you are joking but I guarantee that gay people in repressive countries do not post their face on the internet alongside their queer activities over fear for their own safety. That's the primary reason I've never posted my face
okay fedi, is there a tool that will let me automatically cross post everything from fedi to bluesky? (bridgy isn't working for me) and I would prefer something that would post to my account directly
i prefer fedi but also still wanna post on bluesky but it's too much effort to crosspost everything manually.
you could move your fedi presence to app.wafrn.net and enable the bluesky integration. it's not perfect yet but might work if you just want public posts to be seen from there. as a bonus bsky users can interact with you directly thru wafrn
The issue is that right now we use TWO servers. one for wafrn and another one for the bsky pds. It can be changed and stuff, its on my list. I hope I can have it done before next month to save 7 bucks a month haha
@gabboman this would probably work with my setup, since I have a vps that is connected to my AltTron server which tunnels all of its traffic via wiregaurd.
so yeah we could probably set it up and get it to work, do you use signal? if not we can use discord
so true honestly I fucking hate modern app notifications. what happened to keeping notifs to a minimum I feel like every new app I download I have to just disable notifications for out of the box.
The fact they don't even bother separating the ads notifs into a separate channel from the important ones is what infurates me. Even bank apps do this fucking thing whether I use them or not.
my biggest QOL change I made to my phone was setting the default notification noise to Silent, so I have to manually enable sound on notifications I want and the spam doesn't invade my consciousness constantly
it basically translates to I havent been able to sell some information about you in a while, please my children are hungry just need some personal data to sell
challenge: install the termux terminal emulator for android, ssh into a server, go to the toilet and try to install kubernetes before you're done shitting
Bug description When starting lutris with the debug parameter -d, which is commonly used and requested in the Forum and right here to help users fix issues, displays the full GOG REST API string in...
Hi! I'm creating this request to be reunited with Mia, my support cat. She's been an essential part of my life for almost nine years, and due to financial constraints, I was unable to bring her with me when I immigrated from Venezuela. I would be incredibly grateful to anyone who is willing to donate and help me bring Mia back into my life. 🧡🤍🖤
Hello, my name is Oswaldo, and I'm creating this request to be reunited with Mia, my suppo… Oswaldo Bislick needs your support for Help me reunite with Mía
As someone who is right now looking at the costs of relocating with my dog, I can understand the incredibly steep prices associated with it. Mia is adorable and I hope you see her sweet face soon.
@RestlessLipSyndrome Hey, thanks a lot! And yes, it is incredibly expensive 😭 Where do you want to travel from and to with your dog? Just out of curiosity, how much will it cost you approximately?
@Migueldeicaza I feel bad asking, but would you mind giving this a boost? My friend is trying to reunite with his nine year old cat and he just needs a little help getting to the finish line. It would mean a lot.
As someone bonded with a kitty kitty named Mia as well, and as someone who has had her for going on 15 years, I really do hope you and her are reunited, from the bottom of my heart.
@LavenderPawprints 5 weeks? omg, literally a baby! I've had Mia since she was about 5 months old. We've been through a lot together, she's a true life partner. I can't wait to see her again and give her lots of love and cuddles. 🥹
Sorry, the goal is $4,000, the automatic adjustment is done by GoFundMe so that "people see the goal as achievable." Sorry if there is any misunderstanding.
That's why I'm updating the actual progress percentage in the post.
As a Starlink user - with no choice at the moment but to continue to be - I feel so sorry for the poor bastards who legitimately bought Teslas back when the Reality Distortion Field was still in full effect.
Every time I see our dish in the back 'yard' (paddock) now, I just go "Well, FUCK."
In addition to their child facing discrimination in #Kentucky, the mother has lost access to medications she needs to live and is starting to die as her immune system attacks her whenever she eats.
They have a solid plan for how they are going to move to #Washington , and they do not need a lot. Timing, however, is critical!
Let’s get these folks out!
Update: it seems that the family has made all the necessary arrangements and is planning to move next week, thanks to all of your help 😀
🐉know what? Fuck professionalism. This has to be said.
This woman is dying because the fucking capitalists cut her goddamn insurance
She *could* be taking the money she’s getting right now to buy medications, but she’s prioritizing getting to a state with better medical coverage and protecting her child from transphobia.
I think this woman may be starving herself to save her #trans child.
Their plan is to sleep in a van on a friend’s property until they can work out a better solution.
This is the darkest goddamn fundraiser I’ve ever done and I’m grateful it’s going so well.
Yall who are giving deserve to know. You deserve to see this for what it is. This is fucking class warfare. This is fucking #genocide
"i just hope that no person anywhere in the world at any point in the future has to go through what mothers in Gaza went through these past few months.
like it was so insane. women were giving birth without medical aid and having c-sections without anaesthesia while being malnourished and unable to properly provide food and warmth to their newborns. they couldn't produce milk and couldn't afford baby formula."
A Tale of Strength and Determination: Suad Fights for a Better L… Mohammed Ahmad needs your support for Urgent: Help Suad and Her Newborn Escape Gaza’s Danger
STOP SCROLLING – THIS WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE I went from struggling to over $100K in just TWO WEEKS all because of this mastermind: fiverr.com/wisdom_jamess.
If you’re serious about success, DON’T WAIT. This is the breakthrough you’ve been praying for. Act NOW before it’s too late
Firefox now has Terms of Use! This'll go over like a lead balloon.
You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
Firefox now has Terms of Use! This'll go over like a lead balloon.
You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
So if they decide ads based on my artwork/writing help me "navigate, experience, and interact with online content," they have the right to steal it from me and use it in their "privacy-respecting" ads?
@_tissa_ it can't. There is not an EULA to run the code. If you download and run Firefox through an installer, yeah it does affect you, because you're presented (I assume) the EULA.
Any forks or people who compile it themselves aren't subject to it. @mttaggart
@TruelyNotARobot I'm not a lawyer but I don't see how. You were never presented with these conditions. If Mozilla thinks that they can say "this is available under a free software license but oh there's this other website where we take away your rights that you were never notified about" that's uhhhhh not the way it works.
No, if you upload your artwork they can outright steal it and you can't sue them because you agreed to ToS. That's what it says. This better turn into such massive shitshow Mozilla is going to feel it for a decade. I bet they want to use this bullshit to train their Ai garbage.
@rejzor Does it? The fact that the bolding ends before the end of the statement does not delete the "to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate" part.
@deirdrebeth @rejzor There's no way they *won't* be interpreting "navigate, experience, and interact with online content" in the same hoover-everything-for-advertising-or-AI-purposes sense that all other tech companies do these days.
@deirdrebeth "As you indicate" in what way? Via checkbox or via simply using the Firefox you automatically agree to it? It's so vague and broad it's ridiculous.
@rejzor No disagreement there. It is vague. I'm holding out hope that it's vague in a good way (it seems like they're trying to be cute), rather than jumping to the conclusion that it's vague in a bad way.
If I upload my artwork to anywhere via Firefox, have I just granted a royalty-free license to that intellectual property to Firefox, if they deem use of it is in my best interest in "interacting with online content?"
as I read it, you give them a limited license to use that content as needed to do what you’re using Firefox to do. I.e. if you’re uploading an image to a website, you authorize them to do so as you directed.
@WebCoder49 the problem with things that can be interpreted differently is that if your interpretation doesn't match Mozilla's, and they do a snatch and grab of all your stuff, your only recourse is an expensive lawsuit, which no matter which way it is finally decided, the only parties that win are the lawyers.
@copiesofcopies since when and in what timeline is it necessary to GRANT MOZILLA A WHATEVER LICENCE to send a fucking web request to a random site that does not belong to mozilla?
@copiesofcopies Yeah, that seems more correct. The last line is pretty telling "..as you indicate with your use of Firefox". If you didn't indicate that you wanted Firefox to take your artwork then Mozilla doesn't get that permission. They only get the permissions to do what you "indicate". The other important part is "When you upload or input information through Firefox"
Basically it's just saying that if you indicate that you want to upload a photo to x website, by for example dragging an image into Firefox, then you give Firefox permission to send it to that website you are on.
To rephrase, when you upload through Firefox, you give Firefox the permission to do what you indicated, i.e. uploading.
The true meaning of the quote seem to have blown over @mttaggart 's head like a helium balloon.
@saphkey non-exclusive because you can license your content to others too, royalty-free because Mozilla isn’t going to pay users to use its browser, worldwide because the user could be anywhere. All of those are in fact necessary, the first protects the user’s interests.
@saphkey @copiesofcopies So are all software companies that upload content violating laws by not having this language? Or liable for some lawsuit? FTP software for example?
@rspfau @saphkey I’d call this a conservative approach to address a possible risk. What I will say is that GDPR pretty clearly applies to personal data “processed” by an app, so they might be trying to ensure they’re getting express permission to process personal data contained in user content.
@rspfau @copiesofcopies The lawsuit environment in USA is quite insane. People file lawsuits over any small thing. And lawsuits are expensive. Often it just turns into a battle of attrition by money.
A terms of use document is cheap way to stand stronger in those battles. Its not something that is required, but one day you might wish your company had one.
Just go have a look at the page, its mostly just textbook things like "You Are Responsible for the Consequences of Your Use of Firefox", if you eat Firefox you are responsible for your tummy-ache mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/…
@leeloo @copiesofcopies They ARE a cloud service, including but not limited to Firefox Sync, the ReadItLater watchamathing (Pocket), Firefox Relay and a VPN.
@copiesofcopies The way Mozilla has been going recently, and the way it's worded, I'm having two hunches. 1. This is required for their new advertising initiative. Mozilla wants to collect (presumably anonymous) data about shown ads and conversion. 2. This can be used for some kind of AI thingy. Like, imagine a local neural net that'll get trained on sites your visit and images you upload.
@f4grx with rebuilds, the question is how well they port security fixes to their fork. well, that and when will they get themselved pwned of course, with a backdoored update getting pushed to users...
@infosecdj @f4grx It's not out yet, but #LadyBirdBrowser is perhaps the only real alternative that we have when it's released. It's open source of course. I'm begrudgingly sticking with Brave until then
@f4grx @infosecdj I couldn't say without being directly involved with development. However, the devs have said they plan to support popular extensions, but are currently focused on building the engine. It is being built from the ground up afterall, and Alpha (to early adopters) is only scheduled for Summer 2026 at this stage.
This clause explicitly separates the information they claim license over from the data collected in the Privacy Notice. This clause is more expansive—"information uploaded through Firefox" is basically anything in a HTTP request or a websocket.
This is your hojillionth reminder that non-profits are corpos that figured out how to avoid taxes. When the chips are down, most will readjust the "mission" toward revenue.
yup. there are some less greedy for profit and non-profit orgs, but it is important to remember that non-profit is a tax status. it does not mean a mandate to only do charitable works. it just puts some restrictions on how profit may be used and how much of revenue can be profit.
I have spent my night reading browser Terms and Privacy Policies. Why? Because I love you and hate myself, apparently.
So here's the deal: that "non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license" you're granting to Firefox/Moz when you upload data through it? It is boilerplate language. Pretty common actually!
But not in browsers. In fact, not a single browser ToS has anything resembling this provision.
Mozilla has updated their press release with the following clarification:
UPDATE: We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so we want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information type into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.
@ireneista Many have suggested that the intended meaning here is something like "We literally need to license your data to transmit it via HTTP," but this feels off to me, given that no other browser's Terms contain this language. I'd be interested in your thoughts on that.
we're not a lawyer but we have for sure worked on this sort of thing, and that would be quite a radical interpretation compared to any we've seen before... it's conceivable that something in the digital markets act or digital services act creates a new requirement we're not personally aware of, but our best guesses are >
Mozilla's lawyers overthought it and came up with something weird and unnecessary and are now regretting they didn't loop in the PR team
the company needs this permission because it intends to use this permission, because it intends to use browsing data in all the ways everyone is concerned about
A third possibility is that someone lazy just copied and pasted from other terms of service, and now they're scrambling to justify why that cruft is in there rather than just own up to it.
I mean, no, I am not a lawyer, either. But the *language* clearly states that you grant Mozilla license, and if in doubt, the legal language counts.
It would also be the first time in decades of Internet and copyright that this language was necessary.
You know what makes this necessary? AI training.
If the feature they're referring to is a machine learning system, they need license to train it on your data. But that has little to do with the base...
also, like, this does not happen in a vacuum, the company has spoken about its intent to pivot, since its main business model was to get paid by google to be the default search engine and that was found to be an antitrust violation
@ireneista ... functionality of a browser, so should terms you may have to agree to to use such a feature.
But it's opt-out, isn't it?
And that's where the GDPR and DSA matter; the former require e.g. "informed consent", and you cannot by definition be informed enough of the consent they assume in an opt-out scenario. And the latter prohibits the use of deceptive patterns like e.g. cookie banners to convince users to grant consent against their best interests.
@ireneista ... thinking a lawsuit due to both should be made against them. It's stuff that makes sense in the US legal system, but is going to be painful for them here.
Then the licence cannot be a blanket one but specific to the purpose. Given search terms are currently used without licence and search results are storable and reusable without a specific licence it simply puts a barrier between the user and Mozilla that wasn't there before.
Given that search behaviour has not needed to be licenced up to now and it's a necessary feature of a browser enforcing one now is bound to fail without consideration.
I think the objections to these changes are going to be much deeper and wider than just 'information' type usage, they change the whole relationship between Mozilla and the User.
The User can avoid a lot of this by never updating or removing the Firefox account and never logging in. Licences with unidentified users cannot be relied upon by the Licensee as a defence for use.
I think it makes sense for specific services that need to transit through Mozilla's servers first, but for anything else it doesn't. Examples of such services would be account synchronization, online translation (although Firefox has offline models, but maybe they also have online?), search suggestions (pretty sure those go through a Moz server that also serves "recommended" sites)... Essentially all optional features that aren't the core of what a browser does, but some may be enabled by default so it's easier for them to just ask for the rights to use the necessary information instead of having the users specifically activate them and get an extra clause to look at. Although having them opt-in by default would be more privacy friendly...
But it also doesn't mean we should shout "they became evil!!" when they choose the easy option, I saw your responses basically saying that now they are using all our data for AI training but nothing in their privacy policy suggests that they do...
we didn't say anything about "now". we've been involved in this sort of change from the other side, the update to the legal documents always comes before the feature rollout.
we've really tried pretty hard to avoid taking extremist positions such as "evil", and instead to speak only to what's in evidence. of course, social media being what it is, people will choose to hear things we don't say. we try our best, but people are very determined about that.
if you read almost any privacy policy carefully you will find that it promises exactly nothing. we have a whole gallows-humor piece about that from a while back. irenes.space/leaves/2024-09-29…
Oh yeah that wasn't from you, my bad. But my point stands: I did see some reactions going straight to the AI harvesting based on this change, but based on what I see in other companies that changes their terms to slurp all user contributes data into their LLM trainer, it is not enough.
