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balsoft

@ balsoft @lemmy.ml

Posts
12
Comments
1609
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Has anyone tried Amber for writing bash scripts? Would you recommend it?

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  • At the risk of stating the obvious, I would like everyone to know that https://www.shellcheck.net/ exists. Unless you are a bash wizard: if your bash script doesn't pass shellcheck, it is very likely to have bugs.

  • Juno Computers begins work on a Qt-based OpenStreetMap navigation app

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  • I think the key point with Linux is that at least no single corporation has enough control over it to dictate the direction of the project on its own. Sure, modern Linux is fairly corporate and somewhat beholden to capitalist interests in general, but there's a lot of different actors pulling things in different directions, and the community (by that I mean non-corpo interests) still plays a role in decision making.

    I didn't vote to put Linux in AI servers, defense projects, Teslas

    The definition of FLOSS mandates that software authors relinquish control over how and by whom their software is used, see for example the JSON licensing controversy. But I agree that we should rethink this somewhat libertarian approach and at least try to prevent our software being used for evil.

    I didn't choose to ban devs based on their nationalities

    Yeah that one was a yikes. Especially given it wasn't even prompted by any legal threats, it was just the Linux devs complying with an unjust law prematurely.

    I'd be pretty wary of allowing MIT kernel modules.

    Wait, is that a thing?? Unless you mean the out of tree modules, in which case the MIT ones are not the worst offenders (looking at you NVidia)

  • Spent way too long building a feature rich YouTube Music desktop app for myself, might as well share it

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  • Ok, so there's no statistically rigorous review yet, but 73% of LLM-generated apps submitted to FlatHub were abandoned within 6 months. This is about the abandonment rate you should expect to see on any newly announced LLM-written project, and this figure appears to be much higher than hand-written projects (e.g. this study, while not directly comparable, shows a 16% abandonment rate).

    The reason for this is sort of obvious to me: an LLM makes it really easy to write code that makes an app work, therefore the threshold of involvement/interest needed to "make an app" is much lower. This in turn removes the selection force that makes software authors likely to be interested in, and thus put in the effort (or tokens) to maintain their software going forward. (this is putting aside the fact that LLMs are still horrible at software architecture and quite bad at infrastructure, making the long-term maintenance more difficult).

    I don't doubt that some people will have a lot of passion for their vibecoded thing, and will keep it going for a while. This might even be the case here given the author went out of their way to post about it on Lemmy and respond to comments, seemingly without an LLM in the loop at that stage of the process. But it's also important to disclose your LLM use so others can adjust their statistical expectations.

    anecdotally, I’ve built a lot of projects and abandoned them because I ran out of time. With an LLM to reduce the input effort I actually think I would’ve maintained them longer.

    Likely you would have also built more projects if you had access to an LLM, thus giving you less time to spend maintaining each individual one. Which is kind of the problem here...

  • Spent way too long building a feature rich YouTube Music desktop app for myself, might as well share it

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  • They are here to stay, but stuff built with an LLM is statistically way less likely to be maintained for more than a couple months compared to a hand-written thing. Anecdotally I also feel it's way more likely to have security issues. So I think it's important to disclose so people have their expectations set correctly.

  • Juno Computers begins work on a Qt-based OpenStreetMap navigation app

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  • Eh, for sure corporations do contribute a lot to every major FOSS project out there. I don't expect huge, versatile codebases to be maintained by volunteers lemmy-style, and corpos are the dominant organization kind under the capitalist mode of production, so of course they will have the resources to have a foot in every door.

    But the key differentiator is how much control any single entity has over the project's code, maintenance and infrastructure. On one side of the spectrum there's stuff like Rust or ffmpeg or GNU which are being pulled in various directions by various corpos and the community, on the other there's stuff like Chromium and AOSP where Google unilaterally controls everything. Projects like Linux or Firefox fall somewhere in the middle. We desperately need more projects to be of the first kind, and I feel like to achieve this projects should go as far as to ban donations over a certain amount and limit the number of contributors affiliated with a single organization. "Avoid success at all costs" is my single favorite rule of FOSS building, and it should be applied to technical, financial and organizational decisions all the same.

  • Loosing over 25% battery over night on sleep mode. Fedora 43

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  • Look into hibernation/suspend-to-disk. It's not too difficult to set up, and the power drain there would be basically 0 because the computer powers off completely. The only downside is that it takes slightly longer to resume, but on modern SSDs it's honestly not that noticeable.

