tal

@ tal @lemmy.today

Posts

259
Comments

9153
Joined

3 yr. ago

Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

45m ago

California moves to exempt Linux from its upcoming age-verification law after backlash over forcing operating systems to collect users’ ages
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tal @lemmy.today 45m ago
I wish I still knew where this comic was.
You're probably thinking of an xkcd comic:
https://xkcd.com/2501/

49m ago

California moves to exempt Linux from its upcoming age-verification law after backlash over forcing operating systems to collect users’ ages

I think that the major current closed-source OSes today are busily harvesting all the data they can anyway, and the vendors probably don't care much about also grabbing age, but stuff like, oh...is it illegal under this law to distribute proprietary versions of older OSes now? Like, classic MacOS, say. That's definitely not open-source. And Apple is not going to go back and do a new release of classic MacOS to add age verification to it. But...there's still some old software that you need classic MacOS to run. So...is it illegal to distribute essential software required to run classic MacOS software in California as of the middle of next year?

I mean, you might be infringing on copyright as well, but Apple may be okay with people copying classic MacOS around, as they can't really make any money off it today. But this is the State of California, not Apple, that would act here.

59m ago

California moves to exempt Linux from its upcoming age-verification law after backlash over forcing operating systems to collect users’ ages

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tal @lemmy.today 59m ago

Under the original law, operating systems would be required to request a user’s age or birth date during device setup, then expose an “age bracket signal” to apps and app stores. The law, which defined brackets such as “under 13,” “13–15,” “16–17,” and “18+,” immediately raised questions about how such requirements would apply to decentralized, open-source software ecosystems.

I kind of wonder what software running as a service on Windows is supposed to identify itself as if it's non-interactively downloading software.

1h ago

California moves to exempt Linux from its upcoming age-verification law after backlash over forcing operating systems to collect users’ ages

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tal @lemmy.today 1h ago

The controversy became particularly heated after reports suggested platforms like SteamOS could still fall under the law due to their ties to proprietary application ecosystems.

Ehhh. I think that'd be a hard argument to make. I mean, the OS is open-source. You can download it and modify it and reinstall it or whatever. Sure, it runs Steam, which is proprietary, but so does any other GNU/Linux distro.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS

The core operating system is free and open-source software, while the Steam client remains proprietary.

Like, the only way in which SteamOS differs from another Linux distro is that Valve, which makes the proprietary client, also happens to be distributing the OS.

2h ago

Hottest May day on record in UK as temperatures pass 34C

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tal @lemmy.today 2h ago

Can’t open the windows much as our cat is an indoor cat.

If you don't have or want to get some sort of air conditioning, maybe obtain and stick a window screen on the window, then have the fan blow through that?

Not as common in the UK --- here in the US, they were necessary to deal with malaria back before that got eradicated and kinda stayed for the convenience --- but it looks like there are UK-based vendors, manufacturers, and installers, and that they're often called "fly screens" rather than "window screens".

You could even use something with larger-diameter holes, like chicken wire, if all you care about is the cat, but I figure that if you're going to go to the trouble of putting something up, might as well block insects too.

3h ago

British canals are 2 to 4 ft deep and don't have currents. Did they not know how to simply stand up?

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tal @lemmy.today 3h ago

Are you literally going to work through doing this to the point of getting banned on every community on the Threadiverse?

5h ago

People create human chain to restore Cherhill white horse

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tal @lemmy.today 5h ago

Note that Tom Scott's video is about the Uffington White Horse and the horse in OP's post is the Cherhill White Horse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffington_White_Horse

The Uffington White Horse was created some time between 1380 and 550 BC, during the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherhill_White_Horse

The figure was first cut in 1780 by Dr Christopher Alsop of Calne, who created it by removing turf to expose the underlying chalk.

5h ago

Drove 3 hrs to Bend for my son's baseball tournament. Figured why not stop by in between games.

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tal @lemmy.today 5h ago

Footage inside:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekS8YaAM_4Q

5h ago

What are monies, how do they compare to moneys?

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tal @lemmy.today 5h ago

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/monies

Alternative forms
moneys

Same thing.

5h ago

AI collar claims it can translate your pet’s sounds – and the internet has questions

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tal @lemmy.today 5h ago

6h ago

Sweden’s PM puts IVF at centre of re-election bid amid record low birthrate

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tal @lemmy.today 6h ago

I mean, it may not hurt, but I seriously doubt that this is going to substantially alter the total fertility rate.

6h ago

Aggressive AI scrapers are making it kinda suck to run wikis

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tal @lemmy.today 6h ago

I could see maybe caching that and providing it to a not-clearly-human user if it is in cache. That lets someone do something like link to a particular version of a file in a discussion here on the Threadiverse. The first user loading it will cause it to be cached.

6h ago

Aggressive AI scrapers are making it kinda suck to run wikis

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tal @lemmy.today 6h ago

Detect whether the user is a human, but instead of blocking the request (which is going to be obvious to the scraper operator and will just cause the bot developers to go work on better human emulation until they get the data), poison the response. Just as blocking scrapers is hard for website operators, so is separating useful data from not-useful data for people building AI training corpuses.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ai/data-poisoning/

Data poisoning involves injecting malicious information into training datasets to manipulate an AI model's behavior, compromising its accuracy, reliability, and the overall integrity of machine learning results.

