cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 226 Posts
  • 321 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: January 17th, 2022
  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoProgramming@programming.dev•CSS link not working. Help and Advice needed. (Solved)English
    2·
    4 days ago

    On href, I think all 3: style.css, /style.css, ./style.css point to the same place.

    no, they do not. (click for details)

    those three do not always resolve to the same thing: the first and last are relative, while the second is absolute.

    from a file at http://example.com/index.html, all three would resolve to http://example.com/style.css.

    But from a file at http://example.com/foo/index.html the href="style.css" and href="./style.css" will both resolve to http://example.com/foo/style.css while href="/style.css" will continue to resolve to the file at the root (http://example.com/style.css).

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Are Anti-AI Linux distributions practical?English
    20·
    4 days ago

    Are Anti-AI Linux distributions practical?

    It’s not possible to have a 100% no-LLM-coding-involved Linux distro anymore now that the kernel itself is welcoming LLM-assisted contributions, but it’s still possible to say that everything which the distro produces itself will not use AI.

    How can AI commits be responsible?

    What Debian means is: by reading what it produces and not just blindly accepting it but having humans review it carefully. The quality of LLM-assisted software is highly variable. Experienced people like Debian and Linux kernel developers are much less likely to publish very bad slop than inexperienced developers who are newly able to make a thing work well enough to ship it.

    I am concerned about the extent of Debian’s embrace of LLMs but I still have a lot more confidence in them than most other distros (especially small hardcore-anti-AI distro projects lacking sufficient developer capacity to even keep up with security updates).

    I expect we’ll be seeing lots more things like this non-upstreamable-because-AI hardware enablement and distros like Nura (formerly postmarketOS) will either either adopt more nuanced LLM policies or be forked.

    I am doubtful about if there will be any serious distros with hard LLM bans in a few years from now. But also, perhaps the bubble will have burst by then, so hosted inference won’t be so cheap and the use of LLMs will probably be quite different.

    the primary reason is AI is a thief

    This is not the primary reason for most people, I don’t think. I think the fact that it increases complexity while reducing human understanding is the biggest problem; it’s possible (easy even) now to produce mountains of good-enough-by-many-metrics source code which the person doing the prompting has very little comprehension of. The fact that it is also a plagiarism machine is far less of a problem than this. (There are a litany of other problems too of course, several others of which I would also rate as worse than the plagiarism aspect.)

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Bottles' Founder Has Managed to Run Microsoft 365 on LinuxEnglish
    331·
    1 month ago

    This might be useful for some Linux users who want (but don’t need) to run Microsoft 365 occasionally, but actually relying on this kind of hack is a terrible idea.

    Once fully implemented, this will help draw in people into Linux, as many shudder at the thought of switching to the platform because their preferred office suite doesn’t work here.

    I certainly hope this doesn’t “help draw in people into Linux”. It’s sad to think about people and organizations switching to Linux on the basis of someone misleading them into thinking that relying on this kind of thing is a good idea because when it breaks it will give them a bad impression and they’ll blame “Linux” instead of Microsoft (or Bottles or whoever told them it was a good idea).

    When the lack of a Linux version of a specific proprietary program is the blocker preventing someone from switching to Linux, relying on a workaround which remains unsupported by the proprietary/adversarial software vendor is… a recipe for a bad time.

    Even if this mostly works today, it is extremely likely that (either intentionally or inadvertently) Microsoft will break it in the future.

    So, although I do see how this can be useful for some people when/while it works, in my opinion Linux and the world at large would be better off if this software didn’t exist. I hope Microsoft breaks it sooner than later!

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Rust Coreutils cp Ended Up Breaking Ubuntu Image Builds With Latest IncompatibilityEnglish
    4·
    3 months ago

    But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.

    Of course rewriting them will introduce some new issues, but it will also eliminate classes of bugs from which there are definitely still a great many in old “stable” C code (bugs which are now being discovered and will presumably continue to be discovered at a much faster pace due to LLMs).

    The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.

    I don’t think it is just an excuse; I believe that improving security is also a goal… but removing GPL code is clearly also part of their motivation :(

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Companies now block older browser versions from accessing their websites!English
    1·
    4 months ago

    Companies now block older browser versions

    Now? This has been happening since the dawn of the web. At least the screenshot you pasted represents all of the big three rendering engines - it used to be common to see “Internet Explorer version XYZ required”, sometimes with javascript to prevent you from using the site with any other browser (even if in some cases it would actually work fine if you simply spoofed your user agent string).

    I have used kinda retro devices to surf the web at times

    Most websites became HTTPS-only sometime after the snowden disclosures in 2013.

    Over time old versions of TLS have been deprecated and eventually support for them is dropped from browsers and web servers alike. So, a browser from even 15 years ago literally cannot connect to most webservers today.

    Planned obsolescence is terrible but it’s a minor factor here: it’s actually dangerous to use even (especially?) a slightly-out-of-date web browser because every new release fixes vulnerabilities which can be exploited to run malicious code on your computer. The planned obsolescence which prevents people from being able to have an up-to-date browser comes mostly from proprietary operating system vendors; to have up-to-date software while continuing to use somewhat older computers you need to use free/libre software.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyz•*Permanently Deleted*English
    58·
    4 months ago

    another screenshot of a tweet, no link, no alt text, smh my head.

    imo science memes should link the science!

