HN user
Follow me at https://mastodon.xyz/@pmorinerie
Congrats for knowing what's important to you (time and peace of mind, from what I read), and acting on it.
I work as a consultant, but for the same reasons: I choose to work only a few days a week, take the salary loss, and spend more time with my young kids. A time will come where I'll start working more, which will also unlock more meaningful work – but for now that's a choice I'm happy to make.
As noted by the other investigating organization (La Quadrature du Net), the problem is worse than just the question of the algorithm implementation.
The problem is that the CNAF deliberately targets small unintentional errors rather than large-scale intentional fraud.
Why that? Because fraud is harder to detect and to prove (you have to provide evidence it was intentional).
So smaller and poorer families are disproportionately affected by the controls, because the algorithm was designed to do so. No computational adjustment can fix that: it is the initial intent that is broken.
Source: https://www-laquadrature-net.translate.goog/2023/11/27/notat... (auto-translated in english)
Kazuaki Morita was a programmer on Mario Bros., Zelda NES, Zelda SNES, Zelda Game Boy, Zelda 64, where he did the bosses and fishing game; among many others.
He was often assigned the most challenging programming tasks. His coding style is so specific that it even shows in disassembled or decompiled code ("Ha, this file is classic Morita").
I did this with every first committer to https://github.com/zladx/LADX-Disassembly : giving commit rights immediately (so that they can merge their first PR themselves).
I did wonders to foster a community of contributors, and get more patches coming. The CI ensures nothing breaks, and there never was any trust incident.
Author here! Most of the engine documentation was figured out by many romhackers over the years; I merely started the efforts to write a comprehensive overview.
If you're interested in projects taking advantage of this knowledge, the Daid's LADX Randomizer [0] is awesome. It includes a ton of assembly tweaks that makes the engine more flexible, and add many options to the game.
And Link’s Awakening Redux [1] is a good example of life-improvement game tweaks made using the disassembly.
[0] LADXR: https://daid.github.io/LADXR/ [1] Link’s Awakening Redux: https://github.com/ShadowOne333/Links-Awakening-Redux
To find someone on Mastodon, I would either enter their nickname in the search bar (no need for the domain, it will search on all instances) – or simply click on their profile on a post I like. Just like a centralized network. This tool just exists to do this automatically and in bulk.
It seems to me that finding someone on a federation is as easy as on centralized systems. Do you have a use case in mind where centralization makes it easier to find someone?
I used Scalingo for Rails apps a while ago, and was quite impressed by the quality of the platform. Very Heroku-like. Maybe not as polished, but still doing the PaaS job pretty well (git push, and you're done).
I was expecting someone to post a comment along the lines of "Pixelmator is great for picture editing on macOS"; it is one of the best Mac editors.
But I'm also delighted to see your username pop up :) I used quite a few of your wallpapers back in 2002, when I was making desktop customization packs for Windows XP, and I have fond memories of them.
Indeed – although I guess WSL made unix tools slightly easier to use nowadays.
But even without executing the Makefile, simply reading it can tell new developers which language-specific command needs to be run to build the project (and then the command can be copy-pasted and run manually).
I like nothing more than dropping into a new project, and, rather than figuring out the commands to make it run, see that it has a Makefile with a handful of targets for common tasks.
With some collegues we wrote an article about the benefits of this approach a few years ago: https://blog.capitaines.fr/2016/09/30/standardizing-interfac...
I guess to encourage drunk people not to drive, which makes the roads safer for everyone.
The construction of the only new nuclear reactor in France started fourteen years ago (2007), and is not due before two more years.
It was expected to cost 3.3B€, but in the end will probably cost around 19B€.
Interesting setup.
Do you have any resources about how efficient TrackerControl is at preventing Google to collect data from the phone various system services?
To be fair, they probably ship one of the best and most optimized Electron app out there.
I still don’t like Electron, but Discord is doing a good job with it. Even their React-Native mobile apps feel decently snappy (where usually large React-Native apps are buggy and slow as fuck).
There are many more recordings in the BNF archives linked by the article.
There are even recordings of people speaking latin and Esperanto in 1912. Fascinating stuff!
IMHO, Signal main advantage is that you can sell it to your parents and friends like "WhatsApp, but safe".
It tries to have feature-parity to WhatsApp; looks the same, works the same. All this while researching innovations on cryptography that doesn't compromise user experience too much.
