Shamar @Shamar@qoto.org

I now own a Kobo Clara BW. Here's the first thing you need to know: pick a language, connect to wifi, it will update itself. After that it will ask you to 'connect the device' which requires a Kobo account.

Instead of doing that, plug it into a computer, and when it pops up a little window, click 'Connect.'

On the computer go to the .kobo/Kobo directory on the device, and edit the file Kobo eReader.conf. In the [ApplicationPreferences] section, add a line like

SideLoadedMode=true

and save and exit the editor. Unmount the device from your computer, and hold the Clara BW's power button until the white LED flashes. Then press the power button again.

When it boots back up, you don't need to register or connect shit. Dump books on it and rock on.

I'm posting this because every single internet thing which talks about this leaves out two important facts:

1) If you edit that file before updating, or before you get to the QR code screen, it won't take.

2) Most of the online people access this mode by signing out of an existing account rather than activating it during first-run setup.

Cloudflare asks browser devs to sign insane NDAs before fixing browser blocking

Link: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=32127
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43376064

I was trying to find the source of the “Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018” in
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
and finally found it in the Form 990 declaration.

In the 2023, according to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/
it’s… $6.2m
#mozilla #firefox

(edit: it was $6.9m in 2022, better I guess?)

#Mozilla Has Likely Been Sharing Aggregated #Firefox Data With Advertisers Since 2017, When it Enabled Telemetry by Default

https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/03/12/mozilla-has-been-sharing-aggregated-firefox-data-with-advertisers-since-2017-when-it-enabled-telemetry-by-default.html

#privacy #FOSS

#Mozilla crying on behalf of its boss (#Google) is ridiculous. And sad.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/proposed-remedies-browsers/

What a #shame!

Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine.

#AI #VibeCoding #design #development #making #creation #artiface #craft #coding #programming #technology #humanity

#ScribesAndMakers 13. March: Shameless self-promotion day

Besides all my Open Source work (and the very occasional very tiny fanfiction attempt) I publish Free Sheet Music in digital editions, beautifully renderer as PDF, but also available as MusicXML and MIDI for conversion to Braille music notation as needed.

Voices from the choir et al.:

"finally, legible tenor notes!" (everyone with bass clef allergy)
"it’s easier on the eyes due to the larger size" (older ladies in choir)
easy to transpose (few clicks)
simple enough to make extra versions for the conductor and accompanist (closed score (two systems only, like for piano) with text below, so the pianist can follow the regie instructions)

https://mbsd.evolvis.org/music/free contains my Free Sheet Music contributions mostly from Public Domain scans (some more recent ones were made under permission from the composer/arranger); I also produced https://mbsd.evolvis.org/music/misc/ and dozens of pieces I cannot show because they are licenced works.

I do this for myself and share with the world, but I could imagine digitally engraving some sheet music for YOU for a small donation or something. (My speciality is vocal scores, but I can do piano accompaniment mostly, might need help with optimal distribution of notes to hands. Or just type in from a pre-existing score. I do need pitches, no aural transcriptions.)

#FreeSheetMusic #MusicXML #MIDI #MuseScore #ClassicalMusic

@tante@tldr.nettime.org

A fundamental issue, a sort of language barrier, is that to a #hacker software is speech.

So the invite to study and modify the code is an invite to a conversation (and often a political one).

While you interpret the invite to fork as a way to counter a criticism, it is a validation of the value of such criticism. It's like saying: "hey, that's a great idea, but I don't have the energy/skill/resources/time to try explore it myself: why don't you give a try yourself? It will be fun!"

That's also how you can distinguish a free software built from hackers by a corporate open source with the same license: if you announce a fork, the hacker will be happy, because you are using and studying their work and giving back by exploring new paths, while the corporation will cry about the community split and similar bullshit.

___

#FreeSoftware is neither a solution to people problems nor a new identity: it's a gift.