    Here is the paper from April which this tweet is actually referring to: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/293/2069/20252994/481340/The-phonology-of-sperm-whale-coda-vowels

    Unsurprisingly the tweet’s characterization of the research as finding whale language “structurally comparable to Chinese” is an exaggeration; they are actually saying it is similar to tonal languages and then using Mandarin as one example of a tonal language.

    here are the two paragraphs which actually mention Chinese

    Human vowels consist of a sequence of glottal pulses produced by vocal folds. Whale codas consist of a sequence of clicks produced by vibrating phonic lips, which play a role similar to the human vocal folds [15]. In human languages, the frequency of glottal pulses corresponds to pitch—closely spaced glottal pulses give rise to a higher pitch, while more widely spaced pulses give rise to a lower pitch. In linguistics, tone refers to pitch as recruited to express linguistic meaning. Many languages use tone to distinguish between different words. For example, in Mandarin Chinese, the following four words differ only in their tonal contour, while having the same consonants and vowels [21]: high and level tone ma ‘mother’, rising tone má ‘hemp’, falling-rising tone ma ‘horse’ and falling tone mà ‘scold’. The coda types can therefore be compared to human tone: ‘regular’ coda types can be compared to level tones, codas with ‘increasing’ ICIs to falling tones and codas with ‘decreasing’ ICIs to rising tones. (However, our analogy has a limit: while in human languages, different tones can be associated with different meanings, the meanings conveyed by sperm whale codas have not been established.) In figure 1, the ‘F0’ (fundamental frequency) of each coda is represented with a blue line.

    Beguš et al. [15] show that different coda vowel qualities can be instantiated on the same coda types and propose that coda type and coda quality are orthogonal [15]. This points to another parallelism between the sperm whale communication system and human language, as tone and vowel quality are often similarly orthogonal. For example, in Mandarin Chinese, the falling–rising tone may appear on any vowel, e.g. ma ‘horse’, ma ‘rice’ and ma ‘smear’. Orthogonality, in this case, is used to describe the independent mechanisms of production between the traditional timing or source features and the vocalic or filter features. In other words, the rate of vocal fold or phonic lip vibration can be independent of the shape of the resonant body (the vocal tract or the distal air sac), and both vowel types surface on several traditional coda types. However, while the production can be independent, there can still exist distributional patterns, where a vowel quality is more frequent on certain tones or some coda vowels are more common on certain traditional coda types. Our paper builds on Beguš et al.’s [15] findings and reveals further complexities within the system of sperm whale vocalizations.

    Here is an article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/15/sperm-whales-alphabet-vocalizations-similar-humans …which also links this other fascinating news from the same lab from back in March https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/27/scientists-film-whale-giving-birth-other-whales-help-her (“This is the first evidence of birth assistance in non-primates”)

    finally here https://xcancel.com/kuso_otoko/status/2062224294835540161 is the tweet this post is a screenshot of, where you can find people in the replies already making the predictable “met them at a very Chinese time in their life”, “that’s why japan hates them”, etc jokes.

    note

    i’m definitely not working in China’s Cetacean Ops and trying to prevent the western world from finding out that whale speak is just super slowed down Mandarin, i swear

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Handy flock camera license plate reader mapEnglish
    5·
    5 months ago

    The 2021 paper OSRM-CCTV: Open-source CCTV-aware routing and navigation system for privacy, anonymity and safety says they published source code at https://github.com/Fuziih but I don’t see it there now (though there is a related project called cctv-exposure).

    The final published version of the paper seems to be paywalled; it’s probably on scihub but there is also a preprint of it here on arxiv.

    https://github.com/FNBIP/ghost-route (just 3 commits, from February this year) says it is inspired by the paper and “extended to a production-grade multi-mode threat routing system”. It’s a node app you run locally (there doesn’t appear to be a public instance currently) which would be nice if it could work offline but unfortunately “Offline mode with pre-downloaded OSM tiles” is still on the roadmap and it currently lists “A Mapbox GL JS token (free tier works)” as a requirement (which is probably why there isn’t a public instance - someone would need to pay mapbox if they wanted to run it for other people).

    I have not tried it; if anyone reading this has or does please post here about how it works!

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•"Scan to Verify You're Human": Google's reCAPTCHA is trialing a new "experimental challenge type" which requires desktop users to use an Android or iOS device to be able to pass itEnglish
    11·
    5 months ago

    Is this something that websites opt into and add to their own site?

    Yes.

    reCAPTCHA is google’s “anti-abuse” service which many websites use to prevent slightly increase the cost of operating automated crawlers (which somewhat ironically google operates one of the largest of itself, for their search engine).

    Before neural networks could solve CAPTCHAs reliably, spammers were solving them with human labor; solving services like anti-captcha.com (intentionally not a clickable link…) today use a mixture of automated and human solvers.

    In the future google is apparently building, solving services will need farms of able-to-run-a-recent-android-release mobile devices with some kind of trusted computing hardware, each one of which they’ll have to use sparingly enough to keep usage of its unique ID under some plausibly-human threshold.

    And even if you do have a phone and are willing to identify yourself with it, if it is too old to run a recent enough Android you also will sometimes be denied services for being unable to pass a robots’ “human” test.

    🤮

Moderates