untote aus der Zeit der
Vampirkriege
Meteorsturm, ein elfisches Schwert +1/+3 gegen Drachen aus den
Drachenkriegen
Riesentöter, ein Langbogen +1/+3 gegen Riesen, gesegnet von
Marduk
Todespfeil, ein Pfeil +2 des Todes, gesegnet von Nergal; wer
getroffen ist, muss einen Rettungswurf gegen Tod bestehen oder sterben
Lichtschwert, ein Schwert +3 der Valkyren aus Asgard, welches
die Träger verstösst, die sich 3× einem Kampf verweigern
Eistod, ein Zweihänder +3 aus Jötunheim; sobald die Klinge
gezogen ist, formen sich Schneeflocken; ins Wasser gesteckt, formt sicht
eine Eisschicht von bis zu 10 Fuss; nach Jahren formt sich
schlussendlich ein Gletscher
Moorfeuer, ein Zweihänder +1/+3 gegen Zweibeiner aus dem Jahr
der Dunkelheit, von Froschlingen in Myrkheim geschmiedet und von
Tsathoggua gesegnet; ist die Klinge gezogen, tropft grün
phosphoriszierende Flüssigkeit und stinkt nach faulen Eiern; bleibt die
Klinge gezogen, sammelt sich Wasser und alles zieht sich voll und bald
verwandelt sich alles in eine Sumpf
Dreizack der Fische, eine Stangenwaffe +1, welche zu langen
Zehen mit grossen Schwimmhäuten führt, die Unterwasseratmung ermöglicht
und erlaubt, mit Fischen zu reden
Dreizack der Strafe, eine Stangenwaffe +1, gesegnet von
Ninurta, welcher bei jedem Treffer zusätzliche 1W6 elektrischen Schaden
macht; sobald der Dreizack gefasst wird, beginnt es zu Knistern und
Funken zu sprühen
Feuerpeitsche, eine Peitsche +1 eines Balrogs aus Muspelheim,
die 1W6 Feuerschaden macht; bei einem erfolgreichen Treffer ist ein
sofortiger Folgeschlag mit der Waffe in der anderen Hand erlaubt
Feuerschwert, ein Schwert +1, welches bei jedem Treffer
zusätzliche 1W6 Feuerschaden macht; sobald das Schwert gezogen wird,
beginnt es zu brennen
Erdhammer, ein orkischer Hammer +3 aus dem langen Winterkrieg,
mit dem man jedes Menschenwerk mit drei Schlägen zerschmettern kann
Todbringer, ein Langbogen +1/+3 gegen alles geborene Leben, in
den Vampirkriegen gefertigt und von Orkus gesegnet; geborenes Leben
heisst, dass man Eltern und Vorfahren hat (keine Riesen, keine Drachen,
keine magischen Kreaturen, keine Untoten, und so weiter)
Eigentlich wollte ich ja nur 20. Vielleicht kann ich tricksen und
“Magierwaffen” und “Kriegerwaffen” separat aufführen? Das wäre beim
Ausrüsten von Gegnern wenigstens eine nützliche Unterscheidung.
(#5rrjaoa)
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org
I’m also on the e-mail wagon here. On I have added a “Comment via email”
botten if uses are not logged in. Th …
date: 2023-11-19, updated: 2023-11-19, from: Darch (sørenpeter)
neotxt blog
@lyse<em>@lyse.isobeef.org I’m also
on the e-mail wagon here. On
http://darch.dk/timeline/conv/oe3howa
I have added a “Comment via email” botten if uses are not logged in.
This feature could be extend to other places in the various UIs. Like we
already got the “Does not follow your” / “Follow you” on the profile
page in yarnd, so this detection could be used to sugget the user to
email that person, when mentioning them.
Per The Verge, investors have asked the board to resign and want Sam
Altman back in. They may well get their way. 4 vital questions: 👉Will
the nonprofit continue to exist? 👉What checks and balances will there
be? 👉Where will this leave OpenAI with respect to safety?
Firing
Sam and then trying to bring him back is a hot mess.
date: 2023-11-19, from: Gary Marcus blog
Nobody told me there’d be days like these Nobody told me there’d be
days like these Nobody told me there’d be days like these Strange days
indeed Strange days indeed – John Lennon Sorry, me again. An hour after
my last post, a credible rumor came out that OpenAI’s board is trying to
hire Sam Altman back.
The first miracle of the web was that people could
write
and share knowledge. This was thought to have been a failure as
journalism focused on abusive social media systems. But that’s where the
second miracle, AI, got all its info from. I guess something worked.
💥
In the best case, we may be able to avoid feeding the data through
the compositing pipeline of the compositor as well, if the compositor
supports direct scanout and the dmabuf is suitable for it. In particular
on mobile systems, this may avoid using the GPU altogether, thereby
reducing power consumption. I don’t understand what’s happening but it
seems like a good idea? Can anyone help?
OpenVMS
9.2 for x86 installation guide for VirtualBox
date: 2023-11-19, from: OS News
OpenVMS on x86 is now available for hobbyists! Almost a year after
the official release. This is a part 1 of my getting started guide,
showing you how to install OpenVMS on VirtualBox on Windows 10/11. More
parts will follow, documenting license installation, network setup, ssh,
application installation etc. If you want to give OpenVMS for x86 a try,
this is the series of articles to read and follow along with. Excellent
work by Remy van Elst.
This
last year I’ve caught up with WordPress, have been asking questions, and
one of the best thing about
my work with
Automattic is that the doors have been open. I have great teachers
who are encouraging me, and of course are experts in and proud of
WordPress, and as a result I think
FeedLand and
WordPress are going to work
together in some very nice ways. Getting pretty close on some of it.
I
added an item to the
artcasting
test feed, and also added code in FeedLand to
display
them. On an initial browse
around other feeds and collections, it seems a few are using the
enclosure for images in artful ways. Some of it is spammy, of course.
Should’ve seen that coming. Heh. But we limit the vertical space a feed
item gets in the timeline, you can see the whole thing by clicking on
it, and clicking again after having a look. If you want to create a
genuine art feed, then I want to make it look great in FeedLand. And
keep the more rude feeds manageable. If you’re playing around with
artcasting, let me know, I’d like to see how others are doing, and share
interesting stuff with people who follow this feed.
I admire Jeff Jarvis for his spunk, and on matters of journalism it’s amazing how often I fully and enthusiastically agree with his point of view. But I have to just as strongly disagree with him about OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. I don’t go for hype in tech, I’m very much a Show Me kind of guy. Every time I think of a new use for ChatGPT I’m blown away by what a breakthrough it is. Not just impressive tech, which it certainly is, but how incredibly useful it is. And how it understands my questions. And its infinite patience and good manners. I’m not trying to change Jeff’s mind, but just to say I think my friend got this one wrong.
