Search results for tag #dev
I think the most important question is: why does anyone comply with what one incurious, self-centered, and self-important man, Linus Torvalds, says?
Why is that most important? Because Linux does not belong to Linus Torvalds. It belongs to the world. Torvalds only gets to dictate if the people who are best-positioned to take that power from him fail to do so. From where I sit (as an outsider), he should have been removed from the project, or at least have his dictatorial power removed, long ago, and the primary problem is that there is no structure or will to actually do that.
Under these conditions Linux is a hierarchical, and therefore right-wing, project. The project allows a single man to dictate the future evolution of a global good. Let's drop the illusion that it is "free" or "open" till that changes.
📰 OpenAI and Hugging Face have addressed a security incident during model evaluation, acknowledging the issue and taking steps to mitigate its impact.
🔗 https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/
Hahaha. Funny.
#ai #llm #vibecoding #software #programming #python #opensource #dev #devops #tech #technology
I've taken part in numerous computer science research projects that involved IRB review. I believe the system can work, even for cases like the above post. But Google and Stanford are bad actors that are taken at their word, and no system, IRB based or otherwise, is going to function properly if it cannot appropriately metabolize this reality.
I was once in a meeting where a Google X person gushed about a project that used smartphone sensor data to detect earthquakes. The calculus being set up here is that detecting earthquakes is a social good that outweighs any particular individual's right to privacy and even outweighs their right to know that their smartphone is being used in this way, let alone consent to it in any meaningful way. (*) Let me be clear and say I reject this framing, but it does appeal to a lot of people, even well-meaning ones. A mess.
#Google #IRB #ethics #EthicsReview #ComputerScience #research #ResearchEthics #tech #dev
(*) I assume there's some contortion involving EULAs whereby Google X can pretend that anyone using Android consented to having their smartphone's sensor data used for any future purpose Google et al. cooks up.
📰 NPM's release cooldown has been criticized as security theater by some developers and users, who argue that it does little to prevent vulnerabilities from being exploited during the transition period between versions.
Browsing through the Linux kernel
- section devices
- sub section block
- file badblocks.c
- level critical
When I look in sources for real work I use the old school method
- terminal (ba(c)(k)(z)(fi)sh)
- vim
- logic
- patience
This is just a lazy exercise
DESCRIPTION
badblocks is used to search for bad blocks on a device (usually a disk partition). device is the special file corresponding to the device (e.g /dev/hdc1). last_block is the last block to be checked; if it is not specified, the last block on the device is used as a default. first_block is an optional parameter specifying the starting block number for the test, which allows the testing to start in the middle of the disk. If it is not specified the first block on the disk is used as a default.
sources:
man badblocks(8)
https://explorar.dev/linux-kernel/
#kernel #sources #programming #logic #terminal #linux #explorar #dev #bash #csh #kzh #zsh #sh
update-notifier-crash on Ubuntu 24.04 wrote 1 Tbyte of garbage to syslog before I noticed and stopped it. I noticed because it filled the disk.Unbelievably annoying behavior. I guess that'll teach me to ignore an update notification rather than figuring out how to disable it forever.
I realize this is beside the point, but personally I view the fact that code review is not considered interesting as a serious failure of computer science education. I'm invested in the latter, so it stands out for me.
On the whole writers tend to love to read. I think they love it in part because their education led them to realize that learning to read well is both a good in itself and helps you become a better writer. Programming languages were designed to be human readable so that humans could read them. Yet we have a couple generations of people writing code most of whom were never explicitly taught how to read it, let alone learn to love reading it.
#tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #ComputerProgramming #ComputerScience #ComputerScienceEducation
Open source game engine Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions: 'We can't trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it'
At risk of drowning in AI slop code, @godotengine is firming up its contribution requirements.
🎮 https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/open-source-game-engine-godot-will-no-longer-accept-ai-authored-code-contributions-we-cant-trust-heavy-users-of-ai-to-understand-their-code-enough-to-fix-it/
🎮 https://godotengine.org/article/contribution-policy-2026/
#gamedev #aicoding #godot #opensource #godotgameengine #dev #aicoding #oss #games #aislop #gameengine #article
To be more precise, whoever controls the software attempts to establish a parasitical relationship with a host ("user") using the software as attachment mechanism. One successful class of parasite leads its hosts into believing they are benefiting from the arrangement even as they are being led into a burrow to have eggs implanted in their carapaces. Some parasites recruit potential hosts in active construction of parts necessary to create novel attachment mechanisms.
#dev #blambers #programação #licenciamento #softwareLivre #GPL #GNU
📰 LastPass has notified users of another data breach, potentially affecting millions of accounts.
🔗 https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/23/lastpass-notifies-users-of-yet-another-data-breach/
I like Kim and her work on StopGenAI well enough, but this post of hers is unwarranted and unfair in my view, as is the fact that several people chose to block me in response.
If you read the full context, which I link below, you'll see the objection boils down to the fact that I used the word "current" in a critique of LLM-based generative AI systems, in an attempt to be precise about what I was saying. Obviously people should block whomever they want for whatever reason they want, but I am not going to be cajoled by threats and ultimatums like this one into making sweeping claims just because other people want to see that. I've been crystal clear about my critique of generative AI for over 3 years now and my writing on it here stands for itself. I have no record of it but people who know me know that I was also quite critical of the hype around GANs in the late 2010s.