@ireneista some lawyer thought it was a good idea to put the TCP/IP stack into legalese. Next: "we have the right to copy all your data as needed" (to put it into a network packet)
that's under the present implementation. the normal way to roll out features that require legal changes is to do the paperwork first, and only then deploy the feature. so we're left only speculating about what future changes might bring, once the company has the right to do that........
@http_error_418 @ireneista So, having done a fairly exhaustive review of browser terms, I can tell you that this language is rare. But when it's present, such as in Arc's terms, it is explicit about the use of your data in transmission, and that's it. Arc is also notable—perhaps because it is an AI product—for starting its Privacy Policy with statements about what it will not collect from you. Firefox's policy, sadly, makes no such definitive claims.
The issue is that "anything described in the Privacy Notice" is incredibly broad. IMO it would be easy to argue that "training an AI model on it" is "helping you yadayada". Like… yeah, they can't sell it to data brokers. But almost anything else they *might* want to do with it can be justified with that clause. And most of it I don't want.
What I find troubling is the vagueness about 'upload' - to me, an upload is anything at all sent in the upstream, including personal logins and private identity data you may be sharing with a secure system. If this is what they mean, then they need to break down exactly what data is being collected. Is it everything you send to a site via the browser?
Or is this whole thing just about basic telemetry that you can disable in privacy settings?
I might not even be a country lawyer but this language is still overreach. Never mind the termination clauses where they can try and stop you from using Firefox?
Not that it matters, because a blog post is marketing, and when their own legal department says a company is doing questionable or morally corrupt stuff, be assured they are not admitting to a crime they aren't going to commit, no matter what marketing says
why the hell do THEY need to use information that should only go between me and a website? FF worked for tens of years without this, what "basic functionality" are they talking about at this point?
- This shouldn't have needed to be clarified in the first place. If that blogpost was proofread by anyone they would have seen that section and called it out for being likely to be 'misunderstood' - It's indeed still really weird phrasing
noyb filed a complaint against Mozilla for quietly enabling a supposed “privacy feature” (called Privacy Preserving Attribution) in its Firefox browser which tracks user behaviour on websites.
@deFractal Sorry, I have none. Unlike many here, I do not require my browser to be FOSS. I use Vivaldi quite happily, and have never felt the need to explore the Firefox forks.
My priority criteria are full @ublockorigin compatibility and support for all my user scripts and user styles for fragile or consent-contemptuous sites requiring something more complex than uBlock Origin filters. Tab containers are also important.
Essentially, I care about ensuring I can eat my cake and still have it: block each part of every site that doesn't serve my purpose, and still make the parts which do serve my purpose work despite that.
I notice they haven’t clarified the section on collecting data for “Compliance with law in responding to data subject rights requests, responding to law enforcement requests, managing and protecting our (and our users) rights, property and/or safety. Legitimate interest, where compliance is not appropriate, in supporting legal or regulatory processes or requests, preventing fraud and managing and protecting our (and our users’) rights, property and/or safety.”
Bunch of lawyer-speak drivel designed to obfuscate that Mozilla has simply decided they can't ignore the cash they stand to gain from having more and more data to sell.
IronFox is secure, hardened and privacy-oriented browser based on Firefox. This is read-only mirror of https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox. - ironfox-oss/IronFox
@TamsynUlthara @David_Kelly_SF That's weird, there was a huge uproar a few years ago, and I clearly recall that they got rid of that unique id. Did they forget to update their privacy policy?
Update: The project to remove our unique ID stalled after we encountered unexpected deviations in the number of users counted using other methods. We spent a lot of time researching and understanding the reasons for this. We have concluded that the numbers we get using a unique id are more accurate, so we are sticking with it at the moment. It’s as important not to over-count as it is not to under-count as we develop Vivaldi.
@TamsynUlthara Librewolf is cool in theory but kind of Opinionated™. Seriously, deleting all your history when you close the browser??? That should NOT be on by default, what the actual fuck. (I knew there was something I didn't like about its defaults last we tried it, but couldn't remember what, so I looked it up just now and found its settings docs and..yeah.)
Is there something like it that's less... *waves paw* yeah?
Kinda sucks because I'm a wolf and I would love a Wolf Browser that's actually good. But yeah.
I agree that the LibreWolf defaults are ... not the best for people using it as a standard browser. The idea is to make it as secure and private as possible by default, and let the user scale that back as necessary.
The one thing I find the most annoying is having it always open its window to certain dimensions on startup, to reduce fingerprinting, with no way (that I've found) in the settings to disable it. It doesn't matter in my tiling window manager, but on other machines I've had to use an extension to work around this.
It would be nice if there were a toggle to easily make LibreWolf more-or-less as functional as standard Firefox, just minus the privacy-invasive bullshit from upstream, and let us add more security/privacy as we saw fit. Right now we have to work in the opposite direction, which is frustrating for new users. (Once you get past that initial one-time phase of tweaking the settings, the experience is solid, IMHO.)
@scottwilson Sometimes this language gets written without sufficient scrutiny. And sometimes it gets written with all the scrutiny it needs to ensure you, the user, are screwed.
@scottwilson I think they're being very clear about what they want. In fact, I'd go so far as to speculate that somewhere, around some boardroom table, there was a conversation that Firefox is an albatross around Mozilla's neck. The sooner they can kill it and become the AI/privacy ads org, the better.
@vkc I ain't gonna tell people what browser to use (it's not a particularly weighty moral choice!). In terms of stability, however, I like that Vivaldi has arrived at a business model that pays developers without screwing users.
@vkc wait what is Vivaldi's business model? Did I miss a memo? (I love Vivaldi for what they do but I don't think there is a single browser out there who isn't getting the bulk of its revenue from search companies..?)
@wtrmt Which indicates that the "they need that for Firefox to be able to speak http" excuses is bullshit, the open source version does that just fine. It's for the parts that are not included in the source code, i.e. the AI and advertising.
Hot off the back of its recent leadership rejig, Mozilla has announced users of Firefox will soon be subject to a ‘Terms of Use’ policy — a first for the iconic open source web browse...
That's my guess too. They will train an AI or several with data we let go through Firefox. That's a no go for me. Is that as serious as it sounds? Is it time to leave a 20+ year-old web partner?
@cR0w @da_667 True, however their built-in blocker works quite well. I'm unsure how that will be affected, since I believe it is technically an extension.
It is time to use a browser based on just-rebranded Firefox code. Fennec for smartphone is OK, but I have not found a similar alternative for the desktop. Those I know about have some undesirable delay in releasing updates. Other option is to choose a fork like IceCat and check its update cadence in relation to upstream.
why does everything have to be speed run to enshittification? I start loosing every last slither of hope. All is drifting away and for no good reasons.
@da_667 @scottwilson @cR0w I used it. Hell, it's in the old PWST videos. I'm ashamed of that. But yeah, if you're looking for a browser that has a sustainable business model but doesn't screw users, you have a clear option. If you require FOSS, you have a thousand, but I don't trust a single one to be around for > 5 years
@cR0w @da_667 What do the 3 of ya'll think about Brave?
I keep trying to like it, and I admire Yan Zhu, but I'm really turned off by Brendan Eich and his shenannigans. I'm trying to use software that aligns with my values... I just don't know.
@scottwilson @cR0w I've avoided it like the plague because fuck anything even tangentially related to cryptocurrency. Even if they ripped it out, unless it was the VERY LAST BASTION with ublock/manifest V2 support, I wouldn't touch it.
That's really a very vague, unhelpful statement in bold! I guess it's the only popular browser where you can look at all the code and disable linking to proprietary services through the settings [citation needed], so that will help guard against abuse of that term, but it still feels foreboding...
is this not the same boilerplate language used in almost every website that hosts user content?
Like, no doubt it’s weird for a browser to do this but that wording is typically for allowing websites to publicly host your content on their service/equipment and allow things like image cropping/ re-sharing etc.
Makes me wonder if they’re going to start like, hosting servers as intermediaries between the user and whatever site they’re uploading to. I can’t see why that’d be worth it though except maybe in situations where the end site is unstable. Even if it is at the end of the day for training purposes, I can’t imagine they’d not have some kind of cover story to justify it.
@malusdraco A website is not the intermediary between you and the rest of the web. This language suggests every HTTP request you make is fair game. That's the difference.
I don’t know that I buy “any http request” unless that qualifies as “inputted information” did they do some sort of press release to go with the change in policy?
@da_667 god dammit. Is it even possible for a secure open source browser with its own rendering engine to be maintained without AI and advertising infecting every part of it?
We will keep Manifest v2 for as long as it’s still available in Chromium. We expect to drop support in June 2025, but we may maintain it longer or be forced to drop support for it sooner, depending on the precise nature of the changes to the code.
@cR0w @da_667 The built in ad blocker was created as a response to MV2 being deprecated, so I'd expect them to have built it in a way that doesn't depend on MV2.
Has anyone yet looked at #Firefox code and determined whether Mozilla snuck in something that sends them data even before they introduced their terms of use?
reading the bolded sounds like a typical web browsing experience. You type something in, the browser gets your analytics. I'm sure Firefox has some cloud based bullshit given that the browser is such a ram hog.
@Tubsta @JoeRess @LateNightLinux They have such potential to be the Good People given how everything is going. So frustrating they’re fumbling the opportunity… again. :/
With the lay-offs, the refocus on AI, the introduction of adverts and now this, it's like the Mozilla Foundation is carefully doing everything it can to render itself irrelevant.
I'm skeptical of what exactly this means. Every social media service gets shit for saying you relinquish rights to them for anything you upload but that's kind of the only legalese way that they can allow user generated content. IANAL, so it's hard for me to judge why they would need that text and why they would not.
@igimenezblb I think the important distinction here is a site you navigate to and a service you use on the web, and the tool you use to access everything on the web.
fucking yikes! Does anyone know if they have the same access to forks (the one I have in mind is Tor) or if this only applies if we're using the official Firefox app? I have a feeling it's the latter but better safe than sorry
There is also the incredibly broad "To comply with applicable laws, and identify and prevent harmful, unauthorized or illegal activity." in which Mozilla states they may gather "all data types" - among the defined types include: searches, browsing data (visited URLS), content and any other data.
In support of nebulously defined "identify and prevent harmful," and in response to law enforcement.
That "learn more about" link just goes to a list of definitions.
(Note it is a lot more than this one clause where they expand their claimed right to spy on you, and i encourage your e-mails to reflect this where i did not. See Sarah Jamie Lewis' thread, social.coop/@sarahjamielewis@m… )
Anyway what i wrote, before i read that:
Firefox does not have any right to information i enter into the URL address bar or forms on websites
My feedback and suggestion here, absolutely you can use for free.
Which is that this clause is wildly unacceptable, and you need to make very clear that you do not and will not ever spy on people while they browse:
"When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
Sounds like a ridiculously overbroad claim so that you can stick "AI" down our throats and advertisements, but with this start you will hand over our private data to a fascist government, too.
And again, that sentence is making a claim to data that was never intended to be shared with Mozilla, that is and must remain solely the private personal communication between the person using Firefox and the website being visited.
Mozilla rejected me as their head of Policy/T&S without even a recruiter reachout interview - So the more I see them fuck up the more amused at them I am 😛
How is this license different than any other license for any other web-based application?
You know how many things your browser interacts with to display what it does and you also know that there are a handful of tools like Firefox Sync or Pocket built into it that interact with backend services that Mozilla runs, and those things probably already had terms like this so....
I'm straining to see any way in which this is an issue other than the fact that everybody in the entire universe is going to make it an issue, because we go through this fucking dance every single time everyone ever sees this language, even though it's used in like every EULA ever and you'd think people would get it by now.
@mav I want you to think carefully about the difference between the means of access—the browser—and the site that you choose to access. The language at the browser layer is much more concerning.
Also, I take exception with the "FUD" framing. I have linked only primary sources here. We can disagree about interpretation, but that's not the same thing as FUD..
So is the issue you're taking here that the EULA is not sufficiently granular, in that it doesn't distinguish between usage for data provided for standard browsing versus data transmitted to built-in services like Sync?
I'm calling this FUD specifically because I think your interpretation of this language, which we really do see almost everywhere, is particularly uncharitable (to put it nicely.)
I'm as frustrated with Moz' governance as everyone else, but I do not think this EULA is some great evil. I think this is probably them trying to have one standard EULA instead of separate EULAs for every damn thing they do, plus they didn't have one at all AFAIK for the data they exchange to provide standard things like CRL lookups and safe browsing checks.
I guess if you want to say that your beef with it is that this could be stretched to say that every time you submit data to a site you're giving Mozilla a license to use it, but I don't think that's what they intended at all. Moreover, Firefox IS using your data, and if you use Sync, may very well be saving stuff about what you did (depending on what kind of access you did.)
Asking them to clarify is certainly not unreasonable, but this is hardly a "panic lets all switch to Chrome" kind of scenario.
@mav Respectfully, you are imputing intent where there is none in the language. For one thing, "Sync" shows up nowhere in this paragraph. The language is "When you upload or input information through Firefox." That is broad, and I must assume intentionally broad.
Look, we can disagree on intention, but think defensively. Let's assume Mozilla does want to do gross stuff with my HTTP requests. With this tacit contract, I've agreed to that usage, and any attorney worth a damn could argue so in front of a judge or jury. It's not what they will do; it's what the language could let them do.
I think that the smartest attorney in the world would have a difficult time crafting a EULA for a browser that, under these terms, you would be willing to accept. I'm not a lawyer (or even a particularly good approximation of one) but it sounds like to me the only way to satisfy the thing you're asking for is to spell out in detail inside the EULA itself what services they are talking about and when they are used.
(Mozilla's site does spell out in significant detail what they acquire and what they do with it, but unless there's something specific to link each section with its corresponding role in the EULA, I can't imagine anyone being sufficiently happy about it.)
From a defensive point of view, you're using a tool you didn't make to access servers and services you don't control. If any one of the pieces of this puzzle decide to go full evil, everyone interacting with that layer is fucked.
And it's quite clear by the discussion here that the primary remedy for this is seen as other browsers. Which, fine, use whatever browser you want, but there's one engine in t
... show more
I think that the smartest attorney in the world would have a difficult time crafting a EULA for a browser that, under these terms, you would be willing to accept. I'm not a lawyer (or even a particularly good approximation of one) but it sounds like to me the only way to satisfy the thing you're asking for is to spell out in detail inside the EULA itself what services they are talking about and when they are used.
(Mozilla's site does spell out in significant detail what they acquire and what they do with it, but unless there's something specific to link each section with its corresponding role in the EULA, I can't imagine anyone being sufficiently happy about it.)
