kemuri 🦀 @kemuri@qoto.org
Joined Nov 2022
kemuri 🦀
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This article from @dangoodin about "juice jacking" is the kind of article which make me happy to be an Ars Technica subscriber.
Actual research and nuanced information, while still making it clear that general fearmongering is unwarrented.
I also really appricate that the article includes the following, which is really key in the disucssion:
"The problem with the warnings coming out of the FCC and FBI is that they divert attention away from bigger security threats, such as weak passwords and the failure to install security updates. They create unneeded anxiety and inconvenience that run the risk of people simply giving up trying to be secure."
kemuri 🦀
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kemuri 🦀
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I am happy to report that the missing DOS game—The Haunted Manor—has been unearthed, in poetic fashion, by an archiving guru known as the Smiling Spectre. I am equally happy to report that the discovery has lead into a new mystery!
Thread incoming...
The game itself is a cute puzzler packed with angry medusa-heads, fire-spitting mutants, and hovering tables. Its protagonist is a naked fiend who leers at the camera and peers around shiftily. The levels are more like ruined courtyards than manor chambers, but there are plenty of inverted crosses, so it does feel adequately haunted.
It's difficult to progress far with the four lives given, as enemies are able to fire as you enter a room, killing you before you can strike back with your own projectile (a frowning fireball). Fortunately the monsters often destroy each other, and you can proceed to break bricks, bounce on bubbles, and accidentally turn around and leave so that everything respawns and you have to do it again...
kemuri 🦀
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Did you know that OpenGL on Asahi Linux supports some special features of Apple's tile-based GPUs better than Apple's own OpenGL driver? ✨
On macOS if you want zero-cost custom blending you have to use Metal, but Mesa supports GL_ARM_shader_framebuffer_fetch to do it in OpenGL!
We also support GL_KHR_blend_equation_advanced_coherent, which gives you a lot of common blending modes without having to write any shader code ^^
kemuri 🦀
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How do we decide what a "true threat" is when we have no cultural consensus on what a "reasonable person" is?
https://popehat.substack.com/p/true-threats-and-american-cultural
kemuri 🦀
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Twitter is dying, but my advocacy work helping trans people raise money via fundraisers depends on my five years of work I've spent writing on Twitter, so I need help.
If you're a trans person who needs help raising money for any reason, reply to this toot with your fundraiser. I'll reach out.
If you're a cis person and you can, please boost this post so your trans followers can see it.
kemuri 🦀
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Datpiff, one of the main sources present and historical for mixtapes, is pivoting in a different direction, and contacted the Archive about hosting a library of pretty much all past releases. I naturally said yes.
Expect the collection to come soonish. (They're pointing to the general hiphop mixtape set right now.)
kemuri 🦀
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The highest ranking search result for accessibility auditing tools is accessibilitychecker.org. The design and initial messaging had me suspicious out of the gate, but I didn't see immediate branding for an overlay company.
That is until I submitted a sample test of Google and saw one of the overlay monsters appear as a recommended solution.
Equally as gross, to my mind, is the "legal action" modal that appears when you attempt to use the "back to home" link.
Don't fall for this one, folks.
kemuri 🦀
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Working on a browser extension that supports both automatic blocking and soft-blocking of Twitter Blue users. If the soft-blocking mode is set, it can hide tweets from Twitter Blue users without needing to send any requests to the Twitter server. It also has support for excluding accounts you follow or who have more than X followers.
kemuri 🦀
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kemuri 🦀
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I don't begrudge any writer who wants to keep writing for Substack. Make money however you can do it! But I am tired of people saying that there is nothing scammy or problematic about a publication that hides its financials, hides who it is paying, and then says that we should just trust that it is a neutral platform with no agenda. And on top of that, they now refuse to have any kind of coherent moderation policy.
kemuri 🦀
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We recently moved, so my wife asked for a copy of her medical records from her old hospital. We were expecting a CD that she could hand to her new doctor. We were instead shipped a box that contained over 60,000 printed-out pages.
Our healthcare system is truly insane.
On Rust Trademark Policy Draft
Trademark laws themselves are a mess of nuances, and even though the Rust Trademark Policy draft is generally not out of ordinary, it unfortunately has failed to help illuminate the most important distinction, that is between nominative use and non-nominative use. This draft is heavily based on Model Trademark Guidelines, which has seen no usage in programming language projects before. It's an unfortunate choice of basis in my opinion, as many controversial clauses are verbatim from it. The Rust Trademark Working Group has not reviewed and revised the draft well enough.
