Nick has moved to Mathstodon @internic@qoto.org

Any of you open source people come across Latta AI? A tool that claims to want to help developers fix bugs in open source projects.

Someone suggested a patch generated by this tool for a feature request on my project. The patch is a poor implementation of the request (unusable), it breaks two existing features (i.e. adds two bugs), and leaves redundant code. Not exactly impressive.

I hope we're not gonna get a ton of AI bots making BS pull requests to repos now?

#Code #GitHub #AI #OpenSource

Man, corporations really want to put a stop to libraries:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-library-e-books-queues-1.7414060?cmp=rss

"Depending on the title, public libraries may pay two or three times more for an e-book than they pay for its print edition. In some cases, the e-book may be up to six times the price, librarians told CBC."

"Those publishers ... will often license copies of e-books for just 12 or 24 months. Once that licence expires, libraries must repurchase access to the same book." #canada #cdnpoli #books

So look, I’m not really a believer, and my wife is into a totally different pantheon of deities, but we go to church on Christmas Eve every year with my folks and our kids and it is kind of a nice tradition.

apropos of nothing, here's an interesting article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

have a lovely day y'all
--sf

OpenOffice has multiple unfixed security issues, over a year old, as this image from the Board report says. And no new committers since 2022, and no major release since 2014. Maybe the FOSS community can ask the Apache Software Foundation to finally put it in the Attic, and stop leaving users vulnerable: https://www.apache.org/foundation/contact

My kids are more than a decade past the point of needing them, I have no history of buying them at this address, and I have YouTube history off, Adblock on all my devices except for the iOS ones and “personalized ads” turned off on all of those, and a relative with a one-year-old who still uses diapers was here for dinner and now half an hour later YouTube is showing me diaper ads.

They didn’t even use my wifi.

I hate this shit so much.

I have some financial files (like old tax returns) on my computer that I seldom access and would like to have an extra layer of confidentiality for, so i was looking into how I could easily have an effective separately-encrypted folder for those on my #LinuxMint system.

Obviously I could create a separate dm-crypt partition, but since it's probably a small number of files and the total volume I want long term is not very well known (e.g. I might also want to add things like images of important official documents), that doesn't seem like the ideal solution. It seemed like maybe ecryptfs could be the way to go, but I know the use of that for encrypted home directories was deprecated by #Ubuntu a while ago and looking at Launchpad it sort of seems abandoned (the last recent revision listed is from 2017). Does anybody know the status or have a better suggestion?

#Linux #encryption #DAR #privacy

https://code.launchpad.net/~ecryptfs/ecryptfs/trunk

New, by @lorenzofb, @carlypage and myself: Here is our annual compendium of all the cybersecurity stories that TechCrunch's security desk were jealous of this year, from our friends and colleagues at competing publications.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/24/techcrunch-security-desk-cybersecurity-reporting-jealousy-list-of-2024/

Two WordPress plugins required by the premium WordPress WPLMS theme, which has over 28,000 sales, are vulnerable to more than a dozen critical-severity vulnerabilities.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/premium-wplms-wordpress-plugins-address-seven-critical-flaws/

Diversity innovation paradox: "demographically underrepresented students innovate at higher rates than majority students, but their novel contributions are discounted and less likely to earn them academic positions"

Source:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1915378117

Thanks to Needhi Bhalla, shared on bsky!

