Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 34 Posts
- 115 Comments
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto Linux@lemmy.ml•Just wanted to show off the lowest end hardware I ever ran Linux onEnglish5·23 days agoI’m planning on revitalizing and bringing this old Itautec to the 21st century
I think it was born in the 21st century? From this it looks like the first Celeron M was in 2004, and the first at that clockspeed was 2005.
Also, 2GB of RAM is plenty for many purposes - that’s more than any Raspberry Pi before the Pi 4 had!
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Technology@beehaw.org•ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logicEnglish211·30 days agoThis article buries the lede so much that many readers probably miss it completely: the important takeaway here, which is clearer in The Register’s version of the story, is that ChatGPT cannot actually play chess:
“Despite being given a baseline board layout to identify pieces, ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks, and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were."
To actually use an LLM as a chess engine without the kind of manual intervention that this person did, you would need to combine it with some other software to automate continuing to ask it for a different next move every time it suggests an invalid one. And, if you did that, it would still mostly lose, even to much older chess engines than Atari’s Video Chess.
edit: i see now that numerous people have done this; you can find many websites where you can “play chess against chatgpt” (which actually means: with chatgpt and also some other mechanism to enforce the rules). and if you know how to play chess you should easily win :)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto Linux@lemmy.ml•Cross-platform video player GrayJay now available as FlatpakEnglish93·1 month agoalso “you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.” 🤡
FUTO’s license meets neither the free software definition nor the open source definition.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Open Source@lemmy.ml•is there something about rust which precludes copyleft licensing?English1·2 months agoLmao that my pedanticism could be perceived as BSD advocacy - fwiw, I primarily use GNU/Linux, I develop GPL-licensed software, and I think GPLv3 or AGPLv3 are good choices for many new projects starting today.
My opinions about the history and future of copyleft are somewhat complicated but I didn’t mention any opinions in the comment you’re replying to - I was just correcting your factual misunderstandings about the accepted definitions of these terms.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Technology@lemmy.ml•Top countries with the most solar power in operation - Global TimesEnglish1·3 months agoBy “solar power in operation” (in GW) i think they mean maximum output capacity rather than actual production, since these numbers add up to 923 GW while wikipedia says in 2024 there was 2.13 petawatt-hours (243 GW on average) actually produced by solar.
encryption would prevent the modem from seeing it when someone sends it, but such a short string will inevitably appear once in a while in ciphertext too. so, it would actually make it disconnect at random times instead :)
(edit: actually at seven bytes i guess it would only occur once in every 72PB on average…)
As I wrote in the thread about this last month on !linux@lemmy.ml:
I wonder how much work is entailed in transforming Fedora in to a distro that meets some definition of the word “Sovereign” 🤔
Personally I wouldn’t want to make a project like this be dependent on the whims of a US defense contractor like RedHat/IBM, especially after what happened with CentOS.
and, re: “what do you mean ‘redhat is a defense contractor’?!”: here are some links.
(source)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Technology@lemmy.ml•100+ Meta employees, including Head of AI Policy, confirmed as ex-IDFEnglish8·3 months agopoe’s law exemplar 😬
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto Linux@lemmy.ml•Tuxedo OS (Ubuntu-based) with KDE/Wayland - waking from Sleep freezes the computer. Help?English3·3 months agoyou could edit your post title…
Have you tried https://mike-fabian.github.io/ibus-typing-booster/ ?
I have not, but I think it does what you’re looking for.
The demo video emphasizes its use as an emoji picker but it was originally created for typing Indic languages.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Technology@lemmy.ml•Content moderation is what a 21st century hazardous job looks likeEnglish14·3 months agoand here i does it for free 🤡
At first i thought, wow, cool they’re still developing that? Doing a release or two a year, i see.
I used to use it long ago, and was pretty happy with it.
But looking closer now, what is going on with security there?! Sorry to be the bearer of probably bad news, but... 😬
The only three CVEs in their changelog are from 2007, 2010, and 2014, and none are specific to claws.
Does that mean they haven’t had any exploitable bugs? That seems extremely unlikely for a program written in C with the complexity that being an email client requires.
All of the recent changelog entries which sound like possibly-security-relevant bugs have seven-digit numbers prefixed with “CID”, whereas the other bugs have four-digit bug numbers corresponding to entries in their bugzilla.
After a few minutes of searching, I have failed to figure out what “CID” means, or indeed to find any reference to these numbers outside of claws commit messages and release announcements. In any case, from the types of bugs which have these numbers instead of bugzilla entries, it seems to be the designation they are using for security bugs.
The effect of failing to register CVEs and issue security advisories is that downstream distributors of claws (such as the Linux distributions which the project’s website recommends installing it from) do not patch these issues.
For instance, claws is included in Debian stable and three currently-supported LTS releases of Ubuntu - which are places where users could be receiving security updates if the project registered CVEs, but are not since they don’t.
Even if you get claws from a rolling release distro, or build the latest release yourself, it looks like you’d still be lagging substantially on likely-security-relevant updates: there have actually been numerous commits containing CID numbers in the month since the last release.