A gift with political hopes and sometimes with some rules for reciprocity (#copyleft) designed to maximize the benefit that tje whole humanity get from such gift.

But still, just a gift.

Free Software hackers don't want to turn every people into hackers (#RMS is pretty explicit about that), and this is likely one of its worse limits. In fact, #FSF talk about it as an ethical choise instead of a civic duty.

What they were missing is that a "freedom" that only few people can enact is in fact a privilege.

Unfortunately, in a cybernetic society where the overwhelming majority of agents defining the evolution of the world is constituted by software (thousands automatic agent for each human), people who cannot program, cannot really understand how the world they live in is ruled and by who.

So, like it or not, hacking is a prerequisite to a full citizenship in a cybernetic society just like reading and writing was in an industrial one in the last two centuries.

We can pretend otherwise, and the billionaries running #BigTech corporations are more then happy if we do. But ultimately, we are going to be alienated, if we don't start fighting back.

"It is time to admit that all the tropes and rhetoric and conspiracy theories of the so-called free software movement are an impediment to making any actual progress on making positive political change with regards to software."
https://r0ml.medium.com/free-software-an-idea-whose-time-has-passed-6570c1d8218a

TIL that snac2 does a great job being on the receiving end of an account transfer from mastodon.au. After a long period running a self-hosted snac instance in parallel with that account I have bitten the bullet and gone fully self-hosted. Props to snac2 and to Mastodon for making the process so painless.

#snac2 #mastodon #fedi

As people are discussing the issues witth DDoS attacks and attribution, I’m reminded of how the US Government blamed Russia for a DDoS attack against one of their neighbors, which is more accurately (though very indirectly) blamed on me.

Many years ago I complained in an IRC channel about a small website that ripped off the design of one of my sites. A somewhat shady member of that channel happened to control a sizable botnet (with primarily RU IPs). Yep. You see where this is going. (To be clear, I was venting, and didn’t ask him or anyone else to do anything.)

He thought it would be funny to get a little revenge on my behalf. He aimed his entire botnet at that website, and hit the network with so much traffic that it didn’t take down the target server, instead it saturated the core network gear for the country’s main ISP, knocking most of the country offline for several hours.

By pure coincidence, said small Eastern European country was holding national elections the day I complained about the website, something I didn’t discover until years later.

Even the US Government, with all their resources, can’t always tell the difference between a state-backed attack and a teenager “having fun” with a botnet.

@boarders @pigworker I think what is missing in these conversations is an awareness that hard/true syntax is important, but usually the version that matters is something like a normal forms presentation or cut free presentation or something bidirectional—and this can be formulated and proved correct independently of the "traditional" syntax that it would historically have arisen from in the context of cut elimination or normalisation. My thesis is not the first place that these ideas have occurred—since the 2000s it has been understood by experts that a normal forms presentation can exist independently of whether or not anyone has any idea whatsoever as to how to formulate and prove traditional declarative syntax correct, but perhaps only recently have people been willing to take this idea seriously.

I think this distinction was especially salient in the years during which the misguided "initiality" controversy held sway, until it was finally put to bed by Uemura — since what our work on categorical normalisation proved was that you can study syntax even in the environment where nobody(*) is confident that traditional syntax exists. (*) I guess I mean, no "fields medalist".

I like this because what I care about are algorithms. I care about type checking (qua elaboration), normalisation, conversion, etc. And I can formulate and prove correct all these things without traditional syntax existing at all. And that is good.

how can foss build a politics beyond caveat emptor? what will it take to get us as a movement / faction to encompass a labor vision that can steward free software without profit, against profiteers?

how can foss build a politics beyond caveat emptor? what will it take to get us as a movement / faction to encompass a labor vision that can steward free software without profit, against profiteers?

@garbados well first of all, we need to re-establish constitutional rule of law. Then we need law that recognizes labor unions, collectives, and allows anarchist and communist parties to exist again. Then we need law similar to copyright that allows FOSS to be protected and stewarded by unions and/or collectives somehow.

