rmsilva @rmsilva@mamot.fr

Please don't preorder/buy a digital edition of the live coding book coming out at the end of Nov on MIT press. It's open access and will be freely available as mobi, epub and pdf. They're also selling digital editions separately (despite us paying an open access subvention with public funds).
The ebooks will be free to download, edit and share under a CC-BY-SA license on their website, but hidden under the 'resources' tab. We're discussing how to make this clearer..

Any Etherpad experts out there? I've installed a plugin via the admin interface and now everything has crashed and there's 500 error messages everywhere 😔

Hi #fediverse, I have another question for you: what's a good way to blur people's face in images while also erasing metadata? There are many apps on the web - what are your opinions or favorite tools?

#askfedi #privacymatters

Il est urgent et nécessaire de lire et de SOUTENIR @reflets (par abonnements, par dons https://okpal.com/reflets/, par diffusions, par manifestations) car Altice et Patrick Drahi s'en prennent violemment à nos droits, à nos libertés, et tentent de museler Reflets et la Presse.

Suite à « Le groupe Altice, propriété de Patrick Drahi, a été victime d'un ransomware. les pirates ont publié sur Internet des masses de données. Ces révélations mettent en lumière un groupe industriel complexe, basé dans des pays très souples en matière fiscale. Ils donnent incidemment à voir le train de vie faramineux d’une famille aussi discrète que milliardaire »
https://reflets.info/

Altice et Drahi attaque en justice Reflets.

> « Si Reflets perd le procès bâillon intenté par Altice, on ne pourra plus parler de fuites de données comme les Macronleaks, les Luxkeaks... Notre combat concerne toute la presse » Antoine Champagne

As someone who has gone through many years of depression, I know what to do. I try to eat well, go for walks in a forest, read physical books and talk to good people. I force my brain to produce good stuff.

But what I really would like to know is other people's tricks to redirect your body and mind to the good path. What do you do when you feel low?

#IranProtests: Signal is blocked in Iran. You can help people in #Iran reconnect to #Signal by hosting a proxy server.

https://signal.org/blog/run-a-proxy/

#privacyMatters #internet #censorship

I see a lot of folks looking for remote work. These are some sites that have been helpful for me:

https://app.otta.com/ (I've gotten my best search results here tbh)
https://www.skipthedrive.com/
https://remoteok.com https://jsremotely.com
https://www.flexjobs.com (paid, but worth it if you can swing it)
https://remote.co
https://justremote.co
https://weworkremotely.com
https://jobspresso.co
https://dailyremote.com
https://angel.co
https://remoteleaf.com

> We have not been able to prioritize this work, but we have developed enough of it that we can work with potential contributors. If you’re interested in helping us bring this service to life, familiarize yourself with the existing code and see what you can do.

quoted from https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-08-23-how-does-our-consultancy-work/

Finally wrote a post that's been stewing for a while: What You Miss By Only Checking GitHub

Many researchers, entrepreneurs, open source sustainability commentators, et al. assume that GitHub activity is a reasonable proxy for FLOSS as a whole. It's not.

https://harihareswara.net/posts/2022/what-you-miss-by-only-checking-github/

Goes over some examples, a marketing graphic that made my eyebrows go up, research about how unrepresentative GitHub can be, and some tools to try.

I really should get an #introduction out:

Hey! I'm Derek. I love #opensource, #writethedocs, #python, and running everything on #Linux.

Are you a #ToolsForThought fan? I'm looking to follow people navigating #SecondBrain and #DigitalGarden management of notes.

I'm working on tools that can help make publishing easier, for me, using #LaTeX and Python/bash.

I usually come up with weird projects since that's my primary way to learn something new, which I want to share more of.

After India, France is blocking access to the z-lib.org #library which will not be accessible anymore through the four major French telecommunication providers. The ruling comes after legal action from the Syndicat National de l'Edition (National Editors' Union) and twelve other publishing houses.

