idoubtit

3,355 karmajoined 9 yıl önce

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9 saat öncediscuss

After a cursory read of the PDF, my impression is that the methodology is sound, but the results are blown out of proportion. Of course, if the title was "Boko Haram's internal hearsay about their use of AI", it would draw much less attention.

The weak part is that the interview were with only 15 persons that had knowledge about AI. But, from what I understand, but they never used it themselves. Only the top commanders and the specialized units could send prompts. So it's hard to guess what is the real AI use from a few indirect statements. For example, the commanders could have decided to spread the rumor they were using AI a lot, even if they mostly used plain web search, because they thought it would boost the morale.

For instance, why would anyone pay an AI service to get basic help like that:

> AI provided both immediate technical fixes by teaching “how to uncouple the gun by washing it with diesel” and tactical guidance, in terms of “how to change the military formation so that fighters with jammed guns move to the back and others take their positions until the problem is solved.”

BTW, the paper does explain that Boko Haram was initially just a plain sect, rather living peacefully. Then "following a violent government crackdown and Yusuf’s death in police custody in 2009, the movement turned into a jihadist insurgency". And the last time I read a report by Amnesty International about the conflict, it estimated that 55 % of civilian casualties were caused by the terrorist group, and 45 % by the security forces. The Nigerian army sometimes razed whole villages. Like always, the world is not black and white, good guys and bad guys.

10 saat öncediscuss

If you opened the OP link, you missed the section "Featured in The New York Times".

5 gün öncediscuss

> your definition of dead is elms definition of stability

If Elm's definition of stability is keeping bugs and runtime errors for years, then I'm glad I stopped using Elm long ago.

Not only were the issues unaddressed, but for the past years the PR got no human response. For instance this one¹ fixes infinite loops in the core. [¹]: https://github.com/elm/core/pull/1137

5 gün öncediscuss

I also use OsmAnd~ for hiking, and even more for cycling. I tried CoMaps after a friend recommended it. In my experience, OsmAnd is much more powerful, and if you can tolerate its complexity and battery-drain, it's worth it.

- CoMaps is much simpler, but lacks features. OsmAnd has (too many) features and requires heavy configuration, e.g. to disable some features I never use and optimize battery life.

- Loading a track (GPX) in CoMaps is cumbersome (you have to "Open with..." from a file navigator). OsmAnd can load tracks from within the app, and just display them or turn one into a route. With CoMaps, I couldn't load more than one on a map. My GPX routes are prepared with BRouter on my desktop computer, since both apps are unable to build routes of 150 kms

- CoMaps is better at energy saving. OsmAnd drains my battery in 5-6 hours when the screen is on (the screen roughly accounts for half of the drain). YMMV. For long rides, I switch the phone off as soon as I don't absolutely require its help for navigation.

- OsmAnd has features that I would never give up. Notably, displaying markers on "drinking water" POI, so that I know when I'll be able to refill, or decide if I must deviate my route toward a drinking tap.

- There are more maps and data in OsmAnd than in CoMaps, and more visualisation options.

- Last time I tried CoMaps (from F-Droid), at some point the screen went blinking, alternating between home and CoMaps. The only way out was to shutdown the phone.

[edit: BRouter for routing]

8 gün öncediscuss

podman can work with kube files, which is the YAML format from Kubernetes. That's more "platform agnostic" than docker-compose. And it can be read as a documentation in the same way.

16 gün öncediscuss

Of course quality is subjective, but my own stats on AniDB show no decline.

I've watch at least one anime produced every year from 1977 to now. For 2000-2025 I've watched 24 to 62 anime of each year. My average vote by year is surprisingly stable at 5 ±0.6.

My top votes also don't show any significative tendency. Out of my 25 favorite anime, 6 were produced in 2020 or later. Notably the film "Kaguya-hime no monogatari", but also seinen series like "Nami yo Kiite Kure", "ACCA" or "Eizouken".

BTW, "Eizouken" (2020) is wonderful, and it's about a young girl wishing to become an animator, and how she creates short animes with her friends. I strongly recommend it!

17 gün öncediscuss

My father once received a letter from Algeria, with 3 words on the envelope : his first name, "Créteil" (the town where he lived, ≈100k inhabitants), and "France". Of course, in the 70s there was no Internet nor central database to find him, yet the postal service managed to deliver the letter. He was a very active social worker, managed a youth football team, etc. which made him locally well-known by his first name.

Nowadays, many people can't find anyone or any place unless their phone helps them. And postmen never stop to chat. Such a letter would not pass through the technology process, and probably not through the human network.