You also can't trust AI when it comes to n-categories!

In reality a 1-category is a category, a 0-category is a set, and James Dolan discovered that a (-1)-category is a truth value and a (-2)-category is a true truth value (of which there is only one: "true").

But my friend Allen Knutson asked Gemini, just for fun, and got this garbage. Clearly it's Russian propaganda.

(2/2)

A test shows that all the leading AI chatbots have been infected by Russian propaganda created by an organization called the "Pravda network".

According to the American Sunlight Project, a failed attempt to protect democracy in the USA, the Pravda network put 3.6 million articles online in 2024. In a strategy called "LLM grooming", this network seems designed to manipulate AI models rather than directly influence people. It's mainly focused on spreading lies connected to the Ukraine war:

https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/a-well-funded-moscow-based-global

But on a lighter note...

(1/2)

What is Manus? China’s World-First Fully Autonomous AI Agent Explained https://blog.quintarelli.it/2025/03/what-is-manus-chinas-world-first-fully-autonomous-ai-agent-explained/

Abbandonare i servizi #Google per proteggere la #privacy e favorire gli sviluppatori indipendenti è possibile e auspicabile

Personalmente sono "Google free" da tempo, zero problemi e zero rimpianti

@itsfoss ha pubblicato una guida che si trova qui: https://itsfoss.com/leaving-google-ecosystem/

Ma a casa nostra abbiamo @lealternative (https://www.lealternative.net/), i @devol (https://devol.it/), @ufficiozero (https://ufficiozero.org/) che offorno o consigliano servizi alternativi, liberi ed etici

Let's switch over.

Why people design a new #ProgrammingLanguage?

There are tons of good reasons of course. Some does that for fun or for curiosity, some for political or educational reasons, some to address shortcomings faced with existing one, either in specific use case or in general.

To me, at least at the conscious level, it's completely a political issue.

I see how programming is a new political force (so much that I actively used it to fight #BigTech in Italy) and I see how people who cannot read (aka #debug) or write (aka #programing), are doomed to becomes second class citizens in a #cybernetic society.

I don't want this to happen to my daughters, so I want to teach them how to program and debug.

BUT mainstream programming languages are weird, full of accidental complexity and with over-complicated semantics.

As a nerd who can programs in most of them, I tend to get fun in the abstractions and details of, say, a #Haskell or an homoiconic macro in a #Lisp.

But while they are fun to a person grown (and selected to fit) within such a primitive computing environment, they are inheritely excluding people who cannot spend decades to grasp their subtle intricacies.

And how you can teach such languages to kids?

Sure they can learn and understand any programming language construct way better of an average adult, but at a first glance all they will only see is glibberish!

And while some will be fascinated by such esoteric language that can be used to create games, worlds and agents that serve their will (just like I was when I was a kid), most will find that complicated and thus boring.

On the other hand a language that is explicit and with simple semantics (such as say #Oberon) will seem verbose and boring to a professional programmer.

I love the simple clarity of a #snake implementation like this https://github.com/tmartiro/voc-snake/blob/main/Snake.Mod whose complexity is almost just the complexity of the task at hand.

And while I see little improvements I could add to such language to further simplify it's syntax and semantics, when I try to do so, I end with something that is less readable than the original, despite syntax and semantics being simpler (as in less rules and no exceptions or incoherence).

It was pointed out by @anzu@items.minimals.org: while I want to make the language easy to read and simple to understand, I subconsciously try to address the issues I faced in my ~25 years as a polyglot programmer.
And apparently I can't resist such impulse, like if I cannot escape my experience.

It's sad.

It makes me think of how the phonetic alphabet was invented by people who cannot read or write but were exposed to hierogliphs, and think that creating a democratic programming language is beyond my ability because of how my mind has been blent from the existing one.

@informatica@feddit.it @programmazione@feddit.it
@technology@lemmy.world
@programming_languages@programming.dev