For context, here's my post: https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1782335950.858712
and here's Kim's objection: https://zeroes.ca/@kimcrawley/116807184909806502
which reads:
If it weren't for your "current" modifier, your comment would be great.For reasons I don't understand the thread rapidly degrades from "this post would be great without that one word" to "you invited a murderer into my house": https://zeroes.ca/@kimcrawley/116810548823823670
Sharing this not because it’s about AI/LLMs but because it’s solid advice and the recommendations work equally well for *people* coding web applications (funny that, almost like these things were made by people for people or something).
TL;DR: Use web and platform standards; don’t reinvent the wheel.
The conviction that technology is neutral is not itself neutral. It paradoxically functions as the conviction that this neutrality is a good thing so as to positively sanction the technological development of more "neutral" tools.(this is my own transcription from the video; any errors or discrepancies are mine).
He says this in the context of an argument that, especially in digital/online contexts, neutrality is conflated with truth, reason is identified with data and a quasi-scientific objectivity, and these conflations are damaging to democracy.
#internet #dev #tech #LLM #GenAI #GenerativeAI #democracy #politics
Dzisiaj się mnie tech lead programistów zapytał czemu korzystam z gita przez terminal a nie przez IDE. Trochę mnie to zaskoczyło bo dawno nie widziałem żeby ktoś tak korzystał, zwłaszcza z programistów (bo testerzy to znam).
A wy jak korzystacie z gita?
| Command line/Terminal: | 4 |
| Klikanie po IDE: | 3 |
| Apka typu Sourcetree, Fork itd.: | 0 |
BECK, K. at al. (2001). Manifesto para desenvolvimento ágil de software:
[...]Destaques dos Princípios por trás do Manifesto Ágil:
Indivíduos e interações mais que processos e ferramentas
Software em funcionamento mais que documentação abrangente
Colaboração com o cliente mais que negociação de contratos
Responder a mudanças mais que seguir um planoOu seja, mesmo havendo valor nos itens à direita, valorizamos mais os itens à esquerda.
Construa projetos em torno de indivíduos motivados. Dê a eles o ambiente e o suporte necessários e confie neles para fazer o trabalho.
As melhores arquiteturas, requisitos e designs emergem de equipes auto-organizáveis.
Em intervalos regulares, a equipe reflete sobre como se tornar mais eficaz e então refina e ajusta seu comportamento de acordo.
#engenhariaDeSoftware #desenvolvimento #dev #programação #manifestoÁgil #manifesto
📰 The White House has delayed the release of its report on voting-machine vulnerabilities ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
📰 Tesco has filed a lawsuit against VMware for breach of contract over alleged unauthorized use of Tesco's intellectual property and data.
📰 Ember is an iOS application designed for accessibility that allows users to read Hacker News articles with improved navigation and customization options.
📰 Hackers for Granny advocates for defense against industrialized elder fraud by promoting awareness and education about scams targeting older adults.
🔗 https://professorsigmund.com/praxis/hackers_for_granny_manifesto.html
If you’re trying to register for a Bank of Ireland account and the form fails silently, don’t worry, it’s simple to find out what happened and fix it.
1. Open up developer tools on your browser
2. Copy the failed regular expression from the console
3. Put it, and your generated password into Regexr (https://regexr.com)
And voila, as you can see the problem with mine* was that it hit the 16 character limit which was, to keep things exciting, not mentioned on the page.
Simples.
What muppets!
* Don’t worry, it’s a different one now.
#capitalism #mainstream #mediocrity #BankOfIreland #banks #design #web #dev #ireland
Alt...
Screenshot of me debugging why the password my password manager generated was being silently rejected by Bank of Ireland’s registration form.
I made a huge mistake in my pet project. I used #HiveCE as on-device storage in #Flutter app. It is simple and fast, and I decided it would be enough as while it loads the full content of the “box” (think about it as a database table) to the memory, it also has a “lazy box” option where only IDs are loaded, and you can access the remaining data on demand.
But lazy boxes don’t have a data selection option. You get your data by IDs, and that’s it.
1/2
And here’s a real-world example of the lifecycle of an action performed on a local copy of the Gaza Verified web site¹ showing the event from the toggle button on the client being automatically mapped to the relevant event handler on the SignUpsSwitch Kitten component instance on the server and that handler setting a boolean on a JavaScript object in memory, which is automatically persisted to disk via Kitten’s default JSDB² database.
Note that Kitten is smart enough to automatically redact fields in the log output that look like they might be secrets.
All this is in the stateful-components-api-breaking-change branch³ at the moment and will be in the next release.
¹ https://gaza-verified.org
² https://codeberg.org/small-tech/jsdb
³ https://codeberg.org/kitten/app/src/branch/stateful-components-api-breaking-change
#SmallWeb #Kitten #web #dev #statefulComponents #streamingHTML #hypertext #GazaVerified
Alt...
Screenshot of the Gaza Verified admin interface (Interviews section) running on https://localhost/admin/interviews/ showing the Sign-ups are open checkbox And the Team Schedule section with a table of volunteers to days with checkmarks for which day a volunteer is active this week. The main navigation shows Home, People, Donate, Guide, Team, دليل, and انضم إلنا! as well as a تسجيل الدخول button.
Alt...
Screenshot of Kitten’s Interactive Shell (REPL), showing an action performed in the browser (client event) automatically triggering a server-side event handler that then updates a boolean value in a JavaScript object in memory that is automatically persisted to disk using Kitten’s built-in JSDB (JavaScript Database):
📄 → 🐱: Client event
« signUpSwitch » SignUpsSwitch (KittenComponent) sign-up-switch
{ _componentId: 'sign-up-switch' }
💾 Settings updated in memory.