21 gün öncediscuss

I also think these are harmful simplifications, for several reasons.

First of all, I'm skeptical about the study that proves that people seeing three trees have better mental health. There are so many factors that it's hard to separate one. A solid study would compare families living in the same building, roughly at the same floor, and with similar parameters (family size, income, education, street noise, etc.). Comparisons from different buildings induce too many side factors. I think that collecting this sample would be very hard. I can't access the full-text behind the paywall, so I don't know their methodology, and their abstract is vague, so I fear the paper is meaningless.

Then do people really watch that much through their windows? I'd be surprised that having a glimpse of a few trees at home once a day could change anyone's life.

Even if trees did has a positive impact on mental health, I suppose inciting people to bike or walk (at least partly) to workplaces and stores would dwarf that impact, for mental and physical health.

Lastly, the 30% of tree cover seems arbitrary. For the same percentage, would covering every street with trees have the same impact as keeping trees inside parks? I think the goal to provide places where people go for a walk requires different solutions than the goal to reduce the heat in a concrete jungle.

geçen aydiscuss

There were reason to believe they were less subject to US juridiction: their Subscriber Agreement is for "Sectigo Limited, a limited company formed under the laws of England and Wales". See https://www.sectigo.com/uploads/backgrounds/Certificate-Subs...

Sadly, their United Terms and Conditions in section 8.2 are even more restrictive than LE's. They reject any entity "located in, incorporated under the laws of, or owned (meaning 50% or greater ownership interest) or otherwise, directly or indirectly, controlled by, or acting on behalf of, a person located in, residing in, or organized under the laws of any country sanctioned under the laws of the U.S. or E.U." See https://www.sectigo.com/uploads/backgrounds/United-Terms-and...

From a layman point of view, it could even mean that the ICC and the UN are prohibited from using Sectigo. The Customer must have no "affiliates, officers, directors, or employees" that are on sanction lists, and the US have sanctioned some high-profile members of the UN and the ICC that spoke about the genocide in Gaza.

geçen aydiscuss

Couldn't LE have a branch in Europe or anywhere outside the USA and its minions?

Because they're betraying their own goals, as stated in their About page: “It is a service run for the public’s benefit. [...] Anyone who owns a domain name can use Let’s Encrypt to obtain a trusted certificate at zero cost. [...] Let’s Encrypt is a joint effort to benefit the community, beyond the control of any one organization.” Now they own they are under the control of a political organization.

Here is the paragraph Let's Encrypt added to their Subscription Agreement on 2026-06-04:

> You are not a person or entity that is:

> (a) located in, organized under the laws of, or ordinarily resident in any country or territory that is the target of comprehensive U.S. sanctions;

> (b) a prohibited or restricted party under U.S. or other applicable sanctions and export control laws and regulations;

> or (c) owned or controlled by or acting on behalf of anyone described in (a) or (b).

> You agree to use Let’s Encrypt Certificates and any services provided by or on behalf of ISRG in compliance with applicable U.S. export control and sanctions laws and regulations.

geçen aydiscuss

The problem with this article is that the benchmark method they use is flawed. The documentation of zshbench explains why: https://github.com/romkatv/zsh-bench

Even with a low grade laptop, my zsh config grants me a sub 5ms prompt and a sub 1ms input lag, and that's far more important than the exit time.

     ./zsh-bench
    ==> benchmarking login shell of user XYZ ...
    creates_tty=0
    has_compsys=1
    has_syntax_highlighting=0
    has_autosuggestions=0
    has_git_prompt=1
    first_prompt_lag_ms=54.942
    first_command_lag_ms=57.069
    command_lag_ms=4.275
    input_lag_ms=0.669
    exit_time_ms=26.522

     hyperfine --warmup 3 'zsh -i -c exit'
    Benchmark 1: zsh -i -c exit
      Time (mean ± σ):      26.5 ms ±   0.5 ms
      Range (min … max):    25.5 ms …  27.6 ms

geçen aydiscuss

Not too bad? A hidden procedure with ten clicks, which the user has to repeat for each web browser. And it may break at any time if the browser changes some details. Or if KDE changes. And it's specific to KDE, with no alternatives in most Wayland WMs.

All that for _one_ feature which works out-of-the-box with Xorg, and which Wayland removed for security reasons. From what I've seen, sharing the screen is another common feature which was broken with Wayland and is still painful.

I don't think Wayland's security model is very relevant to me since I have faith in Debian for filtering out rogue applications. So I have to reason to drop my smooth UX for a world of "not too bad" workarounds.