If the claws developers happen to read this: thanks for writing free software, but: please update your FAQ to explain these CID numbers, and start issuing security advisories and/or registering CVEs when appropriate so that your distributors will ship security updates to your users!
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Open Source@lemmy.ml•is there something about rust which precludes copyleft licensing?English2·3 months agoNope.
Nope, it is.
It allows someone to use code without sharing the changes of that code. It enables non-free software creators like Microsoft to take the code, use it however they like, and not have to share back.
This is correct; it is a permissive license.
This is what Free Software prevents.
No, that is what copyleft (aims to) prevent.
Tired of people calling things like MIT and *BSD true libre/Free Software.
The no True Scotsman fallacy requires a lack of authority about what what constitutes “true” - but in the case of Free/Libre software, we have one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
If you look at this license list (maintained by the Free Software Foundation’s Licensing and Compliance Lab) you’ll see that they classify many non-copyleft licenses as “permissive free software licenses”.
They’re basically one step away from no license at all.
Under the Berne Convention of 1886, everything is copyrighted by default, so “no license at all” means that nobody has permission to redistribute it :)
The differences between permissive free software licenses and CC0 or a simple declaration that something is “dedicated to the public domain” are subtle and it’s easy to see them as irrelevant, but the choice of license does have consequences.
The FSF recommends that people who want to use a permissive license choose Apache 2.0 “for substantial programs” because of its clause which “prevents patent treachery”, while noting that that clause makes it incompatible with GPLv2. For “simple programs” when the author wants a permissive license, FSF recommends the Expat license (aka the MIT license).
It is noteworthy that the latter is compatible with GPLv2; MIT-licensed programs can be included in a GPLv2-only work (like the Linux kernel) while Apache 2.0-licensed programs cannot. (GPLv3 is more accommodating and allows patent-related additional restrictions to be applied, so it is compatible with Apache 2.0.)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Open Source@lemmy.ml•Organic Maps successfully migrates to Forgejo after GitHub blocks themEnglish15·3 months agoWhat is a U.S.-sanctioned place? Why does the U.S. government think this is a bad thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_sanctions
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Open Source@lemmy.ml•Organic Maps successfully migrates to Forgejo after GitHub blocks themEnglish671·3 months ago🎉 sometimes US sanctions actually do lead to positive outcomes :)
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlto Open Source@lemmy.ml•is there something about rust which precludes copyleft licensing?English15·3 months agoI often see Rust mentioned at the same time as MIT-type licenses. Is it just a cultural thing that people who write Rust dislike Libre licenses?
The word “libre” in the context of licensing exists to clarify the ambiguity of the word “free”, to emphasize that it means “free as in freedom” rather than “free as in beer” (aka no cost, or gratis) as the FSF explains here.
The MIT license is a “libre” license, because it does meet the Free Software Definition.
I think the word you are looking for here is copyleft: the MIT license is a permissive license, meaning it is not a copyleft license.
I don’t know enough about the Rust community to say why, but from a distance my impression is that yes they do appear to have a cultural preference for permissive licenses.
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto Linux@lemmy.ml•What's with the move to MIT over AGPL for utilities?English12·4 months agofyi: GNU coreutils are licensed GPL, not AGPL.
there is so much other confusion in this thread, i can’t even 🤦
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto Linux@lemmy.ml•What's with the move to MIT over AGPL for utilities?English32·4 months agoApple makes the source code to all their core utilities available
Apple makes the source code for many open source things they distribute available, but often only long after they have shipped binaries. And many parts of their OS which they developed in-house which could also be called “core utilities” are not open source at all.
Every Linux distro uses CUPS for printing. Apple wrote that and gave it away as free software.
Apple did not write cups.
It was was created by Michael R. Sweet in 1997, and was GPL-licensed and used on Linux distros before Mac OS X existed. Apple didn’t want to be bound by the GPL so they purchased a different license for it in 2002.
Later, in 2007 they bought the source code and hired msweet to continue its development, and at some point the license of the FOSS version was changed to “GNU General Public License (“GPL”) and GNU Library General Public License (“LGPL”), Version 2, with an exception for Apple operating systems.”
Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMto Linux@lemmy.ml•today i learned: svg files are just text in an html-like languageEnglish7·4 months agofor example, on a linux distro, we could modify the desktop environment and make it waaaaay lighter by getting rid of jpg or png icons and just using pure svg on it.
this has largely happened; if you’re on a dpkg-based distro try running this command:
dpkg -S svg | grep svg$ | sort
…and you’ll see that your distro includes thousands of SVG files :)
explanation of that pipeline:
dpkg -S svg
- this searches for files installed by the package manager which contain “svg” in their pathgrep svg$
- this filters the output to only show paths which end with svg; that is, the actual svg files. the argument to grep is a regular expression, wheremeans “end of line”. you can invert the match (to see the paths
dpkg -S svg
found which only contain “svg” in the middle of the path) by writinggrep -v svg$
instead.- the
sort
command does what it says on the tin, and makes the output easier to read
you can run
man dpkg
,man grep
, andman sort
to read more about each of these commands.
you can still use OpenRC instead if you want, and sxmo will continue to do so by default.
you can read here about why they added systemd.