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Oliver Lowe

@ otl @lemmy.sdf.org

Posts
14
Comments
242
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe

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  • I feel this is a bit of a moot point from the White House. Memory-safe languages have been around for decades. I feel like the amount of C/C++ out there isn't so much that people think having dangerous stuff around is good, but more that nobody really wants to pay to change it.

  • Does email (SMTP/POP3) count as a member of the fediverse?

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  • Depends how you look at it! Here’s me accessing Mastodon and the fediverse via email: https://lemmy.world/post/11020167 I’ve written a a couple more prototypes to connect one to the other. If anyone is interested I could write up more about how it works or do a more public demo

  • Any apps or sites that scrapes web pages and gives much better privacy respecting web pages or apps than the official ones ?

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  • Not included in the above, but handy is also an alternative web UI for Reuters news: https://neuters.de

  • RFC 9512: YAML Media Type

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  • Third time's a charm

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  • no you didn't Mr. Simpson, no one can

  • No sir

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  • took me a couple but worth it

  • Australia is bigger than some people overseas imagine.

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  • The other fun one is that the continental US (AKA everything except Alaska) is just about the same size as Australia. Then when you consider that there's 49 states versus Australia's 7, you can see how the numbers come about.

  • 💰➡️✝️

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  • well there was probably awareness of ideas of sacrifice, punishment, right/wrong. Old ideas...

  • Unexpected comment behaviour between Mastodon and Lemmy

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  • Good question! Sorry if this answer is weird :)

    For me, I don't actually interact from Mastodon per se. I wrote a couple of read-only Lemmy & Mastodon clients. One for a weird text editing environment I use (https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382) and via email (https://gts.olowe.co/@o/statuses/01HMQ9N4HQ2ETGZWJS49K5NG5Y). To reply to or create posts, I use a write-only Mastodon client I wrote.

    My idea is to exercise the fediverse. In principal I don't think I should need separate accounts for Lemmy, PeerTube, Mastodon, Kbin, Akkoma, etc.

    Right now I'm replying from an account on lemmy.sdf.org as I can't reply from GoToSocial (Lemmy and GoToSocial don't work well together right now) and my Mastodon server (hachyderm.io) has a post limit of 500 characters.

  • Unexpected comment behaviour between Mastodon and Lemmy

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  • Ah ha makes sense now! The "Replying to comments" section of that article explains exactly what's happening. If I understand correctly the community itself (!privacy@lemmy.ml in my above example) is not notified of my reply from Mastodon. If the community did know, then it would broadcast a notification of the activity to whoever else is subscribed to !privacy@lemmy.ml.

  • Why We Can't Have Nice Software

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  • I honestly find it worrying that someone would think it's some sort of deeply ingrained human trait when it's clearly not culturally universal (eg. small hunter-gatherer tribes wouldn't exist otherwise) and not present through all of history.

    I think "growth" is a strong signal for people to put faith and trust into something. And that these emotions have influenced our behaviour for a long time.

    Why did the Roman empire keep expanding? What made them want more? I'm not a historian nor an anthropologist (far from either!). But this feels like "line go up" behaviour. What would it mean for those in power to communicate that some part of the empire was receding? Even if, overall, the empire was objectivetly huge relative to other organised groups?

    One thing I think about is there could be eroding confidence and trust of those in power by colleagues and the general population. If people lose faith, the powerful lose power; they lose ability to influence behaviour. Growth is obsessed over because it's a means to capture influence over the means of production (and capture profit).

    The line has to go up because the current economic system demands it has to go up

    What about outside of economics? Even metrics on https://fedidb.org: shrinking numbers are coloured red. Growing numbers green. Green = good, red = bad.

    Another thought. The other day I was at a cricket match. Grand final. Because the home team was losing, the stadium started to empty. It wasn't about enjoying the individual balls/plays. Supporters were not satisfied with coming second (an amazing achievement, much "profit"!), it needed to be more.

    To stretch this shitty metaphor further, when the supporters (investors?) lost confidence in their ability to deliver more, they just abandoned the entire match (enterprise?) altogether!

    Again: I'm not stating anything here as fact. I'm just absolutely dumbfounded as to why "line go up" is, as you say, such an obsession. I hear you when you say that it's a consequence of how the modern economy works. That makes sense. I guess I wonder what would happen if we snapped our fingers and we could start again. I wonder what the economy system would look like. Would we still be obsessed with growth?

  • Unexpected comment behaviour between Mastodon and Lemmy

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  • Gotcha. I had a feeling something around how Mastodon doesn't support ActivityPub Groups (yet?) would be where things are going on. Congrats on piefed, by the way. I'll start studying the codebase now as I'm keen to understand how server-to-server communication works more deeply than I do now. Sending Announce(?) and fetching stuff from other servers...