From a defensive point of view, you're using a tool you didn't make to access servers and services you don't control. If any one of the pieces of this puzzle decide to go full evil, everyone interacting with that layer is fucked.
And it's quite clear by the discussion here that the primary remedy for this is seen as other browsers. Which, fine, use whatever browser you want, but there's one engine in the world left that runs uBO and it ain't Chrome. (I'm not in any way happy about this, but that's what happens when you put the world's largest ad company in charge of the world's most widely used browser engine.)
This is like the 9,185,046th time we've had the exact same license use terms discussion and I feel like I wanna just wail for a while and then do a shot for every one of them and expire in an alcohol-induced coma.
@mav This is a very confusing claim, given that I above linked Vivaldi's Terms, which do not include this seemingly intentionally-vague or expansive language. And those terms satisfy me just fine. So I guess it is possible to satisfy me!
If by "what they acquire," you are referring to the enumerated data in the Privacy Policy, the paragraph in question in the new terms is clear that they are referencing a set of data including, but not limited to, that data. Combined with the expansive "Uploaded through Firefox" language is neither normal nor particularly comforting.
Now, your points on defensive tooling are pure goalpost-moving. Yes, any service can decide to "go evil," as you put it. But look at how Mozilla has been behaving. Why the hell would I give them the benefit of the doubt now?
As far as what's been hashed and rehashed, I cannot recall a time when a web browser, much less an open source one meant to be a paragon of privacy, has included language like this.
I could be entirely wrong! But look at the pattern and tell me I shouldn't be wary.
I think you should definitely be wary. Mozilla has a long and storied history of looking exactly at what their users want them to do and then pulling out a gun and peppering us all with bullets. And then being like "Whoops!" It's infuriating.
There's no other real options. There's no other browser out there that's worth a fuck in the long run; it's all Chromium. As much as I like Vivaldi, it's just Chromium.
I also still think this is the same damn boilerplate text that's in every goddamn license agreement on Earth so I don't understand why it matters.
You say this is the kind of license agreement that you see in creepy social media, which is true. It's also the same license agreement you see for any other piece of software that has to transmit, store, or display your data anywhere. I just don't think this is that big of a deal and I do not understand why everyone is freaking out about it. I'm also genuinely shocked that other browsers don't have this kind of license. I imagine the reason why Chrome can get away with it is because All of the services tha
... show more
I think you should definitely be wary. Mozilla has a long and storied history of looking exactly at what their users want them to do and then pulling out a gun and peppering us all with bullets. And then being like "Whoops!" It's infuriating.
There's no other real options. There's no other browser out there that's worth a fuck in the long run; it's all Chromium. As much as I like Vivaldi, it's just Chromium.
I also still think this is the same damn boilerplate text that's in every goddamn license agreement on Earth so I don't understand why it matters.
You say this is the kind of license agreement that you see in creepy social media, which is true. It's also the same license agreement you see for any other piece of software that has to transmit, store, or display your data anywhere. I just don't think this is that big of a deal and I do not understand why everyone is freaking out about it. I'm also genuinely shocked that other browsers don't have this kind of license. I imagine the reason why Chrome can get away with it is because All of the services that would need this kind of license are all automatically covered by the Google EULA you have to agree to to get an account. I'm quite surprised that neither Firefox previously nor Vivaldi nor any other browser with a sync tool have this kind of license either. Or maybe they just pushed off the license into the sync tool so you didn't have to agree to it until you used it.
The weird psrudonymous advertising thing is just so much bigger of a deal. And yet we're still stuck with this damn browser because - for the moment - it still exists. Considering the speed at which horrors are flying at us these days, I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow Mozilla got wholly acquired by Alphabet and there became one browser on all of Earth. Especially considering that antitrust law is now dead.
Anyway, I hope this all works out the way you want, that would be good for all of us. I'm going to keep using the only browser on the planet in which ublock origin continues to work, and see what godawful nightmares tomorrow brings.
I don’t agree with these terms. I will cease using Firefox at once. Which will be easy because it’s only on a single system. Librewolf is on everything f else.
I'm not sure what these terms mean exactly, but regardless this is why I'm quite happy with Fedora's build of Firefox. A counterweight against ISVs for stuff like this.
On Wednesday, Mozilla introduced legal updates to users of Firefox, and something feels off. I read, and re-read the new Terms of Use and while much of it reads like standard boilerplate from any tech company, there’s a new section that doesn’t seem …
*sigh* Here we go again. I've had enough with IE ages ago and moved to Chrome. Then to Firefox. Now I'm trying LibreWolf, a fork of Firefox hosted on Codeberg.
@Polychrome @lispi314 Yours is a very charitable reading of the clause. But let's consider Mozilla's recent behavior, and ask how much good faith is due. Can you imagine no more expansive interpretation of this language?
I've spent the night reading browser Terms. Not a one includes a clause like this. They do explicitly call out GDPR, which this oddly does not (the Privacy Policy does have appropriate EU affordances). You know what does use this language?
You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet.
This means the set of data to which the "license" applies includes, but is not limited to, the data defined in the Privacy Policy. That's why the "when you upload or input information through Firefox" clause is so concerning to me. We don't know the bounds of that expanded set, only that it is expanded.
@Schouten_B Well, they've clarified in that direction, but I still find their rationale bogus, given that no other browser seems to require that language to operate. But hey, at least we can hold them to this.
I am certainly not EU law expert, but Article 5, section 1 of 2001/29/EC would seem to obviate this concern:
Temporary acts of reproduction referred to in Article 2, which are transient or incidental [and] an integral and essential part of a technological process and whose sole purpose is to enable:
(a) a transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary, or
(b) a lawful use of a work or other subject-matter to be made, and which have no independent economic significance, shall be exempted from the reproduction right provided for in Article 2.
@Schouten_B Yeah I dunno, this is scoped to the Google Services, aka the applications on the web. And as mentioned, other such services license similarly. But I can not for the life of me find any instance of a browser's own terms doing this.
@buherator As of today, Mozilla's primary revenue comes from search engine deals, not adtech. That will be true if and until the DoJ's proposed remedies in the Chrome antitrust case are adopted, which would prevent the kind of exclusive deal Google has with Mozilla.
@Schouten_B I understand that. But the nuance here is where the license for the content is applied: at the service level, or the browser. This reads clearly to me that it's at the service level.
@rootsnase Based on this, the charitable reading seems to be what they are claiming: they need this license to literally transmit your data via HTTP. But uh, no other browser uses this language, so it's still weird.
This...makes my point? The enumerated services do not include the browser qua the browser. This is the distinction! Google is not, it seems, claiming a license over all HTTP requests you send anywhere via Chrome. But Firefox now is.
IronFox is secure, hardened and privacy-oriented browser based on Firefox. This is read-only mirror of https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox. - ironfox-oss/IronFox
@Schouten_B It's not about privacy. The language relates to copyright, and it grants Mozilla exactly the uses it states. The broader rationale for it doesn't really matter.
@maniandthenonos Ain't no best. As this entire conversation demonstrates, browsers are an intensely personal choice. For some, it's a value statement. For others, the choice is purely pragmatic. There have been several mentioned in this thread that prioritize different aspects (privacy, openness, compatibility, etc.). I personally like using Vivaldi, but that's a non-starter for a lot of of people due to its Chromium base. Shop around!
@rootsnase not just weird, ridiculous; if true, it would mean all software should have such a license for doing anything at all, which is of course not the case. The one installing/running the software is the responsible party in terms of processing, and the data does not need to come anywhere near mozilla themselves
1) I kind of like the language, it’s GPL-esque. 2) I dislike the idea of a legal entity having any kind of operation in their behalf on my Linux machine.
NO PLEASE NOT THIS SHIT AGAIN I JUST RECOMMENDED FIREFOX AS A PRIVACY TOOL TO ABUNCH OF NON-TECHIES AND I DONT WANNA HAVE TO POINT TO LIBREWOLF OR SHIT AAAAAAAAAAAA
servo.org ...the old browser engine project Mozilla started, orphaned and then adopted by Linux Foundation Europe. Probably the only third party that might be a future alternative to the american duopoly. But it as everything else good needs developers. #servo
@neil @TheVampireFishQueen One @lilianedwards and I did a piece of theatre at #Gikii on this few years back - in the context of the Databox project, a self hosted personal data store - if data never left the device what licence if any did (commercial) SW supplier need, and what GDPR obligations did they have. Not sure we ever actually got to a satisfactory conclusion!
I can switch browsers easily enough. However, I have decades’ worth of email in #Thunderbird. I’m more worried about that. Have they added terms of (dis)service to that app yet?
Like others, I'm trying to figure out what features this could possibly support. The only thing I can think of is the Firefox Sync, so I guess Firefox can use my passwords now? And for Select->Right Click->Translate to English? They get a license to whatever I'm trying to translate
@hobs @stinerman @TruelyNotARobot @_tissa_ if it's just bookmarks you are concerned about you can export them manually or use a tool like xbrowsersync.org/ it's open source and encrypted and works with all browsers. There's an APK you can get and keep up to date with Obtainium for Android devices as well.
@buherator They are in adtech, just not as a primary revenue stream. But leaving that aside, compare their Terms with browsers supported by similar models, like Brave or Vivaldi. You'll find this language much more expansive.
the clarification doesn't clarify anything 😞 it is still understandable as "whatever you do with and whatever is passed through the software is ours to do whatever we want"
@c0rb34u It scopes the "license" clause to only the data enumerated in the Privacy Policy. That clause by itself reads as greater than that set, which is problematic.
the clarification is in a blog post, that may not be legally binding. so in my eyes any clarification outside of the ToS is worthless.
If #Mozilla wants to offer AI services or collect and use their users data, this should be a separate opt-in ToS in my opinion, not the terms of the base application.
But TBH #Mozilla is doing too much dumb management decisions these days, so I'm considering to stop recommending it. (colorways, firing #rust and #servo teams, ads for temu and so on)
I think it might have been intended to mean "if you upload copyrighted data using Firefox we're not responsible for any license fees just because you passed it through our software and services."
But I'm sure a good lawyer could twist this in just about any direction they want.
@Schouten_B Licensing terms do not require a rationale, they require the correct language. The language in these terms is unambiguous with regards to those terms.
The specifically worded rationale is fluffy. "As indicated by the user's behavior" (TL;DR) is wide open to interpretation with respect to which behavior implies what intent or requirements. In other words, Mozilla has all the legal leeway to grant itself semi arbitrary uses.
It's "will nobody think of the children??!" in techbro lingo. Creepy as fuck, and very much a reason to treat Mozilla as the enemy in the battle for the open web.
@Schouten_B The precise wording is "to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox"
"indicate" is not "state" or "give consent to". "use" may mean simply starting the browser without interacting with it. "experience" is, by the very nature of the word, subject to interpretation.
This collection of words may mean that by starting Firefox, I "indicate" that I opt into AI training, which an assistant..
@Schouten_B Note also that the privacy notice is referred to as "... including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate ..."
So a) it includes processing data as described in the privacy notice, b) it also includes acting on my behalf to *help* me navigate, not to translate my express navigation instruction into practice, but c) the key word is the first, "include".
@neil Also agree, I don't think they plan to sale everyone data (atleast not so blatantly), have exclusive rights to any material you upload via Firefox or ban adult content.
@Schouten_B ... known uses ahead of time (done here), but keep the door open for other uses.
The next part about the copyright license notably does not explicitly refer to any specific such use, but stands alongside the previous listed uses. Which is great, because you *infer* it refers only to those, but that's not actually stated there.
@TheVampireFishQueen @neil There are a couple of weirdnesses here that I am willing to chalk up to carelessness. But when writing your contracts, that's uh, not awesome as a defense.
But we must consider the alternative, which is that the vagaries in this policy are wiggle room they wanted for one reason or another.
@Schouten_B And you shouldn't mix "legitimate interests" in the GDPR context with copyright licenses. PII is not the same as copyrightable information and vice versa.
@Schouten_B The digital services act prohibits deceptive patterns. That means when I click a "search" button, a manufacturer may legitimately infer that I wish to search for something. It would be a deceptive pattern (or worse) to also send those search terms for analysis somewhere else *even if* this would improve future searches. Here, explicit and informed consent is required.
So nobody claims a browser should ask for consent of everything, just the shady shit.
@Schouten_B @jens Sorry to hop in, but since I've been poring over this for a day now, I think I see where you both are coming from.
The language seems to distinguish what you are licensing and what is covered by the Privacy Policy. That distinction lies in the "as well as" clause. Bas, your gloss is that because they only claim to process data listed in the Privacy Policy, whatever may be in the "as well as," (maybe nothing, maybe something someday) is out of Mozilla's reach. Jens, I think you're reading that to mean the "as well as" data can be processed, uncovered by the Privacy Policy.
Let's leave aside the blog update, which is for all intents not part of the contract.
Functionally, I suspect Bas is close to correct for now. However, it's difficult to imagine that, in drafting, no one read this with the suspicions voiced over the last 24 hours by the public. If we assume the vagueness is intentional, there is a space created for more opt-out (we hope) shenanigans down the road.
What I see is that there is no grammatical connection between the privacy policy stuff and the copyright stuff, and there is no implicit legal connection between processing of PII and licensing copyrightable material. The only connection there is is proximity in the text, and *that* in no way implies the interpretation that Bas is insisting on. Proximity is to logical connection as correlation is to causation.
@Schouten_B @jens Wow I sure do. This clearly spells out the number and nature of granted licenses. I'll take details over vague blanket statements any time. Also the Account mention is not casual; it's formally defined.
🤬 thankfully there are enough forks that this will just show Firefox as what it is: a distraction from Google's monopoly. Time for more Opera in my life.
I mean straight up there's a material difference in how the collection policies are framed here. Arc's Privacy Policy opens with the guarantees about what they won't collect from you. Mozilla's has no such guarantee. Moreover, Moz explicitly states that "Browsing data" is collected for marketing purposes, and consent is "as required by law."
Now, back to the new Firefox Terms. Let's say Mozilla decides browser activity like time on site or even search data is important to train an advertising ML model.
Even if your read of the Terms is correct, that kind of processing would be covered under that section of the Privacy Policy. But if Jens is correct, uh oh, we're still covered for that and more because it could be an unenumerated data type that the broad license language now covers. By contrast, Arc's clear guarantees about what won't be collected, combined with the specific license language, remove this risk.
@Schouten_B See, I think that's the crux of our problem: you again try to interpret this as somehow related to PII, because in the first part they talk about privacy. I haven't even looked into the privacy question.
The second part, which is explicitly not about PII but copyright, and so wholly separate from the first, literally grants Mozilla "a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information" - which refers to anything I upload whatsoever - with no other...