Settings {
id: '7832e729-1996-4ac4-b7d0-db3b6ba294d9',
allowSignUps: true,
mastodonAccessToken: '**** [REDACTED]'
} => allowSignUps = false
🐱 → 📄: Streaming HTML
<div hx-swap-oob="morph" data-kitten-component id="sign-up-switch" class="signUpSwitch off">
<div class="Switch">
<label for="switch-53fb247e-5681-44c1-b8a0-f3f5bac6521d" class="Switch">Sign-ups are closed.</label>
<input id="switch-53fb247e-5681-44c1-b8a0-f3f5bac6521d" name="signUpSwitch" type="checkbox" role="switch" ws-send hx-ext="ws,morph" hx-swap-oob="morph">
</div>
</div>
💾 Settings persisted to disk.
kitten.db.settings.allowSignUps = false
Persisted as:
'_[[`allowSignUps`]] = false;\n'
🐱 💬
Very excited about the new stateful components model in Kitten¹ that I’m looking forward to releasing this week (finally) and the amount of visibility you can now get into the flow of your Kitten apps in the Kitten Interactive Shell (REPL)².
Since the new model is a breaking change (Kitten is prerelease) I’m in the middle of updating our own apps/sites and I still need to document everything. So it will take me a few days to do all that but then I’m very much looking forward to focussing on finishing up Catalyst and Yarn³ for launch this year.
It’s been a six year trek to reach what will essentially be the starting point of the Small Web :)
💕
PS. If you want to support our work, please see https://small-tech.org/fund-us/
¹ https://kitten.small-web.org
² https://kitten.small-web.org/tutorials/kitten-s-interactive-shell-repl/
³ https://ar.al/2024/06/24/small-web-computer-science-colloquium-at-university-of-groningen/
#SmallWeb #Kitten #web #dev #statefulComponents #streamingHTML #hypertext #webSockets
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Screenshot of the Kitten REPL running in WezTerm:
🐢 Kitten Interactive Shell (REPL) ctrl-d to exit; .help for assistance.
Key
🐱 Kitten 📄 Page 🛜 Server event
🧩 Component ◉━◉ Connected ◉╌◌ Disconnected
🐱 💬 kitten.$showEventsOnTable('counter')
undefined
🐱 💬
📄 → 🐱: Client event
« update » Counter (KittenComponent) c9333a86
{
update: '',
value: 1,
_componentId: 'kid-c9333a86-208f-468a-93f6-c6c706a13148'
}
💾 Counter updated in memory.
{ count: 41 } => count = 42
🐱 → 📄: Streaming HTML
<div data-kitten-component id="kid-c9333a86-208f-468a-93f6-c6c706a13148" hx-swap-oob="morph" hx-ext="morph">
<div aria-live="assertive">42</div>
<button name="update" aria-label="decrement" ws-send hx-ext="ws" hx-vals="js:{value: -1}">-</button>
<button name="update" aria-label="increment" ws-send hx-ext="ws" hx-vals="js:{value: 1}">+</button>
<style inline>@scope { div { font-size: 3em; margin: 0.25em 0; } }</style>
</div>
💾 Counter table update.
kitten.db.counter.count = 42
Persisted as:
'_[[`count`]] = 42;\n'
scala> type Something = Nothing => Nothing#dev #tech #software #math #scala #TypeTheory
// defined alias type Something = Nothing => Nothing
scala> summon[Something =:= Nothing]
-- [E172] Type Error: ----------------------------------------------------------
1 |summon[Something =:= Nothing]
| ^
| Cannot prove that Something =:= Nothing.
1 error found
📰 Meta confirmed that 1000s of Instagram accounts were hacked by abusing its AI chatbot, according to a report from This Week In Security.
rsync thing has me thinking about the difference between the "free as in beer" model of free software and the "free as in freedom" model the FSF originally put forward. There are important differences, and it's meaningful when a project changes from one model to the other, which is one way to narrativize what's happened to rsync.I think "free as in beer" software is more appropriately called "Libertarian and Open Source Software", or LOSS. Among other things it involves no obligations on other people, and expects no obligations in return (*). But this means it's an everyone for themselves, anti-communitarian endeavor. We should be honest about this. We should also be honest when a project changes state from FOSS to LOSS, because that's a meaningful change, and actually is a loss in my view.
I continue to believe that enthusiastic embrace of AI/LLM coding tools is a leading indicator of an impending FOSS→LOSS transition.
It seems to me at least one driver of the uproar over rsync is that a bunch of people thought it was a FOSS project but it had, in a short period of time, converted into a LOSS project and the shock was jolting (understandably). As a FOSS project, rsync served a community function, leading people to depend on it, make assumptions about its longer-term stability, and so on. Those are reasonable expectations of a communitarian project. As a LOSS project, rsync is under no obligations to anyone and the maintainer(s) can change the software at any time, for any reason, at their discretion alone. It seems rsync is a LOSS.
#tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #FOSS #freedom #rsync #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs
(*) Putting aside whether this principle is consistently applied or hypocritical.
Open up chat to myself. Send a chat for each todo item. Use a reaction emoji to indicate status (done/cancelled/etc). Reply to the chat to add additional information and/or surface the item. All of it is shared among all devices, encrypted, and generates notifications. The one feature I'd like that I haven't figured out how to hack manually is scheduled reminders. An XMPP chat app that had scheduled messages could do it! I haven't found an XEP specifically about this but XEP-0471 might be bent to this purpose.
As a low-vision user I already have to lean heavily on my short-term memory to successfully navigate the web. I also constantly use screen magnifiers.