Flu surges in Louisiana as health department barred from promoting flu shots
Flu is rising around the country, but Louisiana is well ahead of the curve.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/12/flu-surges-in-louisiana-as-health-department-barred-from-promoting-flu-shots/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Honda and Nissan to merge, Honda will take the lead
if the deal goes through it would create the world's third-largest OEM in 2026.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/12/honda-and-nissan-to-merge-honda-will-take-the-lead/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

In this 5th year of Covid my wife will once again be nurse double shifting both Christmas and New Years due to staff illness & disease breakout among residents requiring more nurses to adequately care. All the while her employer restricting PPE AND demanding less overtime due to 'costs'

The disconnect is staggering

#Covid #Covid19 #CovidisnotOver

I was reading back through my logs I kept over the past two years of medical appointments and it's so so much more depressing than I actually remember on the daily

Just note after note like: "reported the pain and was told no next steps" "tried to get this inhaler prescription fixed for two months while the office refused to call the pharmacy" "specialist dismissed the possibility of hypoxia" "it turns out it was hypoxia"

Periodic reminder that Mark Everett (of the band Eels) did a documentary about his father's (Hugh Everett III) groundbreaking work on quantum theory, and it's touching, fascinating, and completely free to watch.
https://vimeo.com/58603054

85-year-old painter loses life savings to NFT art dealer scam

December 6, 2024
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=85-year-old-painter-loses-life-savings-to-nft-art-dealer-scam

@woozle @idlestate

I don't know if that mattered as much as I once thought it did. Although, I'm still hopeful that change will come along.

After seeing how the migration from X to BlueSky has worked I'm more convinced than ever that "big accounts" matter. People want to be able to follow the people they are interested in or enjoy and THAT will move users. Interface isn't that important.

Difficult but important reading

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hast.4925

"We have been engaged since 2015 in a project about the uses of scientific research by white nationalists and far-right political movements, and we contend that a “citizen science movement” now drives much scientific racism"

It’s time for a special holiday Bridgy Fed status update!

Since last time, we’ve been working mostly on getting A New Social off the ground and on Bridgy Fed internals. Specifically, my development focus for a while now has been cost cutting. I fund Bridgy Fed myself right now, which I’m happy to do, but it costs more to run than it should, probably by 2-3x or so.

(We do plan to fundraise for A New Social eventually and fund Bridgy Fed there instead! Including individual donations, among other sources. Stay tuned for more news when we have it.)

In the meantime, I’ve been pushing the optimization boulder uphill, making slow progress. I’m currently struggling with one big issue: getting caching working in ndb, our ORM.

ndb can cache both in memory and in memcache. We configure it to do both, but it doesn’t seem to be using memcache in production, and I’m not even sure it’s caching in memory there either. If you have experience with ndb, Google Cloud Datastore, Memorystore, or related tools, please take a look and let me know if you see anything obviously wrong!

This also means that I haven’t had much time to spend on features, bug fixes, or other user-visible updates. I’m the only developer on Bridgy Fed right now, and I’m only part time. I’d love help! It’s entirely open source, so if you’re interested, check out the open issues, feel free to dive in, and ping me on GitHub if you have any questions!

Having said that, I have done a bit besides cost cutting since last time:

Generate link previews (aka embeds) on Bluesky.
Launch Threads support! Just via normal ActivityPub, nothing special, but I worked with them a fair amount on interop.
Improve sign-up flow for web => Bluesky bridging.
Try harder to redirect fediverse @-mentions of bridged users to their web site or Bluesky profile.
Reduce confusion on the home page sign-up form by detecting web sites that are already fediverse instances.
Let fediverse accounts re-enable the bridge even if they disabled it before October.
Improve interop with Friendica, Hubzilla, Misskey/Sharkey, Sharkey, WordPress Friends plugin, and GoToSocial.
Improve authorization to prevent a cache poisoning attack.
Improve DNS scaling for Bluesky handles.
Populate the discoverable and indexable flags on bridged ActivityPub actors.
Misc bug fixes for web sites on www subdomains.
Fix rare bug where we occasionally missed bridging posts or other interactions to Bluesky.
Fix rare bug where we occasionally missed bridging deletes.
Continued debugging of accounts bridged into Bluesky that occasionally get stuck and stop bridging.
Lots of docs improvements.

As usual, feel free to ping us with feedback, questions, and bug reports. You can follow the now label on GitHub to see what we’re currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!