    When I look at the ActivityPub Note object (via curl -H 'Accept: application/activity+json https://hachyderm.io/@otl/111887721960075860) I see:

     
        
{
    "@context": [
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
        {
            "ostatus": "http://ostatus.org#",
            "atomUri": "ostatus:atomUri",
            "inReplyToAtomUri": "ostatus:inReplyToAtomUri",
            "conversation": "ostatus:conversation",
            "sensitive": "as:sensitive",
            "toot": "http://joinmastodon.org/ns#",
            "votersCount": "toot:votersCount"
        }
    ],
    "id": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860",
    "type": "Note",
    "summary": null,
    "inReplyTo": "https://ttrpg.network/comment/4965852",
    "published": "2024-02-07T01:59:08Z",
    "url": "https://hachyderm.io/@otl/111887721960075860",
    "attributedTo": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl",
    "to": [
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
    ],
    "cc": [
        "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/followers",
        "https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato",
        "https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux"
    ],
    "sensitive": false,
    "atomUri": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860",
    "inReplyToAtomUri": "https://ttrpg.network/comment/4965852",
    "conversation": "tag:hachyderm.io,2024-02-06:objectId=123754186:objectType=Conversation",
    "content": "<p><span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>Neato</span></a></span> <span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>ForgottenFlux</span></a></span>  I totally get how you feel. One use-case I think of is machine-generated image alt-text. These are often not added to images. But with image-to-text ML models, visually-impaired people could hear a descriptions of images that before were never annotated.</p>",
    "contentMap": {
        "en": "<p><span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>Neato</span></a></span> <span class=\"h-card\" translate=\"no\"><a href=\"https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux\" class=\"u-url mention\">@<span>ForgottenFlux</span></a></span>  I totally get how you feel. One use-case I think of is machine-generated image alt-text. These are often not added to images. But with image-to-text ML models, visually-impaired people could hear a descriptions of images that before were never annotated.</p>"
    },
    "attachment": [],
    "tag": [
        {
            "type": "Mention",
            "href": "https://ttrpg.network/u/Neato",
            "name": "@Neato@ttrpg.network"
        },
        {
            "type": "Mention",
            "href": "https://lemmy.world/u/ForgottenFlux",
            "name": "@ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world"
        }
    ],
    "replies": {
        "id": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies",
        "type": "Collection",
        "first": {
            "type": "CollectionPage",
            "next": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies?only_other_accounts=true&page=true",
            "partOf": "https://hachyderm.io/users/otl/statuses/111887721960075860/replies",
            "items": []
        }
    }
}

    So I'm assuming an Announce was posted to the shared inboxes at lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and ttrpg.network... hmm... I better start reading!

  • Unexpected comment behaviour between Mastodon and Lemmy

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  • Ah! Interesting.

    Which instances? Do you mean hachyderm.io with, say, lemmy.one?

  • Lemmy @lemmy.ml
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org

    Unexpected comment behaviour between Mastodon and Lemmy

  • How to liven up retrospectives when they've gotten uneventful / unhelpful?

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  • Thanks for helping me reframe my thoughts.

    Haha don't worry it's for framing my thoughts too! ;)

    To that end, I'd want topics to be problems or shout outs. Something like "how do we test credit cards" might be a sign of "our documentation isn't great and it slows me down" but it's talked about as a discreet item.

    Devil's advocate: what are those good practices? What constitutes improvement? One way to focus discussion is to try and pick some specific team values/objectives. Let's go with the example about Jira.

    Similarly "I haven't seen Jira used this way before" isn't a problem; maybe the underlying issue is "I don't understand how we use Jira" or "what we're doing causes a lot of paperwork"

    The statement "I haven't seen Jira used this way before" is not ideal starting point for discussion - agreed! But with a value in mind I think we can work with it. Let's say, for argument's sake, the goal is stronger shared understanding of project management.

    You mentioned other team members asked "what's the problem you're hoping to solve?". I think that's a very pragmatic, specific question (I'm a software engineer, too, I get it!) but it's not really in the service of the goal of the discussion: a stronger understanding of project management.

    So how can discussion help with that? What about a Q&A session? The interactive, conversational exchange is a natural way for people to learn (I hear ChatGPT is pretty popular!), and it's likely others will learn a bunch of stuff too about why things are done the way they are.

    Another technique is to use the free-flowing discussion format for what its best at: exploration of ideas, not necessarily solving problems. Solving problems usually takes code, data, testing, experimentation... things that require time at the keyboard.