When I select some text on a web page and hit "copy", then go to some other document and hit "paste", and what comes out is different from what I selected, my cognitive load suddenly spikes. The problem is compounded by the fact that I'm very likely zoomed so far into the desktop that I don't even see the text I thought I'd selected. Naturally I begin wondering whether I made a mistake, whether I selected more text than I intended, whether I didn't hit Ctrl-C enthusiastically enough for it to register, etc etc etc. What ought to be a simple and routine command turns into a mystery to solve. To me this feels like a hallmark of poor design.
(Please note that I will probably block you if you respond with advice or fatalism; see above regarding causing spikes in cognitive load).
I love this post for several reasons, one being that it got me thinking. The Bad Tech aside, generally speaking modern software development seems hyperfocused on change at the expense of stability. git has countless features for managing changes to source code. What's the equivalent tool for managing the stability of finished software? What's the tool that tells you "Great! You're done now, congratulations!"
Surely there are pieces of software that are mature enough that we do not need to keep updating them (*) with new features. The industry seems to provide little fanfare or reward for reaching or even approaching such an end state.
#tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #coding
(*) Bug fixes, security patches, and porting aside.
📰 GitHub has confirmed that unauthorized access to their internal repositories was facilitated through a malicious Visual Studio Code extension, affecting 3,800 repositories.
Kagi started as an AI company that wanted to slurp up the internet to provide a question "answering" service not unlike what Google is proposing to replace web search with. Perhaps they've toned this rhetoric down a bit on their blog recently but there's no evidence I'm aware of that the business has changed mission. All of this is still available on Kagi's own blog---including the fact that they used to be kagi.ai---yet somehow it's controversial to point it out. If you're looking for a web search engine that isn't likely to turn into a slop extruder, Kagi is probably not going to be the one. Try @Mojeek@mastodon.social or Marginalia. This list might be helpful too.
#web #search #dev #tech #software #AI #Kagi #WebSearch #InternetSearch #InformationRetrieval
📰 OpenClaw Security is developing advanced AI-driven security solutions to protect against emerging threats and enhance network defenses.
🔗 https://openclaw.ai/blog/where-openclaw-security-is-heading
📰 Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints, according to an article published on writing.antonleicht.me with 8 comments on Hacker News.
Why people working on software where something serious is at stake would throw out known gradient to use a code generator + testing is beyond my capacity to understand.
https://1password.social/@1password/116580082041363054
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #VibeCoding #Software #SoftwareDevelopment #tech #dev #security #InfoSec #PasswordManagers
Poll: say you have a table of data sorted in ascending order:
Alpha
Bravo
Charlie
… etc
Which icon should appear next to the heading to show that it has been sorted that way?
#UI #Interface #programming #webdev #dev #data #coding #frontend
| Downward pointing triangle like ▼: | 4 |
| Upward pointing triangle like ▲: | 1 |
| Some other thing: | 1 |
📰 Kubernetes remediation for CVE-2026-31431 addresses critical vulnerabilities in container orchestration systems, highlighting the need for immediate updates and security patches to protect against unauthorized access and data breaches.
Do instructors just not teach the code-data duality anymore? Data is code is data is now a mystery?
#ComputerScience #tech #dev #coding #software #SoftwareDevelopment #literalism #LinkedIn
One of the beautiful things about Sublime Merge¹ (and git/diffs) is that you can see exactly what has changed in complex expected values in tests to ensure that you’re updating the tests without overlooking regressions.
(This is from the Markdown page loader tests in Kitten², as I’m refactoring to implement the upcoming breaking change in the stateful components API³ as it affects the generated code for stateful layout components in Markdown pages.)
¹ Which I always have running, full-screen on its own monitor.
² https://kitten.small-web.org
³ Currently experimental and undocumented but that should change once this breaking change is implemented.
#git #diff #unitTests #tape #SublimeMerge #Kitten #SmallWeb #web #dev #developerExperience
Alt...
Screenshot of Sublime Merge displaying a lovely side-by-side diff of my ES Module Loader tests for Kitten, making it very clear exactly what has changed between normalised expected values of various Kitten HTML template renders (in this case, the generated code for the page – if it’s a stateless (functional) Kitten page – is defined as a regular function instead of as a closure (arrow function).
#tech #dev #security #cybersecurity #InfoSec #Vercel #breach #OAuth #AI
In what I’m telling myself is in no way feature creep, I just added experimental TypeScript support to Kitten in a dev branch.
I’m actually surprised how easy it was to do. Given I’m already using esbuild to create the Kitten bundle and already using a custom module loader, the change was basically making esbuild a dependency instead of a dev dependency, lazily transforming .ts files in the loader, and updating a few places in the code to ensure that you can use .ts as an extension in special Kitten extensions like .page.js, .post.js, etc. (so now you can have page.ts, post.ts, etc.)
Everything works the same way it does with TypeScript as it does with JavaScript – there’s no scaffolding or any additional workflow required.
For obvious reasons, I won’t be deploying this at end of day Friday but, hopefully, along with the major breaking change to the stateful component API, I plan to next week.
More details in the work-in-progress change log:
https://codeberg.org/kitten/app/src/branch/stateful-components-api-breaking-change/CHANGELOG.md#2026-04
💕
#Kitten #SmallWeb #SmallTech #NodeJS #JavaScript #TypeScript #web #dev
I realized that if I was writing a program and it didn't always work, I had a choice: I could either fix it, or call it AI.--David Parnas
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #LLMs #Claude #ClaudeCode #ChatGPT #tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering
Oh, you just slapped a 1MB image on your web page? That’s nice.