One simple attack scenario here is if I were to e.g. use a web-based editor to write code. It does not matter if I generally publish this code under a FLOSS license, for example, because Mozilla already has permission to that code *but without* any possible extra clauses such as e.g. copyleft related ones.
Any other copyrightable intellectual property I upload they also have rights to. Automatically.
@Schouten_B This is because copyright is not particularly concerned with fluffy clauses.
"use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox."
This part reads like a copyright license restriction, but as I painstakingly laid out before, "as you indicate by your use of Firefox" has quite literally arbitrary headroom for interpretation, and the other parts aren't much better.
@Schouten_B... thanks to OSI have embraced "we won't tell you what to do" style absolute libertarianism read similarly fluffy, so perhaps you're just used to that.
But more generally speaking, copyright terms can be very precise. I can quite literally restrict the license to use only within five metres of my home, from midnight to 0:13h on the condition that you copy my stuff only in your own blood on parchment made from birch bark, and anything else would not be permitted.
@Schouten_B So for license terms to be this broad - yes, it does protect Mozilla from litigation, but it also means Mozilla has pretty much all the interpretative power in the world to do with my (copyrightable) intellectual property as they see fit. And it is *not* typical of copyright, which this part leans on, quite the contrary.
So the best possible interpretation I have is that they are currently concerned with collecting AI training data, with no specific use in mind. And...
@Schouten_B... that is OK, in principle, but this is the part where associating this with non-copyrightable PII by virtue of proximity is highly disingenuous. It suggests that your granting of those broad rights is in your interest, when your interest is nowhere defined here.
Plus, this kind of association by proximity seems like a clear DSA-violating deceptive pattern. It certainly isn't "informed consent" if you were to accept those terms.
@Schouten_B Copyright is phrased in terms of restrictions and limitations, because you first grant the right to copy, and then specify how.
Already the phrase "in order to" deviates from how licenses are termed. A decent replacement might be "limited only to uses directly implementing", e.g. navigation.
Maybe this kind of example helps clarify just how open to interpretation those terms are. Because I can most certainly claim that my goal in taking your wallet is to *actually*...
@Schouten_B... help you protect your money ("in order to"), but it becomes much harder to defend this in the second phrasing unless it's demonstrably and only followed by putting it into a safe.
@Schouten_B @jens This is a highly Eurocentric discussion, which is fine, but I gotta tell ya, US jurisprudence is fairly hostile to the consumer in cases such as these. To make it more complicated, depending on what Circuit the case is tried in, it may be contract law or copyright law that holds sway.
Given the ubiquitous nature of end-user license agreements, terms of service, and similar agreements for websites and other software,[1] it is unsurprising tha
@Schouten_B It's already well established that caching content, while technically copying, isn't reproduction under copyright law.
It becomes reproduction if the cached content is reproduced/sent elsewhere, but the case law allows this as far as I understand, not in terms of "legitimate interest" (that is business interest), but in terms of "fair use". I'd have to dig up relevant cases, but that discussion is about as old as Napster and settled.
@Schouten_B... browsers to reserve any usage rights because normal operations such as copying bits to/from a network interface, in-memory in a software or to/from caches is already permitted.
If you note, GPL does not include clauses that you must grant the makers of grep usage rights for sifting through your documents.
@Schouten_B Again, though, that's the point I was already making: it may be the case that if challenged in court, users would always be given preference.
But *until* such a thing happens, there is nothing preventing Mozilla from doing whatever the hell they want. This shifts the burden away from Mozilla to take care to be legally compliant with their use of information over to the consumer. At best, it's irresponsible and and worst it's a deliberate backdoor.
@Schouten_B... legal advice Mozilla can get, this again means at best it's gross negligence not to phrase this stuff better based on legal advice, and at worst it's downright malicious.
There is no option from the consumer side to treat this other than absolutely hostile, and the "clarification" they posted yammers on about "we didn't mean it badly" without retracting those changes or working them over.
It's abundantly clear that the intent is not to change, but to convince...
@Schouten_B... consumers the changes are in their best interest when they're not. "I didn't mean to hit you, babe, please forgive me". Fuck that abuser logic.
Mozilla at this point is not to be trusted.
Sad, but but wasn't me who made all those dodgy decisions the community has been documenting over the years, so I'm also unable to shed a tiny tear over it.
@Schouten_B @jens Serious question: unless you have some insider knowledge, what leads you to think Mozilla, an organization that just stated its intent to develop its AI business/strategy, and is incorporated in the US, built its Terms with EU laws at the top of mind? So far as I know, nobody in the EU was gunning for Firefox because of a lack of Terms.
Conversely, taking the more adversarial reading, this opens the door to potential use of user data down the line. I don't know what the rationale was, but I've seen no evidence to support your interpretation.
@grillchen that.. looks... normal? firefox does a lot of stuff on your behalf, and explicitly saying so seems alright.
what's the alternative? I use brave too but that's got the same problem, developing a browser is really expensive if you want it to be used by real people instead of nerds.
@Schouten_B @jens I'm gonna challenge that the scenarios laid out are "mostly legal" in the US. I would describe the use of user data for model training especially as "mostly unlitigated." There are ongoing suits that may establish precedent one way or another, but they have not been decided. And indeed, those cases tend to base their complaints in copyright law, such as the New York Times case against OpenAI.
I'm also gonna push back on the framing that the US government is friendly to corporations here. At the moment, this regime's relationship with tech is fraught at best, with essentially a protection racket holding sway to maintain tech's fealty. But that is distinct from how aby given federal judge may rule.
Now, given all this, I don't think it's crazy to imagine an AI-focused Mozilla taking steps to ensure that any future disputes about model training on user data fall in the realm of contract law rather than copyright law.
@Schouten_B @jens Both, really, since neither are spelled out. But tbh it's weird that they haven't said they won't train on user data. Hell, Zoom says so. Notion says so. On the other hand, Meta quietly slipped into their Terms that you license your content for training by using their platforms.
Yes this is speculative. But I have plenty of reason for skepticism, and "No," is not an argument to the contrary.
@Schouten_B @jens I see plenty of reason to add those terms now.
Let's take as read that neither of us knows what Moz's plans re: AI in Firefox actually are. That also means we don't know their timeline. So from a threat modeling perspective, this language introduces the risk of a dark pattern kind of opt-out consent for the use of user data, similar to how they've handled:
Ads
Telemetry
Chatbot on the sidebar
If my concern is the use of my data in ML processes of any kind, I would say I have ample reason to view these Terms as a potential threat vector.
@Schouten_B Language form mental patterns, mental patterns form language.
It's very much in line with the development a lot of tech companies have undergone in the last few decades, with increased enshittification in tow.
To see this having reached Mozilla is to be expected, but still a blow.
And yes, the hit has been made: you do not take my IP rights under the guise of privacy protection and get to offer a lukewarm "just a misunderstanding" reframing attempt. Sorry, but no.
Google published principals in 2018 barring its AI technology from being used for sensitive purposes. Weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, those guidelines are being overhauled.
@Schouten_B Oh yes, they are, and your insistence that the terms say something different from what the words say is starting to piss me off. As long as I can chalk this up to opinion or lack of understanding, I'm fine.
But you keep just repeating your faith in the good intent and optimal interpretations. You're fine to have those beliefs, of course, but I wouldn't consider them actual arguments.
So perhaps it's best to close this conversation here.
Das Bild zeigt einen Screenshot einer Social-Media-Konversation. Der Benutzer "Amber" (mit einem Cartoon-Avatar) hat einen Beitrag verfasst, dem ein anderer Benutzer namens "Jolene (kitten)" (ebenfalls mit einem Cartoon-Avatar) mit "Puppygirlhornypost2 needs more jpeg" geantwortet hat. Amber hat darauf mit "[@]tjhexf like this" geantwortet und einen weiteren Post geteilt, der einen Kommentar über Leute enthält, die Screenshots von Beiträgen auf Social Media Plattformen posten. Der erste Beitrag von Amber lautet: "I couldn't agree with this more."
horrible. this is all so horrible. the person who literally released a judge's daughter's tax return over some minor conflict has access to some of the most VULNERABLE people in the united states. we're really in over our heads now
DOGE can now access a HUD system that includes addresses domestic violence survivors have relocated to for safety, medical records in disability cases and credit reports in lending discrimination cases.
While some agencies have resisted efforts by Elon Musk’s team to access confidential records, HUD has opened the door. The potential harm to privacy could be significant.
While some agencies have resisted efforts by Elon Musk’s team to access confidential records, HUD has opened the door. The potential harm to privacy could be significant.
DOGE can now access a HUD system that includes addresses domestic violence survivors have relocated to for safety, medical records in disability cases and credit reports in lending discrimination cases.
While some agencies have resisted efforts by Elon Musk’s team to access confidential records, HUD has opened the door. The potential harm to privacy could be significant.
Sorry to disappoint, this is is fully a joke and just because I got that stuck in my head again. I don't have blue hair, only used ties twice at most (for sure at some wedding I hated, and maybe for a school play), and I'm certainly not hiding in your Wi-Fi.
Orange King's madness across the ocean, unholy alliance's rise to power in Germany, and serious people talking about Europe needing a tactical nuclear deterrent?
Is there a way to skip the cutscene to the post-apocalyptic aftermath, or can we load a save and try for an alternative ending?
The Foundation is at a crossroads. We need to raise an additional $610K to break-even, and more immediately to raise $100K to keep our bridges running.
As a neutral custodian for the specification and much more, the Foundation is key to the success of Matrix. It is time to step up for it.
Please help me flee the US! I'm trying to leave asap and hit some turbulence!
I need to pay the car dealership money to pay off my car loan, which is higher than the value of my car. I also need to get emergency dentistry when I arrive and won't have any insurance to cover the costs. I'm looking for work and housing when I'm there so anything beyond that will help! I have multiple disabilities including eds, mcas, pots, me/cfs, fibro and it's very hard for me to do this. My only support comes from mutual aid, so anything you can do helps!
Thanks everyone for the boosts and mutual aid! I had to change my plans around to recover from fatigue but they are still in motion and planned for next week!
I totally forgot about it but I recently released a new album of noisy-ambient live synth stuff on bandcamp, it's $5/pay-what-you-want if you'd like another way to support me.
I've been living off of credit for a few months now but I can't pay it off and the bank is threatening me again with cutting it off. I'm just so tired trying to cut spending as much as I can, I sleep most of the day and try to eat as cheaply as I can but it's hard enough for me to eat in general and idk how to save more. I really need help, I'm in bed most of the day but I barely sleep, I don't know what to do. Please help me ko-fi.com/lillianviolet
Generalizing a bit, but rolling girl (vocaloid song) was the first instance of me experiencing this lol. A song i like a lot that also follows this is "Say it" by yorushika
If you don't mind, could you reply to this toot with something you have accomplished recently? Work, hobby, whatever, but especially if it's something fiddly and technical that required quiet contemplation or problem solving.
Right now my feed is flooded with the omni-catastrophe even more than it was in, like, March of 2020, and I just want (and suspect we could all use) some reminders that progress is still happening and being effective is still possible
I hasten to add that this is not to shame anyone _without_ any wins to put on the board at the moment, it is precisely because so many people are legitimately and understandably paralyzed by stress at the moment that I feel the reminder would be useful
(Not even, really, to shame anyone doing the doomposting. There's a lot of doom. A lot of it is even quite important to be aware of. But the volume and rate of it all is … oppressive)
I'm lucky to be insulated from a lot of the likely doom consequences, but still very concerned for others and my kids.
I find the work I do is both my thing, which I enjoy immensely, and a way of pushing back, by helping to empower individuals and reduce the power others have over them.
This motivates me a lot. It helps me feel less powerless, less subject, and more worthwhile.
I'm retired, and so have the time to get stuff done, which is great.
Nice idea for a thread. Remember too you can mute specific words in Mastodon settings, go filters, add words to filter and posts containing those words are removed from your feed.
convinced my company to let me build an internal tool with only django/htmx so we didn't have to have long meetings explaining stuff the hardware/backend folks get to the frontend folks.
I expect it will increase our velocity on this thing by like 3x or more.
i have been working on computer science research projects with collaborators, a combination of meetings and solitary notebook thinking through various formal developments, planning out and writing papers. proved a theorem or two.
Figured out why some MPI jobs were suddenly failing when using more than ~1000 processes after our update. Turned out to be a combination of two seemingly unrelated issues in two separate parts of the software stack.
But it's all working and the users are happy again!
I posted extensively about it during construction, but I built a coffee bar into an unnecessary doorway. It actually did require contemplation and problem solving because there’s not a square angle in our house, and I’m not a carpenter by trade.
I just finished putting together an interactive lecture on basic stats and experimental design for wireless researchers, and I'm pretty optimistic about how it'll go
I solved an apparently-intractable problem in a test suite suffering OOMs due to library conflict!
I wrote a little pytest hook to periodically sample RSS and CUDA usage, emitted some profiles to JSON, and got some nice plots drawing automagically whenever the suite is run¹.
No one test/fixture was doing it, but this ad-hoc tool made me confident of this after an iteration or two of testing less invasive fixes. So I solved the problem King Solomon style: I cut the suite in twain and never shall the two meet again.
Pretty satisfying problem to work through although it involved a few unwanted diversions.
¹ as I punch this out, I realize those plot outputs do tend to make a bit of a mess, so I should tidy them up a bit
Finally got around to fixing a bunch of things about my self-hosted setup - moved a bunch of services behind Tailscale, also switching auth over to Tailscale as well so that I don't need to keep re-authenticating through SSO. Also wrote up a small script to download my Kindle books now that Amazon's disabling that functionality.
@chrisamaphone just spent 3 days working on a material reference chart for our game, it is tough because we are a highly stylized game but still rely on PBR workflow to achieve some consistency.
I repaired a medium-pressure (about 5 atm) oil line on our motorhome with gaffer tape and cable ties. In the rain. On the side of a highway. Successfully. Does that count? 😁
Rigged up a motion-sensor light to help my visually impaired roommate find their way to the front door to our home, without waking me, when they need to go out for an appointment in the early hours.
Required break-light repair tape to get the color to something not sleep disrupting, a custom cradle built from lego pieces to hold the light and extension cord head stable, and some museum putty to secure said cradle place.
I have been hacking away at my (open source) programming language that I've been designing for a while now, and I recently used it in an actual production context at work, where it ended up being really useful (getting the results much faster than I could have hoped to achieve if I had to use something like Excel).
Recently I've been spending some time cleaning up the codebase and making sure there's a good test coverage. That's somewhat satisfying work, even though it's not something that is immediately visible to users.
I figured out how to make a way simpler, more DRY universal rainbow animation effect across elements all over (the next version of) my personal website using CSS variables.
