Tomo in Saigon @tomosaigon@fosstodon.org

lex - the lexical analyzer of lex & yacc fame - was written by Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google. That's a wild trajectory.

I want a program that, given a block of code, comes up with an appropriate function name for it

When Twitter open sources their algorithms we can finally apply them here

It's good to see the new users on this instance (thanks Elon!) but I imagine it's a flood on the big, centralized instances.

NPCs are real.

AI in NK?

Much is known about North Korea's cyber capabilities, including DeFi hacks.

But NK also has a state-sponsored (as if there was an alternative) AI program. Presumably its devs have the same open Internet access as its APTs. But how about GPU/compute for training - when they could use those GPUs for cryptomining for immediate returns?

The government of Russia is appointing a company to
Russia is to have a government-appointed (Android) Play Store, instead of Google and alternatives.

The reason given is those stores "may soon not allow you to download applications."

The currently most downloaded mobile apps in Russia are all VPNs.

Do countries that block GitHub not think that developers will not be smart enough to find ways to route around the damage and also apply the same technique to future blocked sites?

Lantern is a new type of VPN app which helps people get around blocked sites in their country: Lantern gives you uninterrupted access to the open internet by utilizing a variety of techniques to bypass censorship and firewalls, quickly shifting to other approaches if those techniques are blocked.

Free up to 500 MB/mo then rate-limited. Useful for accessing microblogging platforms (blocked Mastodon instances).

https://getlantern.org

IT worker? Russia is pulling out all the stops for you, from special low interest home loans, exemption from income taxes, and now military deferments!

The country expects to lose 2 million jobs this year.

Adobe stopped selling in Russia and stopped providing cloud access to Russian state media. Are they gonna have to use Gimp to make their memes?

Doritos are drugs in the shape of food

The attention-grabbing science headlines, papers that get published, are arguably the ideas more likely to be unintuitive, surprising, against conventional wisdom, but also wrong for those reasons. A bias to publish stuff that ends up being wrong but never retracted.

Twitter hires Linux kernel developers. They have a whole Kernel & OS team.

Meanwhile, Mastodon gets by on donations (from users) with maybe a few hundred unpaid code contributors. What a contrast.

If free software is used to deprive people's freedom, is it anti-free software?

Is there a free software license that excludes military use?

On one hand, you get peace of mind that your work isn't blowing up civilians.

OTOH, the Russian government just announced they (maybe) won't abide by software licenses - legalizing piracy.

cc @spyro

Astra Linux is a Russian-made (RusBitTech) Debian-based distro "to meet the needs of the Russian army, other armed forces and intelligence agencies."

They claim their Astra license doesn't go against the spirit of GPL.

Many state agencies switched to Astra recently.

Bet all of /bin could be crosscompiled to wasm and run in browsers. Maybe /usr/bin. Why? Just because.

Your bank and banking system should be owned and operated by you.

Electron is a resource hog. But most people wouldn't build a native Linux app without it.

There's an alternative: Revery

"Revery is kind of like super-fast, native code Electron - with bundled React-like/Redux-like libraries and a fast build system - all ready to go!"

Somehow achieved by using OCaml.

https://github.com/revery-ui/revery