    Taking the credit card example:

    Something like "how do we test credit cards" might be a sign of "our documentation isn't great and it slows me down" but it's talked about as a discreet item.

    Use the conversational format to its advantage. Respond to the question with another question: "why do you ask how we test credit cards?" From there they might reply with something about documentation, or maybe the tests aren't clear, or they're not run often enough. Maybe they want ways to run credit card tests on their own workstation as unit tests? From there we identify a whole bunch of ways to improve the code/project/workflow/better align with best practices.

    Anyway, I'm not a manager :) I'm just thinking out loud so next time I start speaking to a team to join maybe I understand the dynamics a bit more.

  • How to liven up retrospectives when they've gotten uneventful / unhelpful?

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  • Hm. Interesting. This is something that gets me too...

    Taking a step back: what are you hoping to achieve with the retrospective?

    I find that the items people are bringing up aren't really important or could just be a question in Slack.

    What criteria would make something important? Conversely: what makes something minor?

    Once we nail these it might be easier to focus the discussion.

  • Why We Can't Have Nice Software

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  • Growth might be impossible, but a steady and "boring" amount of profit should still be possible selling plain-ole-dishwashers. Yet ... for some reason, we don't see that.

    God yes this bothers and fascinates me.

    Instead companies throw everything into growth and we get the retarded bluetooth enabled dishwasher problem everywhere, and I'd like toknow more about why.

    I think it's alluded to in the article:

    They found a way to make consumers spend more money on dishwashing. The line goes up, for one more year. But it's not enough. It has to go up every year.

    Digging deeper: why must the line go up? Pesonally I see it as a deeply emotional, human thing.

    When you read those annual financial reports from big companies, they will do anything to make sure things look rosy. Bullshit terms like "negative growth" are used because "loss" or "shrink" sound bad. So what if it sounds bad?

    Confidence. Trust. It's emotional. These are deep in our psyche. It's how governments get elected, contracts are won, and investments are made. It's what makes us human. If that line goes down... will it go back up? What's going to happen? Alarm bells! Uncertaintly. Anxiety. People abandon you. Money, power, influence fades. You could find yourself replaced by the up-and-coming who "show promise".

    Our social emotional species has hundreds of thousands of years (millions?) of years of this stuff hardwired into us. Trust let us cooperate beyond our own individual or family interests. Would we be human otherwise? (I found the article Behavioural Modernity interesting).

  • Why We Can't Have Nice Software

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  • Not sure it’s capitalism per se. Perhaps rampant waste. Criticism of capitalism could include monopoly formation; massive tech companies buy small ones (obtain more capital = more control over production = more profit).

    There’s despair over everyone, big & small, resolving the same recreated problems. Kelley doesn’t talk about breaking Microsoft up (i.e. redistributing their capital). He implies he’d be ok for Microsoft to maintain its market position if it just fixed some damn bugs.

  • How I reduced the size of my very first published docker image by 40% - A lesson in dockerizing shell scripts

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  • The art of turning a 500-line text file into a 50MB tarball. Welcome to the future :(

  • Article suggests that 1 million ML specialists will be needed in 2027. What do you think of that?

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  • Programming @programming.dev
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org

    Simple Made Easy - Rich Hickey (2011)

    www.infoq.com /presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/
  • Programming @programming.dev
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org

    My struggle from a UNIX background in the modern "cloud" world

    www.srcbeat.com /2023/10/cloud-native/
  • Git @programming.dev
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org

    git-send-email.io - Learn to use email with Git

    git-send-email.io
  • Programming @programming.dev
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org

    Rejected automation?

    www.srcbeat.com /2023/08/sbt/
  • Mlem for Lemmy @lemmy.ml
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org
    Praise

    Small app size!

  • roff typesetting: groff, troff, etc. @lemmy.ml
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org

    Pikchr: A pic-inspired markup language for diagrams in web documents

    pikchr.org /home/doc/trunk/doc/userman.md
  • General Discussion @lemmy.world
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org

    What next for a hobbyist documentarian?

  • Plan9 @lemmy.sdf.org
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org

    Lemmy: experimental Acme program to access Lemmy

  • Lemmy.world Support @lemmy.world
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org

    Deleting >4000 junk communities by @LMAO

  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org

    lemmyverse: find communities from the command line

    git.sr.ht /~otl/x/tree/master/item/bin/lemmyverse
  • Golang @programming.dev
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org

    research!rsc: Coroutines for Go

    research.swtch.com /coro
  • Programming @programming.dev
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org

    research!rsc: Storing Data in Control Flow

    research.swtch.com /pcdata
  • Programming @programming.dev
    Oliver Lowe @lemmy.sdf.org

    Advice for Operating a Public-Facing API

    jcs.org /2023/07/12/api