Actually I’ve been learning way more about creative uses of CSS variables and calc() in general thanks to building the MIT Mystery Hunt website.
Did the opposite of what you're asking for. Did a product security presentation for a potential customer and got a surprising amount of praise from my own colleagues
I have recently become very good at sharpening and honing my kitchen knives, which has made cooking much more pleasant. It’s a task that requires care, patience, and mindful repetition, tasks I’m often very bad at. It’s nice to do something and have my hands be stable.
I have also been learning to play chords on the piano, both in terms of the hand motions required and the musical theory behind it. I don’t want to say that the experience of music is inherently non-Markovian (because is anything, truly, at the fundamental level?), but I am fascinated by how wildly different a particular chord can hit your brain depending on which chord or notes you played before. I used to have to think about Markovian processes a lot (and processes which were insufficiently parameterized to make their Markovian nature obvious)… but feeling it in the brain is so weird and cool.
I have allowed myself to feel my feelings and use them not to dwell (constantly, anyway) in anger and sadness but to drive myself to find things I can do and it is working an
... show more
I have recently become very good at sharpening and honing my kitchen knives, which has made cooking much more pleasant. It’s a task that requires care, patience, and mindful repetition, tasks I’m often very bad at. It’s nice to do something and have my hands be stable.
I have also been learning to play chords on the piano, both in terms of the hand motions required and the musical theory behind it. I don’t want to say that the experience of music is inherently non-Markovian (because is anything, truly, at the fundamental level?), but I am fascinated by how wildly different a particular chord can hit your brain depending on which chord or notes you played before. I used to have to think about Markovian processes a lot (and processes which were insufficiently parameterized to make their Markovian nature obvious)… but feeling it in the brain is so weird and cool.
I have allowed myself to feel my feelings and use them not to dwell (constantly, anyway) in anger and sadness but to drive myself to find things I can do and it is working and it is giving me hope.
I've recently acquired a feel for fixing the parity of the orientable Twiddle puzzles in Simon Tatham's puzzle collection. I've also gotten quite proficient at the ones that don't care about orientation. Reminds me of the difference between Rubik's cubes and super cubes
Over the last two years or so I’ve been working on github.com/brendanzab/language…, a somewhat eclectic collection of free-standing programming language projects exploring type checking, evaluation, and compilation.
My main goal has been to hone my understanding of these techniques, and also to provide a resource I can point to for others to learn from, along with links to other resources. I’ve found it much easier to learn this way, as opposed to investing lots of time into large, half finished projects.
I spent the last two years (re)learning to code by building a super personalized, way over complicated home server, as much from "scratch" as I could. Also automated all my postcard-posting stuff for the holiday seasons and started learning some real machine learning by using my massive postcard collection for fuel.
despite omni-catastrophe and my life being on fire to a pretty epic degree (like, being at the brink of losing housing), I have _nonetheless_ managed to line up enough leads and work to make it through the next 6mo alive! yay!
it’s a pretty damn good feeling to still get clients who want clue, despite seeing so much llm and related gunk all over freelance markets
set up a hanging two-stage compost bin on my balcony (the one in the backyard was overrun with mice last year). it hasn't been above freezing since i set it up so it's most of the way full with rock-hard rotten produce, but it's ready to go once spring comes! started some seedlings too, with more to plant in the coming weeks
@tortie don’t stress. Try to read the rest of the thread more like a bunch of other really overwhelmed people are also managing to get a lot done, and so it may also be possible for you. Not that it should be or that there’s a problem with you if it isn’t, but just that it is worth remaining open to the possibility.
I failed to find any vulnerabilities in the cryptography used by a messaging app. But I succeeded in documenting my experience to arrive at a negative result well enough to meet a few nice people.
Last year, I urged furries to stop using Telegram because it doesn’t actually provide them with any of the privacy guarantees they think it gives them. Instead of improving Telegram’s c…
It was a couple months ago, but I merged a long living branch of my MyCmd project that was a rewrite of the core of the project. It took a year and a half, but I did it.
I'm still working on getting to an initial release, but it was big progress.
I successfully installed a safety cover for our laser marker at work. Now people won't need to wear laser glasses around it, and fume extraction will be more effective (so no one has to breathe smoke).
The purchase (and expense of my time assembling the thing) was approved enthusiastically by our site manager, who cares about safety and his employees.
I'm working on building a gen.AI to teach myself the tech. Since the project is contrived, I've decided to build a Q&A AI for lore for the D&D game world Eberron.
I just got done with phase 2 of the data wrangling, i.e. I'm taking the text from 13 D&D pdfs and making them into AI-training-friendly text chunks. I got done with all the wrangling as of an hour ago, except I need to re-chunkify everything. (technical term)
Then I can stuff it into a vector db and get my MVP on 😀
I'm also coming up on six months of walking every day for exercise. I'm up to 12,500 steps a day for the last six weeks. I've walked over 600 miles since September.
I've lost 7 kg and improved things enough that my doctor had me stop taking the two blood pressure meds I was on because of my kidney failure.
I haven't finished it yet, but I'm learning rust and trying to contort it into letting me do a binary tree (for Huffman coding) that's as aesthetically pleasing as the one I did in Haskell long ago.
It's going terribly, but it's immensely satisfying, so I'm going to just call it Art and indulge myself.
I was able to rescue a Linux installation whose boot loader I had *thoroughly* hosed, with the help of UEFIshell - something I wasn't even aware existed - and a few educated guesses re kernel parameters and UUIDs.
Attached: 1 video
Presenting: the big red conversation optimizer button!
"hey did you read that thing on Twitter? ::::)))"
- (screams in German)
made using #rustlang (for the wireless DMX controller) and #circuitpython (for the button's guts)
I made a basic textbox with text selection in LuaJIT and SDL3. It's nothing special but when it's done it'll be useful in a lot of projects down the line.
i'm really really chuffed about how my convolution reverb thing is shaping up. i've been slowly getting to the "pulling out all the stops" phase of this project one little bit at a time mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/1…
last night i figured out that i can do something akin to subtractive synthesis by manipulating the signs in the impulse response sample, and i've got ideas for how to apply granular synthesis techniques to do weird cool stuff with this
I did another another convolution experiment tonight (just experimenting with different kinds of samples as the impulse response on the same song) and it turned out *amazing*
Attached: 2 images
Thanks to @progrium@mas.to I have now unlocked the ability to write a filesystem about as easily as I can write a web server. It took a lot of effort to get here but boy oh boy was it worth it.
at work I just finished converting a blog post from GooDoc into Markdown, linking everything up, adding some better styling for tables, and have it queued up to publish tomorrow.
At home, I’m almost done refactoring the common bits out of the 11ty configs for four different websites into a single shared config library/plugin.
Oh and this is super trivial but fun-to-me: I compiled the RC1 of Emacs 30.1
I figured how how to use a combination of ImageMagick, ffmpeg, and exiftool to upscale, pad, and convert Slack reacji GIFs to synthesized Live Photos that (mostly) meet suitability requirements to convert to transparent animated Messages Stickers, which now in iOS 18 I can use them as animated custom emoji reactions in Messages
most of my wins have been small and quiet, not particularly interesting on their own, but a lot of those, from hundreds of people, add up over the years to amazing things.
I've been setting up CI pipelines, managing our internal packing, keeping the CI servers healthy and monitored, building software update systems for our charge network, writing telemetry tools, and the like. Oh, and a lot of onboarding, teaching people how to do this kind of stuff, advocating for standards and best practices, etc.
And with a lot of this kind of quiet background supporting work that supports teams who can then focus on their subsystems that then get built into an aircraft, we have built amazing things.
In the past year, we've done a piloted eVTOL flight with transition from vertical takeoff to wing borne flight to vertical landing.
We've also built the first airplane (conventional airplane, not VTOL) off of our manufacturing line, did it's first flight in November, and now it's flown halfway across the country, charging mostly on a charge network that we've deployed
... show more
most of my wins have been small and quiet, not particularly interesting on their own, but a lot of those, from hundreds of people, add up over the years to amazing things.
I've been setting up CI pipelines, managing our internal packing, keeping the CI servers healthy and monitored, building software update systems for our charge network, writing telemetry tools, and the like. Oh, and a lot of onboarding, teaching people how to do this kind of stuff, advocating for standards and best practices, etc.
And with a lot of this kind of quiet background supporting work that supports teams who can then focus on their subsystems that then get built into an aircraft, we have built amazing things.
In the past year, we've done a piloted eVTOL flight with transition from vertical takeoff to wing borne flight to vertical landing.
We've also built the first airplane (conventional airplane, not VTOL) off of our manufacturing line, did it's first flight in November, and now it's flown halfway across the country, charging mostly on a charge network that we've deployed flightaware.com/live/flight/N9…
We've deployed dozens of chargers across the country to support this. We've been working diligently with the FAA on certification, crossing several internal milestones.
It's a long road to building, certifying, and selling an entirely new type of aircraft, with an entirely new, never before certified, propulsion system, but breaking the problem down, working on one piece at a time, and iterating and solving problems year after year gets you closer and closer.
Making progress on a feature I've wanted in #Grafana for almost a decade by giving a lot of technical direction and taking care of a lot of politics so the people doing the actual work don't have to.
Made a wooden monitor+speaker shelf for my desk, un-broke my Pi-Hole after an update hosed it, made my Tailscale setup work much better, oh and survived three job interviews…
I made a cake shaped like a Gengar. I like baking, but decorating cakes is not exactly a hobby or a skill of mine. I can make a delicious cake but it will probably look like crap.
But I found a channel that shows tips on carving a cake, as well as a recipe for denser cake that can stand up to carving. I followed the recipe to the t (that part is no trouble): blending the butter, sugar, eggs, and baker's cocoa, alternating between adding dry ingredients and adding the milk, vanilla extract, and oil mixture. Mixing it by hand because my standing mixer burnt out years back and I just never replaced it, and I just don't have much storage in my kitchen.
The frosting I bought, which is good because I used up most of our butter making the cake. They actually sold purple frosting, and I got that and simple white buttercream for putting the cake together and doing the "crumb layer" which is usually where I stop with decor. (continued)
managed to get a refrigerator running for a small local art gallery so that they could host their exhibition opening yesterday. In the end it turned out to be a dead extension power cord, but we had to move that thing at it was pretty large!
A year ago I moved into an apartment that is quite tiny but has fairly high ceilings. All my stuff was everwhere and the space felt cramped and claustrophobic and the state of my mind came to reflect this. I got some lumber and plywood, borrowed some tools, built overhead shelving everwhere, and moved everything up onto it, so the whole floorspace is clear. It made the most amazing difference, and really the only obstacle to getting it done was mental. Btw this is a great thread to read! Great idea, thanks! Also thanks for Twisted! Used it a ton ages ago and it was super useful.
I built yet another error definition crate in Rust over the past few days. The existing crates for this didn't quite scratch the itch I was having, so I wanted to experiment and try something new. It's working so far and I think I like it! I'm thinking about calling the new crate err_slice.
i've been making geometric pastries, these are mango and passion fruit mousses with a mango jelly heart, on a coconut macaroon biscuit and a pistachio crumble, sprayed in a colored cocoa butter velvet texture.
[post scriptum: you can add many many keywords to filters on Mastodon to hide stuff that makes you depressed.]
OK, I thought of something. Over the last few months I kept seeing #jq mentioned in passing all over the place. I finally realised it was installed by default on all my machines and looked up the manual. I've now used it to poke around in unfamiliar datasets, extract data from huge JSON files into user-friendly CSVs, and alongside #jc I've been able to convert YAML files to JSON, and pull out just the interesting parts of my Apache log files. Sure I could do all this in Python but I'm old enough to have used sed, awk, and plain old grep, so I love a versatile tool that can manipulate standard input. I don't know why I overlooked jq for so long.
I leaned enough of how to use freecad to design a replacement for the lower catch of the baby gate we use as a dog barrier on the stairs. The old one had been slowly disintegrating.
This thread is really nice to look through, thank you for starting it!
I've spent the last six months developing a set of bike wheel lights that are an order of magnitude better than the current off the shelf offerings. I learned CAD modeling, soldering, and 3D printing to build a battery case that folds around the hub, and lights that will attach to any wheel, regardless of spoke lacing pattern.
for my semi automated user creation, I had to redo all the logic our company did some restructuring. So I had some nice time puzzling out how to link places, people and roles out of the API we have access to so new peeps get the correct access and licenses.
It also lead to more functions in Powershell as I quickly figured out where code was reused. So that was a week well spent.
It's a little all-over-the-place for me, and that's hard also for myself. So thank you for reminding me to make this list. I won't mention $work.
But with regards to *progress*, I'm close to finishing a simple ARK resolver/minter that I'll use for @interpeer to provide stable identifiers for its specs.
That relates to the realization that getting this stuff through a standards organization is going to take some time, so we might as well make our own standards and worry about...
And this also relates to the hidden-but-real accomplishment that a sufficient number of specialists agree with a sufficient number of those docs that there exists some kind of pre-consensus, even if it hasn't yet made its way into SDOs.
That's pretty cool, and something to build on.
(Unfortunately it means my TODO list is longer, because I have to revise a bunch of those docs, but that's fair.)
I recently got my Friendica instance working, and I've discovered I like it way more than I liked Mastodon. I then managed to configure the advanced content filter and liberal application of the ignore and block functionality to cleanse my timeline from un-CW-ed front-page news and I'm feeling quite at home in my new Fediverse presence!
When a strange structure appeared in the woods, Kaia's sister failed to investigate it. When Kaia takes it upon herself to delve into the mysterious complex, she finds something that could save her people from the encroaching Instability...
I recently thought of a new way of explaining a coding concept in #godot to my students that works 100x better than the way I explained it before. I was so excited when it occurred to me
I can't help you with technical things at the moment. But I am a blind radio presenter, and every Sunday when I do my evening radio show with gentle and quiet music, people tell me that I do it right to make them peacefull and relaxed. And that's wonderful.
I finally managed (with a lot of help) to migrate my only Python package with a Cython extension away from setuptools and to a modern build system (meson). It’s not much, but now I feel much more capable of doing it at scale.
I have been working hard on my text-parsing programs. I have learned a lot about implementing a 'greedy line-break algorithm'. I have also learned some of what's involved in building an EPUB file that will load into an e-reader application.
I have set myself an ongoing challenge to read the complete works of Harlan Ellison. I added three books in the past week.
I’ve finally managed to push through the hump of getting productive in Rust, understand how its async mechanism works, and apply that in my day to day work on device drivers. I’m about to ship my first driver update with a major component written in Rust, with a custom async executor. (there is still a lot of C++ and Obj-C, but baby steps) Better late than never, I suppose. I’ve tried Rust multiple times since 2014(!) but was always overwhelmed with the effort required.