7h ago

Aggressive AI scrapers are making it kinda suck to run wikis

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tal @lemmy.today 7h ago

The really exasperating thing is that Wikipedia makes all of their data available in compressed database form, and I suspect that other MediaWiki wikis could do so too. I checked one of the wikis being complained about, the Minecraft wiki, and it's a MediaWiki wiki.

This isn't even a case where the server operators have any problem with the data being available to the bots. In fact, people are going out of their way to package up all the data in a form that is optimal for computer processing (better for the bots) and which doesn't create additional load on the wiki servers (better for the wiki operators).

But the bots aren't using them! And on top of that, they aren't even written to follow traditional conventions for being polite in scraping. We've had lots of software spider the Web --- that's not new --- but normally that spidering software has followed basic politeness to try to avoid excessive disruption to the servers being spidered.

It's as if someone has set up a table out front of their house with a big sign reading "Free cookies!" with boxes of pre-packaged cookies. Instead of taking the damn cookies, the bots are obtaining the largest trucks possible and then ramming holes in the house with a truck and scavenging through the ruins, desperately trying to find cookies.

7h ago

Correct

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tal @lemmy.today 7h ago

Pretty sure that it depends on where you live.

searches

Yeah. Actually, according to this, it doesn't typically affect summer weather in North America. Huh.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NOAA_Nino.jpg

The maps show how El Niño commonly affects Northern Hemisphere winter and summer climate patterns around the globe. Notice that there are no consistent impacts on North America during the summer months, while areas around the tropics and Southern Hemisphere subtropics (Australia, for example) experience impacts in both seasons.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/60756922-0a1e-4fee-b7de-2882681bd881.jpeg

7h ago

It's time to talk about my writerdeck

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tal @lemmy.today 7h ago

I simply use more than one TTY, and emacs’ buffers.

If you haven't yet run into emacs's frames, you may find that useful, unless you explicitly want to also use the Linux virtual consoles for other reasons. In a GUI environment, emacs frames are normally represented by another X11/Wayland window. In a TUI environment, they look kinda like a virtual console.

Each frame contains a set of emacs windows (what a lot of present-day GUI software calls "panes") laid out to display whatever buffers you want. You can have a buffer shown in a window in multiple frames if you want.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Frames.html

Some basic operations:

C-x 5 2 Creates a new frame
C-x 5 o Switches to another frame
C-x 5 0 Destroys current frame

You can also produce a similar effect by running an emacs instance in daemon mode, and then using emacsclient to attach to that daemon instance on different Linux virtual consoles, if you prefer the multiple-VC approach. One emacs instance and set of buffers, but can have different windows in different layouts showing them and switch between them.

7h ago

It's time to talk about my writerdeck

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tal @lemmy.today 7h ago

The short answer is that it's presumably some vim theme that he likes, but I'd guess that the origin of that is that DOS text-based applications had a long-running convention --- not always universally used --- of using white text on blue, unlike the Unix convention of white on black.

You can see that persisting in things like default Midnight Commander color choices (it's set up to look like the MS-DOS Norton Commander):

...or in Network Manager's console-menu-based utility, nmtui. I think that the dialog package and prior to that, the newt package, both for showing curses-based menu-based interfaces, also defaulted to white-on-blue, probably for the same reason.

7h ago

It's time to talk about my writerdeck

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tal @lemmy.today 7h ago

Apparently there are escape sequences for it; see my response to the parent post.

Even if there weren't, if a given terminal supported either the older Sixel or the newer KiTTY graphics protocol, it can outright display arbitrary images.

Mainline tmux doesn't support either protocol, though there's a fork that does do Sixel. They're using tmux, so I assume that that's not the route used.

7h ago

It's time to talk about my writerdeck

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tal @lemmy.today 7h ago

suggesting the Vim instance is running in a full-screen terminal emulator under some windowing system or another.

Courtesy of this post, here's a test script to show a terminal's capabilities:

        #!/bin/bash
    echo -e "\e[1mbold\e[0m"
    echo -e "\e[3mitalic\e[0m"
    echo -e "\e[3m\e[1mbold italic\e[0m"
    echo -e "\e[4munderline\e[0m"
    echo -e "\e[9mstrikethrough\e[0m"
    echo -e "\e[31mHello World\e[0m"
    echo -e "\x1B[31mHello World\e[0m"

I thought that it might be them using fbterm (a more-sophisticated userspace framebuffer virtual terminal emulator that's an alternative to fbcon, the built-in Linux kernel virtual terminal emulator), but at least on my system, fbterm doesn't seem to show italics.

EDIT: Ah, saw @zloubida@sh.itjust.works's comment about kmscon. It looks like they're using kmscon, a different userspace framebuffer virtual terminal emulator, and explicitly say so in the article.

EDIT2: If you install it, looks like on Debian it gets used by default on next boot as the new console virtual terminal emulator. Note that unlike fbcon and fbterm, you apparently need to use Control-Alt-FKey rather than just Alt-Fkey to switch terminals when you're inside kmscon, same as if you're in Xorg or Wayland.

8h ago

It's time to talk about my writerdeck

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tal @lemmy.today 8h ago

syncthing

I'd probably use unison running over ssh, myself.