  • Juno Computers begins work on a Qt-based OpenStreetMap navigation app

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  • FYI there's a semi-dead fork of OsmAnd called OffRoad which runs on desktop OS's, including Linux. But it's a bit borked and doesn't support most of the cool features.

  • Juno Computers begins work on a Qt-based OpenStreetMap navigation app

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  • It was indeed broken, fixed now.

    If you decide to actually go for it, in order to get it to compile I did something like this:

     
        
nix-shell
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . -j$(nproc)
wrapQtApp bin/CarNavigation
NIXPKGS_QT6_QML_IMPORT_PATH=/nix/store/66hlc66dkinbrc7ifq0v6ynaq3vkv35y-maplibre-native-qt-3.0.0/qml bin/CarNavigation

    (I'm not sure why the wrapQtApp doesn't pick up maplibre, maybe it's something to do with the patches they apply, didn't have time to investigate. I also didn't have the time to investigate what is needed to get it "installed", hence to installPhase and nix-build doesn't work)

  • Just a reminder

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  • The problem with this isn't voting, it's who you are allowed to vote for and which policies those people represent. Most US elections boil down to "90% hitler and covert fascism vs 100% hitler and overt fascism". Sure, if I were forced to vote in such a situation I probably would vote for the 90% hitler just out of harm reduction, but also it's important to acknowledge that the entire system which forces you to vote for 90% hitler must be destroyed.

    But if Trump had won in 2020, you can bet he would have done the same thing four years earlier.

    The question is rather, would Harris have started some kind of war in West Asia if she had won in 2024? I think the answer is yes, because both Trump and Harris answer to highly overlapping sets of capitalists and imperialists and war is highly profitable. The war would probably be carried out more professionally and effectively, but would that actually be a good thing?

  • Juno Computers begins work on a Qt-based OpenStreetMap navigation app

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  • Yeah, it doesn't have downloadable maps or offline routing (at least yet). It does however cache the map tiles it downloaded, and it seems to also cache some POIs (e.g. I can see opening hours for shops around me even without the internet).

  • Juno Computers begins work on a Qt-based OpenStreetMap navigation app

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  • After some finaggling I managed to compile it (here's the nix file I used to get the dependencies). It's looking basic but actually promising! Here are some screenshots (sorry for potato quality, it's the only one Lemmy allows me to upload at for some reason):

    The search seems quite nice, it seems to search by names but also allows to search for (some?) OSM tags, e.g. amenity:drinking_water shows up water fountains around you. I'm actually annoyed that other apps don't allow you to do so this easily.

    The navigation also seems to work-ish, which is surprising for such a young app. The only remaining things before it's really useful is downloadable maps and offline routing.

  • Juno Computers begins work on a Qt-based OpenStreetMap navigation app

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  • AOSP is controlled and maintained by a single bad-faith entity. We need a community-maintained, community-led replacement ASAP.

  • Juno Computers begins work on a Qt-based OpenStreetMap navigation app

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  • I’m not sure about the target though, amateurs working on their car or restoring old models?

    Yeah, personally I'd be their target audience, if they announce it soon enough and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I can also see some european manufacturers looking to decouple from the US tech being somewhat interested.

  • Juno Computers begins work on a Qt-based OpenStreetMap navigation app

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  • They may be working on a Linux-based car head unit, which is kinda between a phone and a laptop (like a tablet, which it basically is). If that's the case, something like this would be a required app, and current (non-android) Linux offerings are somewhat limited (basically it's just PureMaps and a couple forks, which all work but are a bit janky). If they end up with something useful, it would be great for both phones and cars.

  • American education system in action everybody

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  • 🤔 Interesting

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  • someone who paints in the style of Michelangelo or Studio Ghibli does not pay royalties to either of those entities

    I think it's actually not entirely true. There is a thing called "trade dress" (part of the trademark law), which can protect certain design or "look&feel" elements of any products a company produces; the requirements for this are a bit strict, but if the "style" of your painting is sufficiently similar to a Ghibli animation to cause confusion for customers (e.g. someone may reasonably think that the painting is by Studio Ghibli), there is a possibility that it's a trademark violation. But this is also beside the point.

    if someone reads ten thousand books and then writes their own story, they are not committing copyright infringement.

    There is a legal distinction between human learning and LLM training.