I also recently got PV graphics support for macOS guests merged into QEMU, and the arm64 macOS guest support patch series is also ready to go and hopefully gets merged before the QEMU 10.0 window closes.
A disabled children's camp that I have been working with for three years is about to break ground with their rebuild after a devastating wildfire. It has been a long journey.
published a blog post on my company’s blog and have consistently published my weekly newsletter over at @everyopsguy three weeks in a row. About to close a month of publishing soon.
not really fiddly, but I managed to kick myself into gear and meditate for a good 10 minutes yesterday. I wanted to restore this to a daily routine for well over a year now and I finally got out of the procrastination rut yesterday.
I got my game page live on Steam and I am getting close to having a demo polished enough to release. This is not the most hardcore technical part of the project, but the Steam page is a big step and polishing is a very detail-oriented process that I haven't done to this extent before.
This is my hobby and creative outlet, and creating still matters, I think.
I changed my boot screen theme on Fedora Kinoite! Normally I'd just have to add some files to the right directory and call it a day, but plymouth themes being in a directory that Kinoite doesn't normally permit writes to, I had to learn how to make a .rpm package out of some themes I found and *install" them to my system before I could use them as startup eyecandy.
My daughter is a total genius. She's graduating hs soon and from age 10 has had the goal to find cures and treatments for hellish conditions like alzheimers and cancer. She's going to be a scientist and is the funniest, smartest, best human I know. She has over a 4.0 GPA in AP classes and is truly a sweetheart. I have no money or career, but I have raised one of the greatest people. 💖💗🩷🩷🩷🩷
I've been trying to get actual SSO off the ground at my org. Just got the first real connector correctly configured, with SCIM and everything, in spite of documentation being out of date and flat out wrong in places. And it's just such a nice proof of concept for how to centrally manage users, and a taste of what is to come.
One system sorted, about 30 to go, with lots of open questions and uncertainty. But today finally marked the first glimmer of the light at the end of the tunnel. It feels good!
I finally managed talking to my doctor and asking for help with my mental struggles. Then contacted the local office that offers a free six weeks group course on anxiety, depression and stress and started this last week.
I just finished recording an ecourse that will activate the voices of those that receive it. In a time when so many peoples voices are being squashed it felt very important for me to do.
Removed the freewheel from my old bicycle. Had the correct tool from AliExpress, the longest socket wrench I own, large lump hammer, penetrating sprays, band-aids ready, unscrewing rotation double-checked from YouTube, energising coffee half pre-consumed.
And it just … undid.
Thankfully due to the care and lubrication I used 2 years ago when I fought this thing apart over the course of 3 days. That first, learning endeavour only succeeded because of technical help here on Mastodon. 🚴
I just graduated college at 43, first time college experience! Never went to high school, single parent. My kid was doing thier FAFSA forms, so I did too (your kid will get more money if parents are poor). Got enough grant money to work part time and get a pair of AAS degrees. Still need a job in this new world, but it feels good. Hard, but good.
I wrote some generic code in #Rust to convert multi-GB XML files into Parquet without having to load the entire thing into RAM. Derive macros feel like magic once you get the hang of them.
The definitions of the (nearly 100) data object structures in the XML are now pleasingly boilerplate-free:
I’m working on a personal project that is creating an at-a-glance two week calendar out of eink shelf tags. I’ve finally gotten round to learning enough PIL (pillow) in order to generate the images for these tags to display, and now I need to work out how to update them…
got round to having dentist do a crown on a cracked tooth. And re-kindled a desire to tinker with technology at home. I almost, at last, have something I could actually call a "hobby".
I'm in the process of decommissioning some of the old servers in my basement #homelab and I've only brought down my entire network a few times. And nothing destroyed permanently yet!
Kidding aside I'm proud of my home network and the services I provide to my family and friends.
- Replaced front control arms on our family vehicle, saving about $2000. - Led City X 3D printing project at my son's school. - Tried Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for the first time. - Replaced Win on my daughter's old touch screen Asus laptop with Debian. - Joined the Fediverse (Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops). - Joined Tutamail and Signal.
Edit: I forgot to add that I protested for the first time in my life at the 50501 protest earlier this month.
@quokka1 ran some packet captures over the air and discovered a bug in a newly released vendors enterprise AP radio where it would only wait 10 seconds for an association to complete before it disassociated. People weren't typing their passwords quick enough! Normally the timeout is 30 seconds.
its almost been a week, but I've started a new job! Met some nice folks. Haven't melted from the stress of that. Things are looking better for me, which is nice.
- I got a "major revisions" decision from a top journal - Wrote a first draft of a grant proposal. A bad draft but still *a* draft - Almost finished the yearly financial report of my kid's childcare coop - I'm on a 10 day streak of brushing up my high school maths - Despite all the work I managed to commit to a full week of silent retreat around Easter
Hope you're getting valuable/beautiful things done too .
Last week, a hobby project of mine launched to serve the small, but interesting, community of readers and watchers who nominate for the Hugo Awards. I'm pretty proud of it, even if it is basically Baby's First Django Project, and I probably could have done better in lots of ways.
I'm a professional game composer and have recently managed to switch my entire workflow to use open-source tools! You can see what I use here: johnoestmannmusic.com/tooling/
I believe that Open-Source is one of the strongest cultural movements towards diffusing power structures. I use Open-Source tooling throughout the production of my works to clearly show that it possible + effective.
I recently started familiarizing myself with a new game engine (Godot 🤖) – something I haven’t really done in more than ten years (the last "engine" I was able to use comfortably was Adobe Flash). It’s baby steps every day, but I enjoy the progress and am happy with my results. 😊
Thank you for starting this thread, so much good energy! Our tortoises are hibernating in a crate/plant bed outside, with a wireless thermometer to monitor the temperature. I am currently getting rid of Apple devices, so I didn't want to use Home any more to check on them. I installed OpenHAB on an old Raspberry Pi Zero, and since I also had an eInk display, I wrote a little Python script that pulls the status from localhost's OpenHAB REST API every 5 minutes and draws it on the screen.
Three things: I converted a mid-2011 iMac to run Ubuntu which has made me super stoked on Linux. I poked around in one of my kids’ busted sound-making books using my new multimeter to try and identify the problem—only to learn that it was the batteries that I didn’t bother checking before I started. BUT, this (with help from fine Mastodon people) helped me identify why my EV wasn’t starting the other day: the 12v battery was out of juice!
I'm a student in cyber security and I had fun implementing a cryptography protocol! I had troubles with all the math and programming, but debugging what wasn't working made me understand most of what I was doing so I'm glad I took the time to make it work 😀
I finally sat down and wrote the first draft of a command-line tool to help reduce entropy in my life. I've been thinking about doing it for close to five years, and had two other attempts. What I have now is already making my life easier and I'm so happy that my idea from back then appears to be working out.
I have a long-standing hobby game dev project which I decided to set aside so I can focus on non-programming things with my time (for the first time in my life?)
I started working out. I have purchased a ukulele and am slowly learning how to play it. Not programming after a day of programming suddenly seems like the best move of all time to me.
I've been trying to wrap my head around some foundational Daoist classics (Zhuangzi and Laozi) and have made a little discovery that has a lot of pieces snapping into place.
@f4grx NGL, first glance at the screenshot and I was like WTF is all that?!
But opening the photo to full-size, and that's really quite a nice & clean install! 🤩
I especially like the arrows drawn on the pipes - it's so easy to assume one won't forget which is which, but without markings like that it's almost a guarantee you will (or maybe it's just me lol)
thanks! The pipes are clean because I brushed them with steel wool after soldering. It cleaned up very well. Yeah I made sure not to invert the feed and return lines otherwise the central heating would have behaved a little weird lol
The most complex part was fitting the old 20mm pipes to the new 22mm ones. All the other fittings were prepared in advance.
thanks! It requires a bit of practice but it's surprisingly easy when you also do electronics. You use the same stuff, solder wire, flux, heat. The rest is cutting the tubes at the right length and finding the rights fittings in the store. Quite similar to PCB routing in fact 😀
edit: I improved the alt texts. Tell me if something is missing, I'll add it.
born from the need for distraction and processing of what's currently happening, I wrote an 80-page novella over the course of one month. Still feels weird that I managed to pull it through. chaos.social/@Kiki/11403497647…
I always wanted to have a successful open source project, and now an open source plugin I wrote for Obsidian.md has just been downloaded over a thousand times.
I'm middle-aged, but several months ago decided to try to learn some coding. I started with HTML and CSS and can now create pretty nice-looking web pages, including with some basic animations.
Recently I've moved on to JavaScript, which I have so far found much more challenging - mainly, I think, because the lessons aren't describing things very well. But I take it one step at a time and make copious notes, so expect to make progress just like with the HTML and CSS.
Thanks for saying so. I think things will make more sense when the lessons start to get into examples. Right now they're introducing us to the syntax without even telling us what we would use JS for. Seems kinda backwards.
I wrote a fully modular I/O system for my user interface library to replace the previous one. Took about three months to figure out all the new interfaces to replace the previous ones, in a way that wouldn't break the modularity.
There's still more left to improve, but wow, I've done it and it makes toying with the "lower levels" like hardware abstractions so much better!
@samerion I'm curious, what platform(s) is your user interface library targeting? Or if it's bare-metal, what kind of hardware and what intended applications?
@matt The I/O systems allow the library ("Fluid") to run on any platform that there exists a system for. Right now, this means Linux, macOS and Windows, but it should be feasible to expand support to Android and bare-metal.
It's for general purpose, suitable for both regular apps and video games.
@matt Yes, but Fluid is in too early of development, so it's currently of low priority. Accessibility features are highly system dependent, so I first intend to make sure other I/O systems are stable enough.
I started writing some Swift code in a playground to make procedurally generated voxel art. The code is highly generic, and is happy as long as what the renderer gets is a cube of RGB values. Along the way, I decided, for the sake of elegance, to separate cellular spaces (i.e. [Address]→Element?) from bounded volumes, which turned it from a walk in the park into a stress test of Swift’s type system. I have just recently managed to contain the damage, and am making progress again.
I recently booked my Easter vacation. Time was running out as train tickets run out pretty quickly. And planning my trips take a lot of coordination. So happy I have it all done now.
after effectively decades of unknowingly working around all kinds of flaws in work processes, i more and more realize these flaws and start tackling them.
at work, i often use a website where there‘s a really long page. a fixed position menu would be helpful. three months ago i wrote my first bookmarklet.
or a document conversion process is pretty manual and screams for automation. i‘ve taken over the task and wrote my first shell script.
I finally managed to appreciate the versatility of the turtle module for teaching purposes. Draw a grid, change the turtle shape, add handlers for dragging and dropping, and you (almost) have a Blockdoku clone.
I managed to reach the capacity limits of what I can take on right now, realise that as it was happening, and start saying no to further commitments, until I can clear a bit of headroom. (I think that fits the description 🥳)
I'm trying out coookie recipes found online, and have to convert odd measurings like cups to decilitres and figuring out why baking at such high temperature is a thing in many of them. The endresult is having to try lots of cookies, which even when not perfect is quite nice.
I also am hacking code to write my own image viewer and manipulator, and even if rust has a reputation for being tough, I see steady progress. I felt even felt smugly satisfied when I resolved a git merge issue.
I've been working on our open source #decentralized #search engine @pears . Currently trying to figure out how to best route local queries to other nodes.
The goal: when you search on your private machine at home, you should get results back from the best instances, as fast as possible.
This is tricky because we have to compute similarities over high-dimensional sparse vectors in a decentralized fashion, while also catering for multilinguality. But we now have a first draft for this.
I have just finished a tool-assisted speedrun of a Game Boy Color game from my childhood, and I'm about to submit it to tasvideos.org. It took me about six months of planning, reverse engineering the game and reading some assembly code to understand some of its mechanics, and running scripts to try to find inputs that manipulate the game's RNG to give me the outcome I want.
Having fun exploring the limits of what can currently be expressed via Python's type hints, so there are certain categories of unit tests I don't need to write, and so users of the SDK I'm designing get as much help from their IDEs as I can offer them.
@freddy fixed a friends broken speakers with a custom-built usb-c pd power supply, managed to keep space in my schedule for lunch with friends once a week for 4W in a row now, picked up a sport schedule that I mostly^Woften adhere to, and I so far read about 15 books this year, as it’s the most enjoyable way to prevent me from doomscrolling
I make laser cut acrylic cake toppers for fun. Some of the inlay pieces I cut are insanely small. Think tip of a fingernail size! I share them under the hashtag #NDBProjectLaser my latest was a Taylor swift topper for a 13 year old.
last week I hung my first bifold door. It fit first time into a frame that I built many months ago. I can now close off my living room and admire the reality of something that was only in my imagination when I started this project, years ago.
Had to rope in assistance from neighbour but replaced faulty captive USB cable on Thrustmaster T300 force feedback wheel with a USB-B port permitting standard USB cables to be used. Neighbour 3D printed the fitting I found on the internet and due to very short wires it was fiddly to solder the connections. Now works perfectly and all cables are detachable which I like. No stain and if something goes wrong can be replaced.
I used a binomial probability distribution effectively! While helping my teenager study for exams. ("Helping" here being a loose term for basically sitting next to them as emotional support and making encouraging noises and hot chocolate as necessary).
I changed a bash script I created for logging stats from my solar panel setup into a database. Now, the next time I add new charge controller, I just need to add a few details to an array, instead of creating a separate bash script for the new device.
A small win, but something I had been meaning to do for a while. It is a lot more efficient now, and less likely to lock up the sqlite3 database 🥳
I recently completed a big chunk of work to support web pub and viewing on a decentralised storage network.
It's a really neat solution and needed lots of thought, problem solving etc, works really well, good UX but even so I wasn't happy because it requires some extra setup (local DNS) that will reduce access for many.
two months ago we finally released a game. It's not big or anything but we're pretty happy to have it off our hands and in the wild store.steampowered.com/app/285…
Cave Hikers is a relaxing and humorous 2D interactive cartoon mockumentary that follows three characters through a cavernous world, on a quest to find the mystical “cave with an infinite ceiling”.
I lead-authored a paper on the scientific history of the Carnegie Diplodocus, whose casts are on display in museums around the world. It took a couple of years, and involved wrangling a team five authors from three countries, but it's finally in the proofing stage. It should be the exhaustive, definitive reference for this keystone specimen. (I do this in my spare time; in real life I'm a computer programmer.)
I built a temperature controller for my Bearded Dragon's enclosure. One of the more technically complex builds I've done, including software and hardware skills. Happy lizard.
Finally managed to get to the "have receipt for SSDI application" stage of the retirement disability benefits application process.