Article in English: https://publishingperspectives.com/2022/09/french-publishers-cheer-a-courts-order-to-block-a-book-piracy-site/

Article en français: https://www.numerama.com/tech/1117814-z-library-le-site-specialise-dans-les-livres-pirates-se-fait-bloquer-en-france.html

Damn, big publishers are really trying to crack down on the right to science and culture. It kind of pisses me off because I have been aware of its existence since last week. Only "kind of" as the website hasn't been shut down... yet.

#openaccess #news #radlitnews

btw my new video with @powderpaint is absolutely kickass go watch it if you haven't already

https://youtu.be/wynjpMVsEbw

Just listened to yet another piece on
🔥 disrupting tech
🔥 on an urgent topic
🔥 from a startup 🌈🦄

Could journalists who do these pieces at least *try* to be a *little* critical and ask questions rather than just copy the PR material?

🙌 If any company says they have very new, bleeding edge technology, chances are people have worked on it before, it may even be 20-odd years old and one part just recently became cheaper or improved. That's fine, it's still a biggie. Just be honest about it and acknowledge that tech is incremental.

☝️ If a company - especially a start-up - says "We're gonna be market ready next year!" - especially when all they have so far is a "lab prototype™" - that market readiness next year is horse poo.

⚡ If they say something along the line of "we're definitely going to be successful because we took this electrobrontotricafibulator from space-fusion-AI-tech and use it for X", then at least do more research on the thing than just looking up its correct pronounciation. Chances are there are half a dozen big caveats and it's certainly not a sure thing. Have the courage to contact someone else (unaffiliated) in the field.

</rant> Thanks for reading.

What's Windows-speak for "avahi-publish-service"? I just want to advertise a HTTP service running on my (company-provided) Windows 10 workstation, nothing fancy.

@humanetech IMHO what really matters is that now at least we have an option. I tried to deploy my speech detection algorithms to Android in the past (with Termux scripts that used Tensorflow in the background), and training even a simple model would easily drain ~15-20% of the battery - and the output model was also about 1 GB in size. My current option for face detection instead relies on a Nextcloud photo plugin, but not everybody has the means or the skills to deploy and maintain their own NC instance.

#BigTech can do whatever they like, but we now have options to build ML algorithms that run locally and are actually usable and scalable. One of the arguments I've often heard by privacy-aware people who were still using Google Assistant or Photos on their mobile was "but I want/need these features, and no FLOSS alternative can provide them to me". Now we can go out and tell these people "well, actually we can" - and that's quite a big deal :)

#AI #SmallAI #SelfTrain

One of the arguments in favour of surveillance capitalism is the great usefulness of cloud-based ML predictions.

After all, who can deny the usefulness of photo apps that automatically recognize faces, detect your speech or help you making sense of the deluge of information in a social feed?

The argument usually goes like this: these features require large neural networks, which in turn require a lot of computational power to train the models, and a lot of memory and disk storage in order to load and save those models.

You can't do such things on small devices that run on batteries. Therefore your phone *HAS* to send your data to #BigTech servers if you want to get those features. Otherwise, you just won't get those features.

Except that... What if this whole argument is bollocks?

#POET (Private Optimal Energy Training) proves that you can run both the training and the predictions locally, without compromising neither on precision, nor on performance.

After all, the really expensive part of training is back-propagation. POET breaks down the back-propagation performance issue by quantizing the layers (so real-number large tensor multiplications get reduced to smaller multiplications of integer tensors, without sacrificing precision too much), and a clever way of caching the layers that are most likely to be needed, so we don't have to recalculate them, without caching everything though (which would be prohibitive in terms of storage).

The arguments in the paper sound very convincing to me. The code is publicly available on Github. I haven't yet had time to test it myself, but I will quite soon - and try to finally build an alternative voice assistant that can completely run on my phone.

https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/patil22b.html

gah why the fuck is `set mouse=1` the default in vim I *never* want that behavior

How is there not a comprehensive collection of Xerox PARC's tech reports somewhere...? 😭 I would have thought surely such things would be archived by someone.

There are some on the Internet Archive, but not the CSL-84-5 report I'm trying to find... 😢