    The neural connections in someone's brain formed by reading a book are not considered to be a derivative work, because they are not a "work of authorship" as they are not “fixed in any tangible medium ... from which it can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated", and they are not “sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration".

    LLM weights meanwhile totally fit the definition of a "work", stored in the medium of a digital file (fixation) and produced by humans through a computational process (human authorship), making it a derivative work of the training material by definition.

    Once again, I agree that this is actually unfair, but it is the consequence of the law as written, because the law itself is unfair.

  • How long could the human race survive on only cannibalism?

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  • Ah, I see. Yeah, that makes more sense and I don't have an answer for your question then. I suspect it wouldn't really work due to long reproductive cycles and extremely limited total food supply.

  • 🤔 Interesting

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  • If a company unlawfully ... reproduced protected works in a way that violates copyright law, then it has broken the law and should be prosecuted.

    Merely training an LLM on copyrighted material without holder's permission (and then distributing the weights or selling access to inference on those weights) is a violation of copyright law if it were to be applied consistently (ignoring the fair use argument, which I'll get back to). That is, if you applied any other computational process in this way, the result would be a derivative work and subject to approval by copyright holder(s). The reason it's "different" this time is that the people violating the law are richer than those who wrote the law in the first place, not because of any legal argument.

    As of right now, there are multiple lawsuits against major LLM developers. In some of those cases, the courts have ruled that training on publicly available data can qualify as fair use.

    If a court ruled that it's "fair use", that actually lends more credence to the idea that LLM weights are a derivative work - "fair use" is a defense for copyright infringement that only makes sense in this case if the new work is an unauthorized derivative of the original.

    Whether it's actually fair use or not is another question. I can see the fair use argument for open-weight non-commercial models, not so much for commercial offerings - commercial LLMs seem to fail all 4 elements of fair use.

    BTW, I'm not even necessarily anti-AI (at least the open-weight, local models). I use a local model in my job almost daily, and also I think it's mostly good that the entirety of FOSS corpus is available for download in a compressed and easily remixable form. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of the legal system which applies its already unjust copyright law (and most other laws) only against poor people.

  • How long could the human race survive on only cannibalism?

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  • And, since we’re all cannibals now, what portion of the hucows is going to be reserved as hucow food?

    I think this is where your farming idea falls apart (or becomes identical to the problem discussed in the video). You can't sustainably farm animals without an external energy source. The reason we farm herbivores and some omnivores is that it's possible to feed them with grass (or whatever processed awfulness passes as grass nowadays). When we do farm carnivores for some reason, we feed them with meat harvested from herbivores.

    A fully cannibal-based farm is simply impossible because even if humans were perfect at turning food into muscles on their body, there wouldn't be anything to (sustainably) extract from the overall farm system, since there wouldn't be any extra energy/muscle mass/whatever going into it. Also, humans are very very not perfect at turning food into muscle mass, and waste most of the energy that came into their system on stuff like breathing and heartbeat and other metabolism. So, if the requirement is that all humans are cannibals, the only thing left to do is to farm non-sustainably, i.e. extract meat from the system as it runs out, feeding hucows with other hucows to keep at least some of them alive, but eventually you will run out of hucows (which is, once again, pretty much what's discussed in the video).

    Alternatively you could claim that "hucows" are not "humans" per se and feed them with non-hucow-based food, in which case it could probably work in a fairly similar manner to modern-day pig farming but on an even larger and more horrifying scale - pigs are quite similar to humans in many ways. Sans all the pandemics that would eventually happen due to cannibalism, of course.

  • Offroad @lemmy.ml
    balsoft @lemmy.ml

    It's not sexy but it is (was) mine

  • Inventing Reality @lemmy.ml
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    Just Bezos Things

  • ThinkPad @lemmy.ml
    balsoft @lemmy.ml

    While we're sharing setups...

  • TrailViews @piefed.social
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    Desert Sunrise

  • pics @lemmy.world
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    Desert Sunrise

  • Photography @lemmy.ml
    balsoft @lemmy.ml
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    Desert Sunrise

  • pics @lemmy.world
    balsoft @lemmy.ml
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    Moonrise at sunset

  • Photography @lemmy.ml
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    Moonrise at sunset

  • pics @lemmy.world
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    Winter Dawn

  • Photography @lemmy.ml
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    Winter Dawn

  • pics @lemmy.world
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    Late spring in Georgia

  • Photography @lemmy.ml
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    Late spring in Georgia