This feels both too big (a huge emotional milestone) and too small (it seems to be the precursor to an even larger paperwork burden), as well as being not at all fiddly or technical. But it did require quite a bit of quiet contemplation ("have I managed to put down *all* the relevant doctors?") and problem solving ("where is that info?").
I moved a light switch in an outbuilding from the middle of the room to the doorway so we don't have to muddle around in the dark with our bins. Relatively small amount of work for an objective life improvement!
Yesterday I got an update installed on a system for cataloguing manuscripts that simplifies & halves the time it takes to connect a manuscript to the various works within it, which are stored in a separate table of the database, and tweaked the current testing data to match.
And in sillier outputs, last weekend I wrote a JavaScript script that produces really bad imagined romance-fantasy book blurbs: exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?…
This is objectively funny because I'm in that state where I'm ridiculously proud of being able to output a simple test curve, while also being aware that by itself, this doesn't look like anything
Adding a new module, with support for loading (and potentially outputting) SVG files into Path2D
Uses SVG Tree
ToDo:
SVG Loading
With API documentation
Fix Monoid Instance on Path/Path2D
ad...
The booger, dried to the back wall of my nasal passage, right up in the corner, where stubby ends of fingers are shunned I persisted I insisted I pushed and probed and prodded and poked It resisted It slip shifted It hung and stuck and welded, it clung We fought long Battled hard Were times I felt, the grip did slip Others, like my nose, raw, would split But I gave and gave, till two knuckles deep and the blood vessels within, did start to weep And there, it let go And tasted so sweet
Been "projecting" this one boulder problem at my local climbing gym. It's a tough, very overhung route that I knew I was strong enough to do, but I just couldn't get some of the moves. Usually that means there's a problem with technique. So tonight I broke it down into sections, and practised them in isolation, feeling for what was going wrong, and how to position my body so that the moves felt easier. After doing this, and half a dozen or so tries I finally topped it, and it actually felt, not easy, but completely doable, where before it had felt impossible.
have been building these light boxes for charlie and the chocolate factory, kind of fidly to deal with all the details, and repeat 6x, but they are going to be cool.
I've been reading "Conflict is not Abuse" by Schulman, probably the most feminist book ive ever read, and did a lot of emotional work around processing that.
Proud of myself for sticking to it, even when it was hard.
I finished a photo book from a trip we took to Spain and Portugal last April. Now working on the one for my Mom's 90th birthday party as a gift for her 91st. Keeps my mind busy and looking hard at photos lets me remember good things.
I am hosting a weekly jazz show on my local FM radio station. It's been great to get so immersed in music again and learn new skills unrelated to software. It's been great to be reminded that art is still being created and people are reacting to this moment in all kinds of ways.
@mdboom That's so cool. There's a guy who's been doing a jazz show on my alma mater's radio station pretty much every week since 1980. It's become a local institution. These things can really pull people together.
The station publishes an email address for the host, Rob Bamberger. You might want to drop him a line! I bet you'd have a lot to talk about 😀
Swing into the weekend with Hot Jazz Saturday Night on WAMU! Each week, host Rob Bamberger celebrates the great American music of the early twentieth century, playing vintage jazz, swing and big band recordings from the '20s, '30s, and '40s.
@jalefkowit Yeah, I'm definitely inspired by that show, and listened to it for many years before I moved across the Bay. Part of my "thesis" is in response to that show -- that there has been plenty of growth in big band since 1959 worth celebrating, and plenty of activity even today. I'm trying to connect the "classic" stuff to newer things people may also enjoy.
Yesterday I managed to steer the conversation of an implementation we need to do at work towards progressing. We have one colleague who is exceptionally good at programming, but has severe tunnel vision and will sometimes reply in such a way that I wonder if they think everyone else is dumb 😛
Getting this done required carefully bumping this colleague in the right direction and breathing deeply while reading some of their remarks 😅
I'm helping my neighbourhood get a functional web presence so it's easy to disseminate info, and (fingers crossed) more people will play their dues so we can have more fun/useful activities 😃
@darkuncle this took a lot of thought and serious contemplation, I’m not sure how many times I refactored and reimagined the algorithm until I was happy with it. github.com/lcisec/lckbx
I made a Time and Space #quilt last weekend. It's pretty basic, but it held together through it's first laundering, and it's keeping me warm as I type this.
Last week at Glass Time (the multi-week open projects flameworking class I am in the semester), I made a higher-genus hollow form than I’ve made before. (A small vase/bottle with a “doughnut” hole connecting from front to back.)
Oh and a Work Success: yesterday one of my students emailed me something she saw after class that reminded her of our lecture topic.
I dyed my first thing ever! I dyed my white Miyoo Mini Plus handheld retro console a dark, DARK purple. I had intended it be navy blue but I still love the results and I'm going to do a few more for family!
I fixed a bug in Vim. Not a major thing but a recent patchlevel broke a feature I use often and none of the usual contributors noticed the breakage, so I felt I had to be the one to research it and write the pull request.
I had a hobby I wanted to start in on, but in my initial attempt, I had organized it to be very dependent on being at my desktop computer. But then I didn't touch it for months. In the last couple of weeks, I had a good think about why it was that a thing I wanted to do for fun wasn't drawing my attention like I expected. Turns out, spending more time at my desk was a big blocker, so I spent some time figuring out how to make the process all analog so I could do it at the kitchen table or wherever and buying a few supplies like a binder and dividers to make analog notes and keep them organized. Now I've done it 3-4 times since reorganizing it and I'm having a great time with it.
Dunno if that's technical or fiddly enough, but it did require quiet contemplation and assessment of myself and my habits.
Attached: 2 images
Sometimes SwiftUI just works so nicely. A little bit of work with the barcode scanner and I have a view modifier that performs an action whenever a barcode is scanned or can update the value of a binding.
I wrote a recreational topology book, which you can pre-order at Bandcamp: b--k.bandcamp.com/album/topolo… . Should be done this weekend.
Reading all the math underlying the book has been such a great respite. Good math is a narrative about building interesting things and solving hard problems, but is completely devoid of the usual interpersonal drama that comes with most narratives.
This is almost a month ago now, but I completed a major update to my company's product for making documents (especially PDFs) more accessible to blind people. We rely on third-party services to do the heavy lifting (OCR, document structure analysis, AI image descriptions), but there were still some tricky bits I had to do myself. One of the last ones I had to do for this update was finding links in the original PDF and adding matching links to the HTML version.
This one's less technical, but last week I spoke to a small group of blind students at a local high school. I showed them a few fun things one can do online with a web browser and a screen reader, including accessing the fediverse. They were taking notes. I think I helped their teacher motivate them to master important screen reader commands.
By "small group", I mean only three students. So some may say it wasn't a good use of my time; after all, we technologists are supposed to do things that scale. But it felt good and worthwhile.
Today I wrote a basic version of strace in Rust, and it only took me a couple hours!
I'd been really busy with school for a long while, and I had done nothing but homework that I was bad at interspersed by YouTube for far too long. Sitting down and spending a few hours bashing out a library was the most fun I've had in months, and a great reminder that I'm not a useless human being since art appreciation is hard for me.
"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid." --Not Albert Einsten, as it turns out, but worth remembering nonetheless
yesterday I shot a personal best #archery round beating my rival by 70 points. (The archery round was a 'Western', 4 dozen at 60 yards and 4 dozen at 50 yards). This was using my favourite English #longbow
@hiway I had dinner with my daughter tonight. She’s a junior in college and a chemical engineering major. She told me about her accomplishments and it made me happy that she’s adulting well.
Did some sewing. New hats and some very soft fleece haltertops for under everything. I am very cozy. Also teaching young women in my neighborhood how to make clothing and bread. Old women, too. And men. Whoever is curious.
I knuckled down and got CSS flow layout to work on my phone browser for PixieReport's "weather stations nearby this one" view, making the 4x3 image view about the right width for smartphones.
Now I have to go back and fix it for landscape mode browsers so it doesn't explode down the scroll direction by scaling to the viewport width, oops. But it fixed the "too small for the phone" problem.
Mozilla Developers Network, the gift that keeps on giving for novice developers.
@SnoopJ My friend, who I’ve known since high school, has his 50th birthday the 1st. I’m going to be traveling and can’t make it; he was really disappointed.
A week ago, my partner and I drove 800 miles to surprise him with an early birthday party. 😄
His partner helped arrange so we’d be at a whiskey bar when they walked in. We were facing with our backs to the door, and as he walked by I asked if he wanted to sit with us. He just froze up, and then started laughing.
At work, we need wsl-vpnkit or similar to get WSL 2 working while on the VPN. It includes some binaries though, so it's blocked. After fighting and failing to get it approved, I figured out how to compile the relevant binaries from gvisor-tap-vsock in WSL 1 and use the wsl-vpnkit shell script to put them together in a systemd service in WSL 2. Wrote up some instructions and a coworker was able to repeat it, so it's not just a "works on my machine" thing!
I made a good start on a totally commercially useless but (fun to me!) side project involving the re-creation of the old school MUD idea but using REST and FastAPI/SqlModel.
I also with great effort finished the first shambling revision of my new from scratch @neovim configuration:
But I'm not happy with a trade off I made to get it going and want to retool it to be much cleaner 😀
I myself have been feeling overwhelmed by current events and the tsunami they create in my social media, and focusing on side projects, my charity work, and spending time with my lovely wife and cuddly lovable dog 😀
@lydiaschoch I used to use a tool called dnote to keep track of thoughts and todos from a command line. Since corporate policy is to not install unauthorized third party apps, I reimplemented dnote in bash this week. I call it bnote
i found & joined a local makerspace! i've gotten slightly better at soldering (completed some little kits) and started learning python! i got a job (extremely part-time and not one i want to do forever but still!!!)
Ive got MOST of the seed bank organized and on the order form to ship out to folks for free. I still need to finish packing up the blanket flower, hollyhock, and coneflower into envelopes. But stamps to actually send stuff out haven't arrived yet, so still have a bit of time.
but soon, soon, I get to start mailing flower seeds to folks
i've been learning tinkercad and modeling stuff for the 3d printer i finally bought after years of toying with the idea, currently progressing on making a phone support for my bike, because my phone is big and heavy and not that common, so it needs something custom. still needs work but happy with my progress.
I’ve just finished making my first crochet blanket, and it’s my first time using something trickier than treble crochets. I’ve been footering at it off and on since September, unravelling the bits I messed up, until I got into my rhythm with the stitch.
I decided to learn how to crochet during the first lockdown, and not only has it been great for my head, it’s kept the hand I broke a few years ago well exercised.
Sending sympathies for the current state of overwhelm.
@kimlockhartga What a lovely thing to say. Thank-you ❤️
The wool was what inspired me to make a blanket. The colour of one of the stripes is paua shell, and I have very happy memories of a holiday in New Zealand. The other colours just leapt out as good companions for it.
This is a great idea! Much appreciated.. thank you for asking.
I set up my household's new gravity-fed water filtration system, from unpacking to first use. This involved reading instructions, identifying parts, initial cleaning, priming, and testing the first run. It works great.
Recently designed and had my first real PCBs made for work with the help of my coworker! We got the boards and spent a few hours debugging why they weren't working basically at all... Are all the voltage regulators working? Can we see data on the USB port? Is there something wrong with the EEPROM setup? To cut a very long story short, it turned out the data + and - lines on the USB port were backwards in the schematic... Oops 🤦♀️ Luckily during that debugging we also happened to discover I used the wrong footprint for the crystal we put on the board, so we had to bodge that too... To fix the USB port being wired backwards, my coworker made a "USB Crossover cable" which does exactly what you'd expect (it wasn't worth modding the boards when we could instead mod the cable!)
Anyways other than those two things, rev 1 was pretty successful otherwise... The stuff I thought was going to cause issues (transistors and gates) actually worked totally fine first try.
I at last opened my very old air fix skeleton kit, that I’ve been meaning to start for years, ordered paint and filler and about to begin construction. The first step is always the biggest accomplishment. I built one in 1969, my finest build, but alas the glue failed with age and it’s in irreparable bits now. The skull is on display though.
I found an fixed a timing-dependent bug caused by uninitialized memory use in watchdogd, mostly by analyzing logs and staring at the code until I realized what didn't fit. github.com/troglobit/watchdogd…
Depending on the timing between the SIGCHLD callback run and the first generic_cb() timer callback run, script_exit_status() sometimes returned uninitialized memory as the exit status of a script. ...
I created a visualization of a knowledge graph for Calculus and its prerequisites, which is powering the product I’m currently working on.
I was doing this to prepare for a public talk, which unfortunately got rescheduled due to on-site water problems in New Jersey. Nevertheless, I’m still happy with the results! It's nice to have something to show to your F&Fs to explain "what is that I'm working on" 😀
I had two really good therapy sessions that I think unlocked me, I'm visiting my friends I haven't seen in years, I started cooking a bit… yeah there's some good stuff
Yesterday I've finally understood how to make a luks decryption on debian with a key stored into the tpm, but without dracut or clevis, with ony the initramfs-tools ! It's actually quite easy and weel described on the tpm2-initramfs-tool github (but they have forgotten to indicate the step where you add the key to the luks volume). And now I'm digging into the PCR explaination, in order to decide wth which PCR I would like to seal my luks key. I'll probably want to seal it with the ones about kernel/firmware binaries.
in the winter holidays I finally managed to fix a bug in this Haskell library I maintain. The main insight came to me from a random internet stranger and the whole thing made me learn a bunch of stuff about calling conventions on different CPU architectures.
This makes HasCacBDD work on aarch64 including ARM and Apple M1.
Big thanks to Melissa aka shadysciencefeline for help!
Previously we relied on calling conventions specific to amd64:
> "...
I reverse engineered a bootloader and wrote an actual working piece of software so that firmware could be updated easily.
I also worked out a method for doing a four aces card routine I saw Juan Tamariz do from scratch, and not only did I work a method out, I practiced it, and then performed it completely fooling my partner. I think the method I arrived at might be Identical to Juans because it is not hard.
I also practiced and mastered a couple of tricky coin sleights. (I am an amature magician)
I left a job about 6 months ago that was draining my energy. To try to get my enthusiasm for my work back, I set myself a challenge - to figure out how small an encoder for a modern video compression standard can be.
And not only did I succeed at answering that question, it did bring my enthusiasm back, and now I'm partway through writing up what I did: rachelplusplus.me.uk/blog/2025…
recorded a giant checklist of groceries in my Obsidian vault (not just weekly, it includes a lot of the infrequent stuff too)
The whole thing is organised by the area of the house it's kept (specific cupboards, fridge, freezer, etc) so that I can quickly go through the house auditing what we need in the next shop.