Back in the day, folks were hiding running code and data in the graphics of their games that had to fit into 22KB.
https://revs.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/hidden_secrets_of_the_custom_screen_mode.html
Alt...
Screenshot of BBC Micro driving game Rev with the code and data normally hidden in blue in the sky shown in yellow.
In light of what I've seen, LLM use seems to provide the illusion of addressing both kinds of complexity in the short-term while it increases essential complexity in the long-term. It may or may not reduce some accidental complexity; the verdict is still out, as far as I can tell. Judging from the recent leak of the Claude Code front end source code, LLMs seem to introduce an enormous amount of new accidental complexity.
To the extent that LLMs are in the category of what Brooks calls automatic programming, this quote he shares from David Parnas is important:
Automatic programming always has been a euphemism for programming with a higher-level language than was presently available to the programmer.The "higher-level language" LLMs trade in is English, which Dijkstra has strongly argued makes for a poor programming language. But even if, contra Dijkstra, it turns out LLMs somehow change that equation, we are still stuck with Brooks's argument that higher-level programming languages largely only address accidental complexity. They do not get at the essence of what makes creating software systems difficult.
Taken together, all this seems to suggest that LLM use in coding is a net negative, and if the above is to be believed it will result in worse outcomes, not better, over the long haul. Definitely re-read Brooks and see if you agree.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #LLMs #ClaudeCode #software #tech #dev #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment
What appears as critique – yearning for smaller, weirder, more human spaces – often functions as brand repair. Netstalgia becomes a strategy: it restores trust without redistributing power, softens anger without changing infrastructures and reframes structural problems as matters of vibe, design or community feeling."Am I working on change, or am I working on brand repair?" is an important question to ask oneself regularly, it seems to me. It's especially relevant for the tech sector, open source, and computer science.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #tech #dev #software #OSS #FOSS #ComputerScience
#tech #dev #computers #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #advertising #InformationPollution
I’ve made this point before about how inane AI hype is now, but a computer beat the best chess player in the world in 1997. No one pretended, after 1997, it wasn’t worthwhile to have humans compete in chess. In fact, the world of chess developed strict protocols around computer use and you can get banned from tournaments if you use a computer program as you play. You are certainly shamed and mocked.#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AIHype #LLMs #writing #tech #dev #coding #SoftwareDevelopment #SoftwareEngneering #softwareAI and writing needs to be treated the same way. I do think people should be shamed for using AI to help them write creatively. It’s an embarrassment, and a form of cheating.
You don't have to pretend that Claude Code's source code is lovely just because you like using it or are impressed by whatever madness is going on around AI right now.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Anthropic #Claude #ClaudeCode #ClaudeCodeLeak #AgenticAI #tech #dev #software #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment
Buddy. I've written COBOL. I spent several years working almost daily with a 3-million-line monstrosity of a COBOL program. I was working on another app that interfaced with it, but in that work I occasionally had to read the code and in a few cases modify it. Granted I haven't spent as much time looking at the leaked Claude Code source code (and won't lol), but nevertheless I confidently declare that Claude Code is worse. "Spaghetti code" doesn't come close to describing this thing.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #ClaudeCode #ClaudeCodeLeak #Anthropic #Claude #tech #dev #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment #software #COBOL #LinkedIn
One of the most popular JavaScript packages on earth Axios has been compromised
The Axios NPM package has been compromised and the maintainer of the project has been locked out of their account. This will go down in history as one of the most successful software supply chain attacks ever
💥 https://opensourcemalware.com/blog/axios-compromised
#javascript #axios #webdev #npm #js #dev #compression #softwareattribution #web #webdev #successful #attack #plaincryptojs #malware
So I just bought @nileane’s TinyStart launcher and, yep, it’s beautiful.
Minimalist in the best possible way. I’m keeping Spotlight around for the moment but already I’m not sure why I would use it for anything.
So lovely to see indie devs showing trillion-dollar corporations how it should be done.
💕
#TinyStart #macOS #launcher #app #indie #dev
Alt...
The main TinyStart launcher window showing my most launched apps and links (for the moment, WezTerm, the Catalyst web site, and Sublime Merge).
Alt...
TinyStart’s beautiful emoji picker, with my last used emoji (cat face) in the Recent list, followed by the Smileys & Emotion section.
Alt...
TinyStart’s settings panel, showing the Links section active with links I’ve entered that I want to access quickly (the Kitten and Catalyst web sites and their source repository pages as well as the Gaza Verified page).
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #github #tech #dev #SoftwareDevelopment
I worry that few smaller companies or startups will survive, and the country will be pockmocked with half-constructed data centers and obsolete equipment. This is not like the dot-com crash that left useful and unused fiber optic networking.
hashtag#AI hashtag#GenAI hashtag#GenerativeAI hashtag#software hashtag#tech hashtag#dev hashtag#AssetBubble hashtag#PrivateCredit
🥳 New Kitten¹ Release
• Adds Kitten Introspection API
I’ll record a video this week demonstrating it.
In the meanwhile, check out the change log for details:
https://codeberg.org/kitten/app/src/branch/main/CHANGELOG.md#2026-03-29
Enjoy!
💕
¹ https://kitten.small-web.org
#Kitten #KittenReleases #SmallWeb #SmallTech #introspectionAPI #web #dev
I'm not going to name and shame but I'm in the midst of a conversation on this, which is why it's top of mind.