2 ay öncediscuss

No, more like:

    git rebase -i
    # squash all the commits (e.g. in vim with ctrl-v)
    git reset HEAD^
    git add -p
    # interactively pickup the RED hunks
    git ci -m RED

The main difference to jj is that the RED commit is created later with git.

2 ay öncediscuss

There's one problem with arrays that I haven't seen mentioned here or by the OP: when inserting a key-value, the type of the key may change. For instance ["4" => "four"] === [4 => "Four"]

This can lead to some unexpected behaviors. For example, I've already been bitten by `array_merge()` whose result is different if its parameters are arrays with numeric indexes.

    array_merge(["4 " => "four"], ["5 " => "five"])
    // ["4 " => "four", "5 " => "five"]

    array_merge(["4" => "four"], ["5" => "five"])
    // [0 => "four", 1 => "five"]

2 ay öncediscuss

You can do that. Of course, PHP's native types are quite limited, but a phpdoc syntax should work with static analysis tools. For instance:

    /** @psalm-type MyobjType = object{mystring: string} */

    /**
     * @param MyobjType $myobj
     */
    function (object $myobj): void

Here are some documentation and examples:

- For Psalm, see https://psalm.dev/docs/annotating_code/type_syntax/utility_t...

- For PHPstan, see https://phpstan.org/writing-php-code/phpdoc-types

It may work in your IDE (autocompletion, etc.) but there is no standard on this side. Some IDE have their own parsers, others use one of the LSPs for PHP.

2 ay öncediscuss

What is the open standard?

As far as I know, the ISO standard for zip only specifies two compression methods: "store" (no compression) and "deflate". If I follow that, when I create a zip file, I know it's not performant, but at least it's almost universal (except for file ownership, permissions, character encoding and anything modern).

The corporate PKWARE has added other compressions to their original zip software, but those are not in the standard. They will not work for an EPUB, a LibreOffice file, etc. If I want a good compression, I reach for zstd (often through `tar`) or 7z if I want more portability.

2 ay öncediscuss

I had no heard of ECT, but I'm not impressed. I've just benchmarked it against two others PNG optimizers, and here are the file sizes for default and max levels:

    1985457 oxipng-o6.png
    2030036 oxipng-o2.png
    2125459 ect-o9.png
    2144598 ect-o3.png
    2169351 optipng-o7.png
    2215086 optipng-o2.png
    2218326 original.png

    oxipng 9.1.5
    OptiPNG version 7.9.1
    Efficient Compression Tool Version 0.9.5

BTW, I could not compile ECT on my Linux system, because its CMake config was too old. I used the Windows release through Wine, but it shouldn't change the results above.

I tried to apply ECT to a few .gz files, but it complained it was not compatible, and I did not dig further.

[edited for a typo s/I/it/]

2 ay öncediscuss

Not the GP, but I also have mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks. They modernise texts for American readers. This means changing the punctuation, merging some words, altering the syntax, etc.

When I read an old novel, written two centuries ago in England, the little differences to modern English are part of the charm, and I certainly don't want any Americanism mixed in. For one of my favorite novels, The Forsyte saga, the author deliberately used some rare forms of words, which SE replaced with the mainstream forms.

2 ay öncediscuss

As pointed in your link, NetBSD achieved this with some help from Debian. If I understand correctly, it's not that NetBSD tried harder, it's that their problem was easier: fewer packages which change less (they still use CVS, "stability" is an understatement!).

BTW, most Debian packages have reproducible builds. Those which have not (I'd say 5%) are shown in orange in the graph there: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

2 ay öncediscuss

I expected a toy project, but it is a usable library, which required a lot of work. Good job on delivering. A few comments:

After reading "composer.json", I thought that the tests used a custom framework. I'm glad the project does not suffer from NIH syndrome, but the dev dependency on PHPUnit should be declared.

There should a warning that it's only meant for some Western Latin languages. The normalization of the input is built on a character table for a handful of cases. That's not enough for some Latin languages, e.g. Turkish. And any input with Cyrillic, Arabic, CJK and so on, will be ignored.

There is no Unicode normalization or cleanup. Real-life input have many corner cases, e.g. diacritics next to the characters, or invisible characters inside a word to prevent hyphenation. Unless I'm mistaken, this engine would treat the NFD form "fête" as "fe te", instead of the expected "fete", which the NFKD form "fête" produces. I suggest using ext-intl for Unicode normalization, at least as an option.

Lastly, I can't think of a use case for this library. I've always had access to some external service (MySQL, Postgresql, Manticore Search, Solr, etc.) or to a PHP extension for a local Sqlite with FTS. Even for hobby projects, I haven't deployed to a shared hosting for more than two decades.