Each item is also tagged with the area/aisle number where it's found in each of the three local grocers and each grocer has a separate page with a dynamic list of what's currently needed, this time organised by aisle. The aisles are sorted in the order I would progress through them so that I can rush through in hurry and know exactly what I'm looking for at each aisle without backtracking.
At the top of each grocer page is a link that immediately starts driving directions in Google maps and at bottom is a picture of the points card barcode so I'm all set for the checkout....
Oh! And also the bin code for times when I'm swapping a soda stream tank so that they don't need to look it up 😂
Circuit breaker powering a friend’s greenhouse located in their garage tripped — but a 5” thick ice glacier made it impossible to open! I brought tools of disassembly and what worked best was my 8 pound short-handle sledge hammer and my sharpest splitting wedge! Thick ice is fucking tough! Their greenhouse is getting power again!
Feels good to help make something a bit better in the current dystopia …
managed to get a single-board computer which had me defeated for 5 years to boot, and now it's running a desktop environment and serving a role I need (a non-laptop system near where I spend most of my time to display various information, youtube, etc)
@nazokiyoubinbou A few years ago I wanted to ease into really using Linux, so I dual-booted. I adapted surprisingly quickly. Now I log into the Windows side about every 6 months to run updates... then right back to Linux 🤣
I've been doing rules work for the new netrunner set. I wrote several reference cards to teach and clarify mechanics, and this weekend we'll be finalizing rules text for most of the game cards
restarted my home server after de cluttering my office table/room, and moved sync thing out of Freebsd jails to the main machine so that I can play with Linux containers with the handy guide written by @gyptazy
I updated all the dependencies I could at the moment for the odilia screenreader, also removed some accessibility event handlers which are cluttering the speech buffer with mostly useless information. I'm currently working on making caret browsing work as expected, also fixing the problem where it wouldn't read certain list and treeview items, because they don't have names and descriptions directly associated with them, but I suspect they're just a wrapper and I have to make heuristics for when odilia should look at the descendents of that item in case it's a container. This is the work of guesswork and heuristics, because the orca screenreader has a very weird and complicated codebase, plus it's python and I don't know python well enough to go fast over that codebase, so I'm choosing the way of pain instead
update on this one real quick: apparently no, those list and treeviews which aren't reading with odilia are, in fact, not at all containers for other items, at least not in most cases. In fact, doing it this way introduces more bugs, in the form of things being readable before just misteriously not reading and so on. So yeah, back to the drawing bord I go, will have to inspect orca and see if I can decipher anything useful from it, enough to solve my problems.
I set up a new GitHub organization and configured the project tracker with priorities that are actually actionable and directly meaningful. Very pleased with them so far.
I maintain a small Rust crate (crates.io/crates/constant_time…) which has to do some tricks to avoid being optimized to something not constant time, and I had been worrying that these tricks might not be enough. These last few months, I made a nearly full rewrite of it, making it safer against the optimizer while not losing too much speed (which required some amount of manual vectorization, since the optimizer can no longer autovectorize), and I plan to do a release with these changes tomorrow.
@feoh What have I done lately to solve a problem? I added filters to Mastodon so I don't have to read all the shit going on in the world. My visits here are no longer classifiable as doomscrolling.
I migrated a Python hobby project from pdm to setuptools. Small win but it took some figuring out, especially being as unfamiliar as I am with Python packaging. >.>
Don't know if this qualifies, but at work on Thursday I had a coding problem I just could not see. When to bed that night and dreamed about the code (my mind is weird like that). Woke up yesterday morning and my 'subconscious' had figured out where the error was and how to fix it. 🙂
I don't know if this counts, but I built a picnic table out of Legos for the first time ever in my life at the age of 32, 100% independently. I am totally blind and relied on accessible instructions AKA text-based instructions for the blind and visually impaired, as well as chat GPT to accomplish this task . I created a custom chat GPT specific for Lego builds, included specifications such as be descriptive in prompts, etc. this did take quiet contemplation as I fucked up a couple times, but in the end it was a success. I didn't know if I wanted to jump for Joy or burst into tears LOL I guess any goal achieved, no matter how small, is still an accomplishment right? 🙂
I've been helping out at work upgrading a project from python 2 to python 3. Last week we went from 200+ unit tests failing to 0. Mostly involving making decisions about where to use bytes and where string.
@adhdeanasl The gain structure on my #1 guitar amp is notoriously finicky, in part because the two channels feed each other, both are extremely sensitive to input variation, both respond to a “jazz/rock” master toggle, all three EQ knobs have extra toggle switches and THEY all interact with everything else in non-obvious ways, plus I have had it modded with a A/AB power switch and a 3 way toggle to pull negative feedback from different points in the internal signal chain.
ANYWAY I managed to get it set up sounding like absolute ass last summer, thin, raspy, no mojo whatsoever, went down the rabbit hole of tube swapping with little positive effect, and have been disappointed with the sound ever since.
I finally sat down with it, left the tubes alone, and dialed everything up from scratch…I do this by turning up the final master volume to max, nothing plugged in, and moving every knob and toggle while l
... show more
@adhdeanasl The gain structure on my #1 guitar amp is notoriously finicky, in part because the two channels feed each other, both are extremely sensitive to input variation, both respond to a “jazz/rock” master toggle, all three EQ knobs have extra toggle switches and THEY all interact with everything else in non-obvious ways, plus I have had it modded with a A/AB power switch and a 3 way toggle to pull negative feedback from different points in the internal signal chain.
ANYWAY I managed to get it set up sounding like absolute ass last summer, thin, raspy, no mojo whatsoever, went down the rabbit hole of tube swapping with little positive effect, and have been disappointed with the sound ever since.
I finally sat down with it, left the tubes alone, and dialed everything up from scratch…I do this by turning up the final master volume to max, nothing plugged in, and moving every knob and toggle while listening for variations in the low level hum/noise of the output (hat tip Steve Kimock who mentioned this trick on a message board decades ago). I listen for inflection points; spots on the potentiometer range where an audible change occurs. If you can hear that, you can trigger it with your picking hand, which is what I want from this amp. Maximum touch sensitivity.
It took about 90 minutes but I solved it using only my ears and more patience than I was able to muster over the last 6 months. It sings again. When the amp is dialed, I play more often, I play differently, and I enjoy it more. Winning!
I had no idea why strange numbers were appearing at the bottom of my WordPress blog, under the footer. I tried everything to make the vanish.
In an unrelated matter I decided I didn't need Google Analytics anymore since they were inaccurate anyway. When I deleted the code the strange numbers also vanished. Yay.
This might not count under "recently" but it's one of my favourites: I figured out an upper bound for where Busy Beaver overtakes Kruskal's TREE function. To my knowledge, we didn't have one before.
The way to do it involved writing a program in a language that can be compiled down to Turing machines, which was SUPER fiddly because the language is very restricted.
But I did manage in the end. Busy Beaver overtakes TREE no later (and probably a lot earlier) than at 8424! 🌳🦫💡
Replaced the hard drive on an old 5th gen iPod with a Sd card and also put in a new battery. The thing has always sounded better than anything else Apple has ever built. Now it’s gloriously light and filled with 512 GB of music.
this is really lovely as I feel your pain. I'm soaking up the joy of other creatives and writers on Substack at the moment. They've spurred me on to continue with my first draft for my book! Find beauty in the arts and nature. I think that sometimes helps.
I have been writing a bash script to call up to CCADB for a list of root certificate authorities and parse them out.
It's a multiline CSV and the typical Linux tools don't handle newlines in fields very well. Had to loop over the records and build the second field manually before processing a record.
I attended a "listening session" at my company about why people feel unheard. I spoke on a topic that possibly could have gotten me fired, and three other people on the call concurred.
I just 3D modeled and am printing out a flange to cover up the range vent hole in the cabinet above the microwave, to keep things in the cabinet from falling down into that hole and junk accumulating between the microwave and the cabinet.
I finally managed to write some tests which run a compiled go command that starts kubernetes jobs, and I don't completely hate the end result. Found at least one bug in the process, which was nice.
I've managed to write code that lets me easily reprovision my OpenWRT router from factory settings with Ansible but also to export settings from the router to my Ansible project. This makes it possible for me to safely experiment with network settings on my local network without having to worry about fallout when I inevitably break something. This was much more fiddly than I initially expected and OpenWRT seems to mostly be held together with gaffa tape, hope and shell scripts. 😀
I replaced a defective thermistor inside our Rheem hybrid electric water heater, which required standing on a small step stool and bending over (to avoid knocking my head into the ceiling) and reaching two hands down into the unit. A plumber would have charged at least US$300 for that.
last week I figured out how to precompile macros in the compiler for my programming language which sped up launch time by a factor of 5
I also launched a mediocre hyper-personalized search engine; only a couple thousand pages in the index but it's already helped me find a few things and has been a lot of fun to work on
finished editing four volumes of the second series of a speculative fiction universe about non-human aliens I've been writing, and have recently begun the third chapter of the third series.
The mac database hadn't been working for arp-scan since an upstream location change in late 2022. So I did a PR to fix that.
A LuCI page to enroll application specific encryption keys. I'd been bashing my brains out on JavaScript I didn't quite comprehend for a week or so, but finally got something that looks like what I wanted when embarking on this quest.
I've developed a nesting fixation due to all this *gestures broadly* but I emptied out about a half dozen bags of paper and trash from my office, dusted and cleaned shelves, emptied and organized the hall closet which was stuffed full of junk that hadnt been cleaned in 10+ years, so now we have more functional space and aren't climbing over junk, we can sit on the couch and watch videos or play games that had been too hardd to get to before.
It may not seem like a lot, but it's been years and years worth of clutter and anxiety finally getting the motivation to tackle it
I fixed the pocket door for the downstairs bathroom. The tricky bit was figuring out how to hold the little rolling slider in place while I lifted the door up to latch the pin.
I decided to take back a little control of my spot on the Internet and moved my blog off of GitHub pages to a VPS and moved to a single user GotoSocial instance.
arranged with my neighbor friend a series of bi-monthly social meetups, where we do backyard art projects together with friends.
I have an amazing friend with art scene connections and they make beautiful large format photographs, and we got tired of not hanging out, and not being creative in a community. We are both hoping that this kickstarts and strengthens our community.
for months I have had an ONT, WiFi node and switch lying on the floor behind my TV in a rat's nest of wires. Semi-inspired by this thread, I finally got around to fastening them all to the skirting board. It may not be beautiful but it's a lot better than before! (Nice 3D-printed bracket for the Eero courtesy of someone on the internet.)
@blaise Absolutely! The whole thing is going into a blog post soon (from my new ✨business blog ✨) but you can totally have a sneak preview of the information while the full post is effectively embargoed pending paperwork approval.
We put together a trampoline! We had made a start about 2 weeks ago but it got dark halfway through the build, and then it rained the next day, and then we had two busy work weeks. So the project had stalled. But it got done today! Much jumping by small people ensued.
over the last few weeks, I’ve learned to read hiragana, one of the Japanese syllabaries. I got very fired up after a trip to Japan and honestly part of what keeps me going is that every time I start to feel tired of reading doom, I open my flashcards app instead. I wrote a blog post about it, though I left off how the learning is an escape rinsemiddlebliss.com/posts/202…
I reorganized the tea and coffee storage in our kitchen, which allowed me to relocate the spices from the depths of the corner cabinet in which they had been interred. The project isn’t done yet — at the very least, the drawer needs internal dividers to help keep things in place — but it’s already 1000% more useable.
I recently kinda refurbished a coffee grinder to gift to a friend. I've never done anything lime it before so hi had to learn a lot of new things. I took it all apart, replaced the burrs, cleaned it, calibrated it, and repainted it a totally different color. I also ended up needing some custom low contact parts. I ended up learning CAD software to model and create the part myself. I then put the part online in the off chance it could be useful to someone else.
I've been struggling to do much of anything for some time, whether it was something I enjoy or not. So I was really proud of myself for actually finishing this project.
This is an algorithm I came up with, based on the Floyd's
Tortoise-Hare constant-memory linear-time linked-list cycle-detection
algorithm. It is linear-time and malloc-free. It *eventually* det...
I pieced together from various sources instructions for downloading and DRM-stripping all our Kindle books from Amazon, primarily a couple of Reddit posts with good info. Then I worked through importing nearly 1000 Kindle books for our household into Calibre with the DRM stripped.
It's another good step towards getting completely free of Amazon.
We still have at least 300-400 non-DRMed non-Kindle ebooks from other sources to import.
Ironically, I had been putting this off for years, and I probably wouldn't have gotten to this for several years more, if Amazon hadn't announced that starting 2/26 they would switch to a tougher DRM scheme and make it harder to download.
super foolish and fiddly but I wanted to be able to link to articles/components I load dynamically on a page, while also supporting responsive nav and styling all with native JavaScript.
It wasn’t anything super difficult, nor is the solution I came up with the way I would do it if building again. But it works well enough, and it’s something I hadn’t tried before.
I've been working on an HTML + JS thing for github.com/python-organizers/c… and it's been surprisingly rewarding even if it never ends up becoming a thing "for reals".
I just finished re-implementing my powerlevel10k config in Oh-my-posh (ohmyposh.dev) earlier today.
The benefits include actually being written by me (my p10k one was generated with p10k configure), more features if I ever want them, and not being written in shell with like 50 character envvars for settings.
it's been three years of full-scale Russian invasion, and I'm not dead yet!
And, I managed to fix and get merged one nasty bug in WebKitGTK font scaling, and maybe with the help of awesome folks from GNOME we'll fix a few bugs in Geary soon.
@partizan these accomplishments do not seem to be of the same scale, but I am glad of both of them.
Also as an American I feel obliged to apologize for my country. Those of us who do not want to see you dead really did our best and I am sorry it wasn’t enough; we are hoping Europe comes through for you when we inevitably falter.
I'm about |-| close from becoming a gentoo developer. Literally like two patches left in my "final exam" project. Not to mention last Summer I got to speak at CERN. Knocking off the bucket list in rapid fashion!
@glyph, as our world burns, I anxiously await a Phoenix to arise from its ashes (always hopeful), I escape the chaos for a few hours painting cards. I’m still learning to paint on You Tube videos, so they are not professional level, but they are full of love. I started making these cards during COVID, and found some joy. Painting them pulls my attention away from the negativity, and people like getting mail. They show that someone is thinking of them with love. 💕
the screen on my tablet fell off, and broke the ribbon cable. I checked online, not repairable. I called the local shop. Not repairable. I found the part on Amazon for $8. 20 screws, and some light prying, I got the end of the cable in view. With a 10X magnifier, I got the old one detached. New one in. Back in, and I have my tablet back. Still need to glue the screen in again...
_x:" title="
_x:"/>
lol
Mendie
in reply to AnarchoCatgirlism • • •But.
We're Gay?
AnarchoCatgirlism
in reply to Mendie • • •