I think some of the strange shifts we're seeing in high-profile folks in tech who already had authoritarian impulses---which, let's be real, is uncomfortably common among tech workers---is that they are groping for ways to embrace taking power that do not run afoul of other values they've endorsed. This really can't be done unless the person was already pretty antisocial, so we see weird behavior such as running self-serving "surveys" about AI with foregone conclusions, microaggressions and dissembling, attacks and other forms of hostility, being "one shotted" or conflating a computer program with humanness, etc. It's really a general problem, in that view, given how the US regime has shifted away from social democracy/liberalism into a much more brash, violent, and authoritarian stance. There are a variety of ways to cope with such a shift, one being to embrace it while bursting into a cloud of internal contradictions.
#FOSS #OSS #OpenSource #software #tech #dev #SoftwareLicensing
Heads up: there's body shaming and ableism in what follows. [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
John Backus titled his 1977 Turing Award lecture to the ACM Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs. Section 1 is titled:1. Conventional Programming Languages: Fat and FlabbyIn the abstract, he states:
Conventional programming languages are growing ever more enormous, but not stronger. Inherent defects at the most basic level cause them to be both fat and weak: their primitive word-at-a-time style of programming inherited from their common ancestor--the von Neumann computer, their close coupling of semantics to state transitionsand later
For twenty years programming languages have been steadily progressing toward their present condition of obesitydoubling down on the body shaming and ableism. He clarifies later in the lecture that what he means by "von Neumann programming language" is one with assignment statements and manipulation of variables. Applicative (i.e. functional) languages are what he means to contrast with these stateful languages.
Several figures of that time, including Peter Landin of "the next 700 programming languages" fame, were unashamedly in love with the lambda calculus and the prospect that it could usher in a full algebraization of computer programming. Backus is interesting because here in a high-profile lecture he's explicitly referring to issues of state as making programming languages "fat" and "flabby". I suspect many of his peers felt similarly even if they weren't using such nakedly ableist metaphors.
#ComputerScience #SoftwareDevelopment #tech #dev #ableism #FunctionalProgramming #StatefulProgramming #ImperativeProgramming #SideEffects #effects
For the uninitiated, what are typically called side effects include:
- Input/output (to the screen, to/from a disk drive, to a printer, to/from the internet, etc.)
- Relatedly, interaction (with the mouse, with the keyboard)
- Statefulness ("remembering" data in RAM)
- Parallelism (doing more than one thing at a time) and asynchrony (doing things out of order)
In what sense, then, are they "side"? And what on earth is being "managed"? Isn't that what we mean by "programming"?
#ComputerScience #SoftwareDevelopment #tech #dev #politics #FunctionalProgramming #SideEffects #effects
Getting the whole argument just right is fiddly, but the basic idea is this. You feed some kind of theory into the AM/AS, which is a black box. It churns on this and spits out a result, which is added to the theory (I'm neglecting the case that the result is inconsistent with the theory). It can now churn on theory + result 1. For any given and potentially very large N, after doing this long enough, it's churning on theory + result 1 + result 2 + ... + result N. Whatever it spits out will be dependent in particular on results 1 - N. When N is large enough, unless you know these results you will not be able to understand what it outputs because the output will almost surely depend critically on one or more of results 1 - N. In other words, the output will look like noise to you. If the AM/AS is appreciably faster at producing results than people are at understanding them, there will be an N beyond which no one can understand the output up to that point. It'll become indistinguishable (unable to be distinguished) from random noise.
If you're into software development, this would be analogous to a software system that generates syntactically-correct code and then adds that code as a new call in a growing software library. If you were to run this long enough, virtually all the programs it generated that were short enough for human beings to have any hope of reading and understanding would consist almost entirely of library calls to code generated by the system. You'd have no idea what any of this code did unless you studied the library calls, which you wouldn't be able to do beyond a certain scale. If the system were expanding the library faster than you could read and understand it, there'd be no hope at all.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether this is a desirable thing to do and whether it's happened yet. I would offer, though, a question to ponder: what reason is there to believe that a random number generator hooked up to an inscrutable interpreter produces human flourishing, for any given meaning of "human flourishing" you care to use?
#tech #dev #mathematics #AutomatedMathematician #AutomatedScientist #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #ThoughtExperiment
At least in the way I use computers as a low vision person, pop-ups are extraordinarily anti-accessibility. Yes, even tooltips and alt-hovertext, depending on how they're done. Some websites are close to unusable because of these things.
In retrospect I might have written non-sense in place of nonsense.
If you're in tech the Han reference might be a bit out of your comfort zone, but Andrews is accessible and measured.
It's nonsense to say that coding will be replaced with "good judgment". There's a presupposition behind that, a worldview, that can't possibly fly. It's sometimes called the theory-free ideal: given enough data, we don't need theory to understand the world. It surfaces in AI/LLM/programming rhetoric in the form that we don't need to code anymore because LLM's can do most of it. Programming is a form of theory-building (and understanding), while LLMs are vast fuzzy data store and retrieval systems, so the theory-free ideal dictates the latter can/should replace the former. But it only takes a moment's reflection to see that nothing, let alone programming, can be theory-free; it's a kind of "view from nowhere" way of thinking, an attempt to resurrect Laplace's demon that ignores everything we've learned in the >200 years since Laplace forwarded that idea. In that respect it's a (neo)reactionary viewpoint, and it's maybe not a coincidence that people with neoreactionary politics tend to hold it. Anyone who needs a more formal argument can read Mel Andrews's The Immortal Science of ML: Machine Learning & the Theory-Free Ideal, or Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics (which argues, among other things, that this is a nihilistic).#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #coding #dev #tech #SoftwareDevelopment #programming #nihilism #LinkedIn
- https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/2163
- https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/2008
- https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/2273
#SearX #SearXNG #SearchEngines #AlternateSearchEngines #MetaSearchEngines #web #dev #tech #FOSS #OpenSource #AI #AIPoisoning #AISlop #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #ChatGPT #Claude #Perplexity
The future lies in embracing statefulness and effectfulness in self-modifying code. Unlike the bureaucratic procedure of rule-based coding, this style of programming is more like surfing, or performance, or gardening. Your task as a programmer is to plant a seed of code that unfolds into something beautiful, possibly guiding it as it unfolds if you have the mastery. I'll leave as an exercise for the reader what the soil is in this metaphor.
