Parienve @Parienve@qoto.org

Aaand clew is back up! :D

https://clew.se

I think it'll stay that way for a while this time, but… fingers crossed!

Clew is a new search engine that maintains an independent index and is aiming to be a copyleft (APGLv3), self-hostable, privacy-respecting, customizable search engine which prioritizes independent creators/bloggers/writers and penalizes sites with ads and trackers. (Boosts welcome!)

We're currently in a public beta and had extended downtime while implementing spam-fighting measures, which we've just returned from.

On reviewing privacy preserving tools:

This is not a new discipline.

We have mathematical and engineering tools to do analysis.

We have decades on decades of research literature, rooted in cryptographic analysis, statistical methods, probability theory, and computer science detailing how privacy preserving system are broken.

Just how one can tell that a badly engineered bridge will collapse before it is built, one can assess that a "privacy preserving" tool will not preserve privacy.

Today seems like a really good day to remind you to get @signalapp

There's a funny thing you see in many scientific papers - especially #AI papers: The paper will prominently include a link to a GitHub repository with claims of code availability "soon" but when you go there (months after the paper was released) there's either just a placeholder or the paper text.

People use GitHub links to score browny points for "doing open science" but most of it is just not there. Especially with statistical systems when you realize that you don't get the training data, you don't get the code, you don't get model weights what you get are results and a "trust me bro".

Building a culture of accessibility - Felicity Miners-Jones @ Tetralogical:
https://tetralogical.com/blog/2024/04/19/building-a-culture-of-accessibility/

9 signs your frontend code has quality issues that affect your users - Angelika Tyborska:
https://angelika.me/2024/04/13/9-signs-your-frontend-code-has-quality-issues/

How to think about HTML responsive images - Dan Cătălin Burzo:
https://danburzo.ro/responsive-images-html/

Beware – automatic tools over-report accessibility issues and steal your time - Bogdan Cerovac:
https://cerovac.com/a11y/2024/04/beware-automatic-tools-over-report-accessibility-issues-and-steal-your-time/

About 14 years ago, one of my coworkers read California labor law and realized we were entitled to overtime for working more than eight hours a day, rather than for 40 hours a week. It meant a big bump to my income, to about $30/hour. I was working night shift, with twelve hour shifts, and two hours of commuting each way. I was continuously sleep deprived and barely saw my family that I lived with, for five years.

@opensuse Factory became bit-by-bit reproducible, enhancing #Tumbleweed's verification. Thanks to all involved! 🚀 95% previously passed. @reprobuilds https://news.opensuse.org/2024/04/18/factory-bit-reproducible-builds/

Basic things which are: irrelevant while the project is small, a productivity multiplier when the project is large, and much harder to introduce down the line

https://matklad.github.io/2024/03/22/basic-things.html

Discussions: https://discu.eu/q/https://matklad.github.io/2024/03/22/basic-things.html

#practices #programming

A spy tool is scraping the messages of thousands of Discord servers and selling the data. This is letting people track users across servers, shows when they joined voice chats, which servers they're in, etc: https://www.404media.co/a-spy-site-is-scraping-discord-and-selling-users-messages/

Wow, Marginalia's new article on Query Parsing and Understanding comes right as I'm about to start work on coding more query parsing features into Clew. Good timing.

The true power of #genAI is not technological, but rhetorical: almost all conversations about it are about what executives are saying it will do "one day" or "soon" rather than what we actually see (and of course no mention of business model which doesn't exist).

We are told to simultaneously believe AI is so "early days" as to excuse any lack of real usefulness, and that it is so established - even "too big to fail" - that we are not permitted to imagine a future without it.

Today I read https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/pain-we-forgot/

and thought up several things I want from an IDE

For a pure language like Haskell, I want the IDE to magically find properties for me.

There are already libraries like https://github.com/nick8325/quickspec and https://github.com/rudymatela/speculate that can do it, but they're not yet hooked into haskell-language-server.

I also want my IDE to discover which tests execute which functions, and run the tests whenever the functions change.

#python #coding #academia

Working with long scientific data pipelines can be a nightmare because the code of dozens of people, package managers (conda, pip, poetry) and workflow tools (make, snakemake, nextflow, pydoit) just bundle up into an indecipherable mess.

I'm wondering if people here know of good examples or have suggestions on how to keep scientific software workflows lean... Or at least make them less of a pain.

Increasingly finding that #AI-generated images on a blog post lowers my opinion of the author — not (just) because of a principled anti-AI stance but also simply because it’s rubbish.

If you’re happy decorating your work with generated garbage I’m just going to assume your standards are that low for everything you do.