That said, the amount of misunderstanding about it propagated by influencers is very disheartening. The hostility and arrogance displayed towards lawyers and legal expertise is in stark contrast to the usual humility the Rust community has towards technological expertise. I hope everyone do better.
I Am Not A Trademark Lawyer, if you are, I welcome your corrections. Keep caveats in mind, be critical but civil, let's discuss the concerns:
"I cannot even use Rust the word any more! How am I gonna write my blog article / book / presentation?"
That's called "nominative use", and is allowed by trademark laws, whatever the Rust policy says. Nominative use is allowed regardless if it's commercial or not.
"The Linux distro packagers cannot use the word Rust for their packages for the Rust toolchain any more!"
That was a concern back in June 2022, was fixed then, and the fix is inherited. Section 4.2.1 explicitly allows this non-nominative use.
"I cannot make any change to the Rust logo? What about my freedom of expression?"
You can freely use your creativity on the image of the Rust logo, as long as you do not use it to refer to Rust. In other words, you can totally publish your altered Rust logo as fan art, but you should not use it in a presentation to stand in for the official logo, or use it as the logo of something related. This "unaltered logo" clause is in effect for every trademark, including even the hexagon C++ logo. Python requires all alteration to be submitted for review, and publishes a guideline with permitted and not permitted examples.
"I have named my project Rust XXX, and I have to change it to something else? No other program language requires this!"
You don't have to change it, you just need to ask Rust Foundation for permission. Perl requires permission for such usage too. Python and Elixir have an exception for freely distributed products, but require permission otherwise too. "node" and "go" doesn't have this problem since their respective trademarks are "Node.js" and "Golang".
"I can't register rustmasters.com!"
You can, but the domain name usage prohibition is a mistake they should fix. Toyota USA v. Tabari (2010) has already decided that domain name can qualify for nominative fair use. All other policies mentioning domain name specifies prohibition only conditional on consumer confusion. Some comments say Rust is "going Oracle", but Rust has actually gone beyond Oracle here.
"I can't use Rust in the name of my user group?"
You can, and the draft policy is wrong again. This is almost certainly also a nominative use like in the domain name case, and Rust should change the unenforceable clauses. Python policy takes care to specify logo usage because logo usage is almost always non-nominative.
The policy draft does have serious issues, not because it can actually prohibit you from doing any reasonable thing, but because the things it tries to prohibit, it cannot. The Rust Trademark Working Group needs to improve their legal review process and not take the Model Trademark Guidelines at its words. I hope later revisions can fix the mistakes above and use more examples to illustrate nominative use and permitted non-nominative use.
kemuri 🦀
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Do you see this? 
I'm like a lion in savannah, and yesterday evening I was like a wild hunter in the bedroom: there was feet outside the bed 
kemuri 🦀
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Earlier today at the ABA IPL Spring Conference, the Copyright Claims Board (CCB) said that many plaintiffs are using them to get posts having nothing to do with copyright taken down (like political speech).
Audience laughed. CCB laughed
Censorship via copyright loopholes isn't really a laughing matter.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3351348
#ABAIPL2023
kemuri 🦀
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OpenAI touted GPT-4's scores on professional exams and other standardized tests. But they may have tested on the training data: we found slam-dunk evidence that GPT-4 memorizes coding problems that it's seen. Besides, exams don't tell us about real-world utility: It’s not like a lawyer’s job is to answer bar exam questions all day.
The latest in the AI Snake Oil book blog by @sayashk and me: "GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question" https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/gpt-4-and-professional-benchmarks
Show thread
#Twitter is having a mysterious bug: some tweets are not showing up in the feed, and and are shown as "not exist" and "deleted" if viewed via a link from some regions, for no apparent reason.
kemuri 🦀
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Some users are so prolific and so high-quality uploaders that just visiting their "user uploads" page is an exquisite curation it itself.
Such it is with THE IBIS REBELLION, who has been scanning in and uploading discard pulp magazines with a nod to quality and evocation for years:
kemuri 🦀
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Woooooah, the kernel test robot is already testing Rust builds too! ✨🦀✨
It caught a real issue too... I didn't realize CONFIG_DRM was tristate and module bindings don't yet work in Rust! (at least I think that's why this broke...)
Joined Nov 2022
