Corn Woman 🌽 @WomanCorn@schelling.pt

Do not be glued to the news. Before CNN, people used to watch maybe an hr of news each day, after dinner.You got a dose of world, national, local, so you could be informed.

It is not healthy or natural "to be glued to the news" or for news to be 24-hrs. Most of the news isn't even news, it's just "experts" talking about their interpretation of the news, speculating on things.

Being glued to the news will not make you more informed, it'll make you more stressed, worried, depressed. Stop it.

Alice and Bob

I cannot stress this enough.

The biggest threat to an archive of cultural media, especially pop culture media, are the corporations that own the media. https://vmst.io/@jalefkowit/114028618754509486

the first rule of hosting an important service is "make sure you have more bandwidth than your enemies"

40gbit would probably be a good idea. Even if your servers are only doing 10gbit. But the tricky part is dealing with a distributed attack. So if you're not using a CDN that can absorb it for you and your transit providers don't offer DDoS protection you need enough bandwidth and your own DDoS detection infrastructure as well as a working blackhole routing setup with your transit provider so you can tell them to drop the traffic from the attackers' prefixes before it reaches you. And remember, if they're actively attacking you, you probably can't login to your router to update the blackhole routes unless you have a backdoor through another network.

This is usually too much of a burden and cost for a small hoster with limited funds and manpower, which is why you get roped into using a CDN like CloudFlare...

I don't know what the morally right solution is here but they're going to have a tough time if they think they can handle these things on their own. I'd have just flipped over to CloudFlare and wrote a blog post explaining that the internet is too hostile to not have protection. The End.

From @aeirlys.bsky.social

"Remember Internet forums? Those bustling online spaces where people gathered to chat, share ideas, and build communities? While social media giants like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) took center stage, forums continued to thrive. Now, one of the leading open-source forum software providers, NodeBB, is joining the fediverse. Starting with NodeBB v4.0.0, federation is a core feature": Opensource Forum Software NodeBB Joins the Fediverse - OSTechNix https://ostechnix.com/nodebb-joins-fediverse/

If you see a painting by Andy Wormhole, do NOT look into the soup can

You will glimpse another universe!!!

If you run #Linux and want a safe haven to coordinate when bad comes to worse, you may want to install a #Freenet / #Hyphanet node ASAP:

Install Java and wget (e.g. sudo apt-get install openjdk-17-jdk wget)

wget 'https://www.draketo.de/dateien/freenet/build01500/new_installer_offline_1500.jar' -O new_installer_offline.jar;
java -jar new_installer_offline.jar -console

Leave out -console to use a graphical installer.

For more information, see https://www.hyphanet.org/pages/download.html#gnulinux-posix

#LineageOS is pretty incredible. I have an 8-year-old OnePlus 5T rocking the latest version of Android thanks to LineageOS 22.1. The battery still lasts more than a day, and the phone only cost me $500 (in 2017 dollars). Pretty great value for money.

Via the Tumblr machine.

We're at the end of an era.

#socialmedia #internet #digitalculture #archives #digitalmedia

I finally turned off GitHub Copilot yesterday. I’ve been using it for about a year on the ‘free for open-source maintainers’ tier. I was skeptical but didn’t want to dismiss it without a fair trial.

It has cost me more time than it has saved. It lets me type faster, which has been useful when writing tests where I’m testing a variety of permutations of an API to check error handling for all of the conditions.

I can recall three places where it has introduced bugs that took me more time to to debug than the total time saving:

The first was something that initially impressed me. I pasted the prose description of how to communicate with an Ethernet MAC into a comment and then wrote some method prototypes. It autocompleted the bodies. All very plausible looking. Only it managed to flip a bit in the MDIO read and write register commands. MDIO is basically a multiplexing system. You have two device registers exposed, one sets the command (read or write a specific internal register) and the other is the value. It got the read and write the wrong way around, so when I thought I was writing a value, I was actually reading. When I thought I was reading, I was actually seeing the value in the last register I thought I had written. It took two of us over a day to debug this. The fix was simple, but the bug was in the middle of correct-looking code. If I’d manually transcribed the command from the data sheet, I would not have got this wrong because I’d have triple checked it.

Another case it had inverted the condition in an if statement inside an error-handling path. The error handling was a rare case and was asymmetric. Hitting the if case when you wanted the else case was okay but the converse was not. Lots of debugging. I learned from this to read the generated code more carefully, but that increased cognitive load and eliminated most of the benefit. Typing code is not the bottleneck and if I have to think about what I want and then read carefully to check it really is what I want, I am slower.

Most recently, I was writing a simple binary search and insertion-deletion operations for a sorted array. I assumed that this was something that had hundreds of examples in the training data and so would be fine. It had all sorts of corner-case bugs. I eventually gave up fixing them and rewrote the code from scratch.

Last week I did some work on a remote machine where I hadn’t set up Copilot and I felt much more productive. Autocomplete was either correct or not present, so I was spending more time thinking about what to write. I don’t entirely trust this kind of subjective judgement, but it was a data point. Around the same time I wrote some code without clangd set up and that really hurt. It turns out I really rely on AST-aware completion to explore APIs. I had to look up more things in the documentation. Copilot was never good for this because it would just bullshit APIs, so something showing up in autocomplete didn’t mean it was real. This would be improved by using a feedback system to require autocomplete outputs to type check, but then they would take much longer to create (probably at least a 10x increase in LLM compute time) and wouldn’t complete fragments, so I don’t see a good path to being able to do this without tight coupling to the LSP server and possibly not even then.

Yesterday I was writing bits of the CHERIoT Programmers’ Guide and it kept autocompleting text in a different writing style, some of which was obviously plagiarised (when I’m describing precisely how to implement a specific, and not very common, lock type with a futex and the autocomplete is a paragraph of text with a lot of detail, I’m confident you don’t have more than one or two examples of that in the training set). It was distracting and annoying. I wrote much faster after turning it off.

So, after giving it a fair try, I have concluded that it is both a net decrease in productivity and probably an increase in legal liability.

Discussions I am not interested in having:

You are holding it wrong. Using Copilot with this magic config setting / prompt tweak makes it better. At its absolute best, it was a small productivity increase, if it needs more effort to use, that will be offset.
This other LLM is much better. I don’t care. The costs of the bullshitting far outweighed the benefits when it worked, to be better it would have to not bullshit, and that’s not something LLMs can do.
It’s great for boilerplate! No. APIs that require every user to write the same code are broken. Fix them, don’t fill the world with more code using them that will need fixing when the APIs change.
Don’t use LLMs for autocomplete, use them for dialogues about the code. Tried that. It’s worse than a rubber duck, which at least knows to stay silent when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

The one place Copilot was vaguely useful was hinting at missing abstractions (if it can autocomplete big chunks then my APIs required too much boilerplate and needed better abstractions). The place I thought it might be useful was spotting inconsistent API names and parameter orders but it was actually very bad at this (presumably because of the way it tokenises identifiers?). With a load of examples with consistent names, it would suggest things that didn't match the convention. After using three APIs that all passed the same parameters in the same order, it would suggest flipping the order for the fourth.

#GitHubCopilot #CHERIoT