(I'm only half joking!)
One of my favorite "security challenges" is the "verify your email" one. By this point my email has been verified so many times it should have top secret clearance.
#Mozilla #Firefox #DarkPatterns#antifeatures #AISlop #NoAI #NoAIWebBrowsers #AICruft #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #tech #dev #web
"Politics" isn't only about institutions. It's about organizing large numbers of people to do something they wouldn't otherwise do. Corporations organize large numbers of people to do things they probably wouldn't do if they weren't paid and/or didn't need the money to live. 10,000 people wouldn't spontaneously get together and spend the best hours of their days for months building a commercial jet airliner if there weren't corporate structures in place and a society that keeps them close enough to deprivation that they will do this in exchange for money.
#FOSS #OSS #OpenSource #software #OpenSourceSoftware #tech #dev #SoftwareDevelopment #politics #economics #corporations
Long post [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
I've now had at least four people, two of whom self-identified as Mozilla employees, claim that the above list of AI features--which were suddenly and rapidly added over the last few releases of Firefox, and were "on" (true) by default--could easily be turned off by flipping one master kill switch. This is not true, but folks keep claiming it or suggesting it anyway.Here's a post from an official Firefox Mastodon account suggesting such a master kill switch does not exist yet, but will be added in a future release:
https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115740500373677782
That's not as bad as it could be. It's bad they're stuffing AI into a perfectly good web browser for no apparent reason other than vibes or desperation. It's very bad if it's on by default; their dissembling post about it aside, opt-in has a reasonably clear meaning here: if there's a kill switch, then that kill switch should be off by default. But at least there will be a kill switch.
In any case, please stop responding to my post saying there's a master kill switch for Firefox's AI slop features. From the horse's mouth, and from user experience, there is not yet.
Furthermore, when there is a master kill switch, we don't know whether flipping it will maintain previous state of all the features it controls. In other words it's possible they'll have the master kill switch turn on all AI features when the switch is flipped to "on" or "true", rather than leaving them in whatever state you'd set them to previously. Perhaps you decide to turn the kill switch on because there are a handful of features you're comfortable with and you want to try them; will doing so mean that now all the AI features are on? We won't know till it's released and people try this. So, in the meantime, it's still good practice to keep an eye on all these configuration options if you want the AI off.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #web #tech #dev #Firefox #Mozilla #AISlop #NoAI #NoLLMs #NoAIBrowsers
AI is intellectual Viagraand it hasn't left me so I am exorcising it here. I'm sorry in advance for any pain this might cause.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #DiffusionModels #tech #dev #coding #software #SoftwareDevelopment #writing #art #VisualArt
In a GitHub issue about adding LLM features:
I definitely think allowing the user to continue the conversation is useful. In my own use of LLMs I tend to often ask followup questions, being able to do so in the same window will be useful.In other words he likes LLMs and uses them himself; he's probably not adding these features under pressure from users. I can't help but wonder whether there's vibe code in there.
In the bug report:
Wow, really! What is it with you people that think you can dictate what I choose to do with my time and my software? You find AI offensive, dont use it, or even better, dont use calibre, I can certainly do without users like you. Do NOT try to dictate to other people what they can or cannot do."You people", also known as paying users. He's dismissive of people's concerns about generative AI, and claims ownership of the software ("my software"). He tells people with concerns to get lost, setting up an antagonistic, us-versus-them scenario. We even get scream caps!
Personally, besides the fact that I have a zero tolerance policy about generative AI, I've had enough of arrogant software developers. Read the room.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #calibre #eBooks #eBookManagers #AISlop #AIPoisoning #InformationOilSpill #dev #tech #FOSS #SoftwareDevelopment
#Cloudflare #SecurityTheater #surveillance #web #tech #dev #DarkPattern
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #tech #dev #DataScience #science #ComputerScience #EcologicalRationality
- browser.aiwindow.enabled
- browser.ml.chat.enabled
- browser.ml.chat.menu
- browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge
- browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge
- browser.ml.chat.page
- browser.ml.chat.shortcuts
- browser.ml.chat.sidebar
- browser.ml.enable
- browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
- browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled
- browser.ml.smartAssist.enabled
- browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
- browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled
- extensions.ml.enabled
- sidebar.notification.badge.aichat
Enter "about:config" in the browser bar and then search for each of these and disable them, turn them off, or set them to false as appropriate.
Depending on which version of Firefox you have you may not have all these configuration options.
Check your smartphone browsers too!
#firefox #mozilla #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #SmartIsSurveillance #tech #dev #web #NoAI #AICruft #antifeatures
#firefox #mozilla #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #SmartIsSurveillance #tech #dev #web
#dev #tech #web #resilience #DarkPatterns #DownDetector #cloudflare #CloudflareOutage #EverythingIsBroken
Screenshot reads:
downdetector.com
Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.
