These threats to ban social media have shown that this topic is all about power and control and nothing about the people. Instead of investing in long term, sustainable solutions - less centralized networks, open algorithms, interoperable protocols - countries have been trying to reduce exposure to the internet to minimize damage.
Are solarpunk values part of your thinking process … which company you will be working at?
I do not think necessarily about solarpunk, but it ends up being related to solarpunk. When you build software with the intention of it being used for a long time and for many contexts, you make it more sustainable, better against aging.
And, maybe in a broader sense, is hoping to work on projects aligned with solarpunk values realistic?
It is realistic and it should be done. Values are a guideline to follow when you need to make a decision. Values of sustainability, justice, hope will certainly guide you to build something that will help more people and have a positive impact in the world.
I work for a company that mainly does PoC projects with low TRL. This gives me the opportunity to choose the technologies that align with solarpunk: open-source libraries and standards, products that can be self-hosted and scale as needed.
Moreover, my team and department avoid using big tech products: Mattermost for comms, Nextcloud for storage and docs. Non-developers use Windows for" compatibility" reasons, otherwise, we use Linux.
Additionally, the company makes products that will be used in renewables and similar sectors, which makes it super solarpunk.
I have talked with the author to confirm what he meant with this and other posts he made on compilation. He has confirmed that most (if not all) C compilers are not deterministic. He has pointed me to here as an example. He added that optimizations are not applied in deterministic order and when you add LTO it worsens the problem.
I agree that LLM are made to be more exploratory, this is good as it allows them to experiment with more different topic, as opposed to always saying the same. However, I do not agree it is a feature for code generation, as you would need it to follow strict ruleset (code syntax, specification, tests). Whatever errors it generates and people accept are little mistakes in the threshold of acceptance for the person and a tradeoff for the cost of fixing the problem. In some contexts we see people focusing almost only on short term which leads to a lot of errors being allowed.
Moreover, you cannot say compilers are deterministic. There are situations where they are not (at least for the user).
https://krystalgamer.github.io/high-level-game-patches/
GCC’s unwarranted behaviour
In order to keep the code as small as possible I was compiling the code with -Os. Everything was working fine until I started to remove some printfs and started to get some crashes. Moving function calls around also seemed to randomly fix the problem, this was an indication that somehow memory/stack corruption was happening. After a lot of testing, I figured out that if -O2/-O3/-Os were used then the problem would appear. The issue was caused by Interprocedural analysis or IPA. One of its functions is to determine whether registers are polluted across function calls and if not then re-use them.
a relative time formatting library that contains no code
The library is two text files (code) that are processed by an LLM (interpreter) to generate code of another type. This is not that new in terms of workflow.
I think what makes this the worst is the fact that the author admits that you can’t be sure the library will work until you generate the code and test it. Even then you cannot guarantee the security of the generated code and as you do not understand the code you also cannot give support or patch it.
When Performance Matters
If performance of a datetime processor is not relevant, what is? The author mentions they would like a browser implementation to be fast, documentable, fixable. However, operative systems, browsers, and other complex systems are made of little utilities like this that have very well documented functionalities and side effects.
But the above isn’t fully baked. Our models will get better, our agents more capable.
The whole assumption is that instead of creating a good stable base that anyone can use we should be just shtting out code until it works.
Eventually the hardware will be good enough to support a shitty bloated browser so we don’t need to optimize it.
Eventually people will harden their PC enough so we shouldn’t care about security.
Low effort pizza is the best dish.
I guess the point of using only text is to test how far you can go with performance. Using plaintext, or a simple markup language, also forces you to not do the things you can do with HTML.
Image a news website where the focus is the actual news, instead of the weirdly sized max-contrast cookie banner, or the weird space left for ads that do not load because of uBO.
It seems plaintext blogs are a weird child of smallweb design.
I think it would be best to have some kind of markup to identify links, and provide other things like italics, bold, subscript, superscript. For example, as in gemini protocol.
We need to raise awareness because most people do not even know what is on the table. I have seen many reactions to Australia ban on social media and most people show support for it without considering the catch of ‘how do you implement this?’
Crucially, the document reveals that EU governments see metadata – specifically traffic and location history – as the most vital tool for law enforcement.
Ah, yes. Store data at the risk of it being hacked or used by companies in order to protect the people from themselves.
The paragraph you quoted says he was Australian.
We have won, but at what cost…
The use is explicitly optional for EU citizens or third-country nationals. The physical travel document must still be carried when crossing the border.
(bold added)
They always present it as optional, and then create a whole infrastructure around it that expects and forces you to have it.
Ban anything digital. Back to the paper age.
EU needs to stop listening to the giant companies and focus on the clean tech they are always delaying.
At least the weather is very cool and stable in underground prepper bunkers.
I keep seeing people celebrating the victory without commenting the rest. It was a good victory indeed, but it is just the beginning. The party lost 8 seats relative to 2021 and Russia will keep trying to corrupt, sabotage, attack the country.
ELI15 Why are car companies in Europe so stuck with cars other than eletric? Shouldn’t eletric have better margins and include State/European incentives? And it is also cheaper in the long run for the consumer.
US tech centralization is terrible !!!