In my experience, doing exactly what WhatsApp does (but safer) makes it an easy sell to people around me.
Tl;dr: CSS conical gradients, overflow detector in the DevTools, and Webrender for macOS and older Windows.
I was wondering why Firefox felt speedier than usual ; turns out the combination of the new Warp JS optimiser and Webrender does wonders on my MacBook.
Nicholas Nethercote is, of course, the author of the "How to speed up the Rust compiler" series of articles [1], which I found fascinating. He spent quite some time at Mozilla optimizing rustc internals.
Kudos for his work, and for making Rust compilation faster for all of us.
As far as I know, Mastodon is quite active, they’re releasing features and improvements monthly, and the number of active users is still growing.
It seems Mobilizon invested a great deal in the usability of this tool.
(Not specifically the visual design, but the ease of use and the matching of user needs).
I've seen projects advertising decentralization as the main selling point. Mobilizon seems to also push strong on the user experience, and I'm glad they do.
This is addressed in the article:
In contrast, BeWelcome, a similar but much less popular platform, covered their finances with less than $10,000.
The costs of running such a platform are not high. And Couchsurfing operated for free for at least a decade: they relied on donations and volunteer work.
In the end, some of the founding volunteers decided to sell out the Couchsurfing code and community to investors. These investors want their money back. Of course Couchsurfing now has paid staff, but it's not required for operating the website: it's required for userbase growth. And neither the new user fee is about the operating costs: it's about investors getting their money back.
It looks like so, yes.
Though, after digging in the doc, turns out there may be a way to create temporary free ids to try out Urbit: https://urbit.org/using/operations/creating-a-comet/
That was indeed in 2004 – long before nuclear stopped being cost-competitive with renewable energies.
Oh, and renewables are also faster to deploy than nuclear plants (which take years to build).
I see what you mean. But how about seeing it in the other direction:
Imagine how much the maintainer must has been burned, in order to take the decision to shut down their entire love-work – in hope that the toxic situation will stop.
From our point of view, this may not be the best decision. A desperate one, maybe. But to imagine how the person must be feeling to think this is the best way out.
For your self-hosted SaaS needs, Yunohost is awesome.
One-click install of many apps and services – but more impressively one-click upgrades as well. Nice, user-friendly, very little maintenance required. Self-hosting for people who don’t want to do system administration.
I’ve been running a Yunohost server for the past three years, adding and removing various services on the fly. Love to use it, and the great work of people behind this.
Was the 3x cost increase also to be expected?
Not mentioned in this article (although it's in the Release Notes [1]): the amazing work done regarding the macOS compositor.
This should give pretty noticeable speed and battery improvements on Retina Macbooks.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/70.0/releasenotes/#new
limited to the west coast of the US
I'm from Europe, for the record :)
That said, you're right, of course there are no laws regulating the potential misuse or evil use of research results.
However I feel we, as societies, tend to feel that researchers have some kind of moral responsibility in the use of their discoveries. That somehow, the researchers working on nuclear bombs are not entirely unrelated to its use – and, on the other side, that Alexander Fleming deserves some moral credits for the uses of penicillin.
My point is that in software engineering we are usually held responsible neither by law or by this shared understanding.
It seems you are understanding "politics at work" as "discussions about political parties, candidates and elections".
IMHO, politics is much more than partisan politics. In the broad sense, it is reflecting and deciding on how live together. And parties and candidates are only a part (maybe the most divisive) of it.
Technical professions are generally held responsible for what they enable. Biology: researchers can't do anything they want on plants, animals or humans. Medicine: doctors are expected to follow strict guidelines with their patients. Even engineering: implementing a cheating system for diesel tests will (rightfully) get engineers into trouble.
But software engineering seem to have a pass on how the things we build is actually used.
Dark patterns, facial recognition, mass surveillance? Just some code, a nice puzzle. It's like the profession as a whole feels only distantly connected to what they actually do.
I welcome the trend of developers taking more moral responsibility for their work. I want more ethics courses, more difficult questions, more uneasiness about what we do with our code, and what we enable. Not to be sure we build the right thing, but at least to be less wrong–and, sometimes, to know when we clearly build the wrong thing. I want us to be accountable; like other technical professions in the world.
And if in the workplace, the place where the majority of software in the world is usually produced, we can't have these discussions, what use will it be?