#tech #dev #web #DarkPatterns #DownDetector #cloudflare #CloudflareOutage #EverythingIsBroken
#Google #Gmail #Gfail #GoogleIsSpam #tech #dev
Alt...
Screenshot of a Google Mail inbox showing a recent Google-generated verification email sitting in the spam folder. I did not put it there, nor do I recall ever telling Google to mark Google emails as spam.
#tech #dev #web #captcha #cybersecurity #infosec #SecurityTheater #DarkPatterns
Security theater. In fact I think "security" is really about control, and nowadays when I encounter a security challenge I think of it in terms of who is trying to control my behavior and to what ends. I think it's clear by now that many internet "security" controls, at least those deployed by large tech companies, are not good faith efforts to protect users; that's a secondary concern.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #Copilot #Gemini #tech #dev #web #internet #SecurityTheater #cybersecurity #infosec #security
#tech #dev #web #internet #SecurityTheater #cybersecurity #infosec #security
Somehow bot-detecting algorithms have been degrading over time.
This is a troubling trend because people who aren't using the anointed access points of the internet struggle more and more to connect and interact. Large entities like CloudFlare choke off more and more avenues of access in the name of "security", enforcing digital checkpoints without any accountability to anyone.
#dev #tech #web #bot #DarkPattern #security #infosec #cybersecurity #checkpoint
The first thing I said to the person who suggested to me that human brains might be directly hooked to a computer, whenever that was, was "everyone will go insane immediately". I still believe that, but now we're beginning to see evidence.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #Neuralink #tech #dev #HCI #BrainImplants
When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the further degradation of an already degraded educational system. We agree that we would rather deplete our natural resources than make our own art or think our own thoughts. We dig ourselves deeper into crises that have been made worse by technology, from the erosion of electoral democracy to the intensification of climate change. We condone platforms that not only urge children to commit suicide, they instruct them on how to tie the noose. We hand over our autonomy, at the very moment of emerging American fascism.Yes +1.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #Claude #Copilot #Gemini #GPT #ChatGPT #tech #dev #science #research #writing
Like other addictive technologies, I have a love/hate relationship with ____________, and the more I despise it, the more I use it, and the more I use it, the more disgusted I am at how addicted I’ve gotten, and the more addicted I get, the more I wish it had never been invented.#dev #tech
Here's an except from a post on Matt Stoller's BIG newsletter, which is very good on the subject of antitrust:
The last meaningful reference point for an antitrust remedy is the Microsoft case. In that one, the break-up was overturned, and a weak interoperability mandate was imposed. But the real penalty to Microsoft was embarrassment and fear within the executive suite; no longer would the company crush its rivals, from then on, lawyers would cautiously oversee product design. That’s not ideal, Microsoft should have just been broken up and set free to compete. But a chastened leadership did have the effect of not killing the next generation of companies, who ended up creating Web 2.0. That’s deterrence, which is one goal of antitrust remedies.(emphasis mine)This remedy, by contrast, is obviously going to fail. And the main reason is that, unlike Microsoft, Google’s leadership is utterly unchastened. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and chief legal officer Kent Walker will get bonuses for what they did. They see this conflict as one in which they fought bitterly, and kept at it, and shredded documents, and the result was… victory. They will have no compunction continuing to engage in unlawful behavior. After all, what’s the worst that could happen? Would a rival or the government really go before a weak judge who doesn’t want conflict, and convince him to act? I don’t think so. In other words, this decision isn’t just bad, it’s virtually a statement that crime pays.
Stoller recently wrote a post titled "Why Is Google Still in One Piece? The Terminating a Monopoly Problem" with the subtitle: "Google has lost three separate antitrust cases, and more are on the way. Why does this company still exist in one piece? It shouldn't, but we're still dealing with the hangover of the 1990s."
The problems with the tech sector go all the way to the tippy top.
#Google #monopoly #IllegalMonopoly #antitrust #dev #tech #Gemini #android #Chrome
#captcha #SecurityTheater #infosec #CyberSecurity #security #tech #dev #internet #web
https://fosstodon.org/users/scala_lang/statuses/115056704676502452
#dev #tech #coding #conference #scala #ScalaDays #CovidIsNotOver #CovidIsAirborne #LongCovid #MaskUp #accessibility
If you take the stance that writing is thinking--that writing is among other things a process by which we order our thoughts--then understanding code generator output will require substantial rewriting of the code by whomever is tasked with converting it from technical debt to technical asset.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #CodeAssistant #AgenticAI #tech #dev #coding #TechnicalDebt
I am very twitchy about what's happening with AI polluting every corner of Microsoft Windows and am worried the same will happen to at least some Linux distributions. I think the worry is warranted, but in this case I misfired--sorry about that.
I guess I won't be using GNOME ever again
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-AI-Assistant-1.0
#tech #dev #FOSS #OpenSource #linux #software #GNOME #NoAI #AI
Microsoft Corp. has walked away from new data center projects in the US and Europe that would have amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity, according to TD Cowen analysts, who attributed the pullback to an oversupply of the clusters of computers that power artificial intelligence."Data center projects that...amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity" is a nonsensical statement. The (technical) capacities of a data center have to do with storage, compute, transmission, and latency. I understand there's probably some Fermi calculation along the lines of converting electric power to compute capacity using the TDP of NVIDIA's latest GPUs or something like that. Nevertheless, it's misleading to speak this way, not to mention lazy. It is oversimplifying in a bad way, treating data centers as utilities that supply a commodity when that is just not the case (at least not with AI, where prices for services still fluctuate fairly wildly).