Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one

If your city couldn’t avoid making a massive city-damaging mistake in the first place, do the next best thing — remove the mistake, and repair your city. Like #Utrecht, Netherlands did with its central area river, then freeway, then river again.

(Image via @BicycleDutch) #Dutch #Holland #Netherlands #freeways #cars #bikes #cities

"The idea that complex social problems are amenable to cheap technical solutions is the siren song of the software salesman"

Re the Online Safety Bill/regulatory proposals invoking harm to the vulnerable as a problem mass surveillance could solve.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64584001

Wiki Unblocked is also built by #fdroidorg using the #ReproducibleBuilds process, independently confirming that the binary APK shipped on https://f-droid.org matched the source code.

Seeing the utopia that is promised just around the corner with AGI @clarkesworld closing submissions because of inundation by "AI" generated submissions. Feels like a DDOS attack.
https://dair-community.social/@clarkesworld@mastodon.online/109871320720975169

World: Can the US please just use the metric system, instead of making up weird measurements no one else understands

US:

If you use Debian container images, please note that "debian:bookworm" images are already using deb822-style repository sources https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/apt/sources.list.5.en.html#DEB822-STYLE_FORMAT

Something that stuck with me from a previous job is the quote: “don’t underestimate things that have survived many attempts to kill them.”

Think: DNS, bash, C, TCP.

These things have survived this long for a reason. Find out the reason.

This is a post specifically about technology, but the same idea also applies to government. Don't underestimate processes that have resisted prior attempts to reform them, and have continued on in more or less the same way for a long time (e.g., procurement).

These things have worked the way they do for a reason. Find out the reason.

https://mastodon.social/@samwho@hachyderm.io/109893278789754854

The EU digital identity wallet might handle some of citizens’ most sensitive data. Its success highly depends on the trust people place in it. Undemocratic behaviour & the deletion of privacy-preserving features of the new ID are certainly the wrong way to gain society’s trust.

As a committer on a couple of medium-popularity projects I couldn't agree more with this:

"Maintaining a successful open source project is Good Will Hunting in reverse. You start out as a respected genius, and end up being a janitor who gets into fights."

— Byrne Hobart (@ByrneHobart@twitter.com)

I spent the morning poring over the Android 14 DP1 materials, especially the API differences report. Which means, once again, I have some random musings: https://commonsware.com/blog/2023/02/11/random-musings-android-14-dp1.html

As usual, the early developer previews have the most stuff to report on. Thankfully, these posts get shorter as we march towards beta releases.

And, as usual, I don't pull many punches.

All the hype about souped up developer productivity using LLMs for coding reminds me of the original title of this 2014 paper, before it was milquetoasted in 2015 acceptance.

LLMs can help you rapidly acquire semi-plagiarized fragments of well-traveled code instead of using a quality library with vision of the problem domain. Might be great for KPIs, but this debt will come back to bite you, unless you're already gone. Will be painful for orgs to adapt.
https://research.google/pubs/pub43146/

People worry a lot about losing knowledge — about "burned-down libraries".

Comparatively few people seem to worry about what happens if you take a billion books full of auto-generated, often-untrue junk text and *add* them all to the library.

In theory, nothing is lost. In reality, everything is lost, because nothing useful can now be found.

I have never really liked discussing whether you have something to hide, as an argument for or against security or privacy. First, it's irrelevant - everyone has these rights no matter what. But also, once you start talking about "hiding", you have already lost the discussion - because it's a word that is associated with negative connotations.

I think we should change the discourse. I don't have anything to hide. But I do have many things to protect. I have the right to protect my privacy. I have the right to protect my communication. I have the right to protect my work. I have the right to protect my friends and family.

#SomethingToProtect #Privacy