What is Hackers' Pub?

Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.

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I've been busy wrapping up the final parts of Loops ActivityPub federation!

We will ship with two modes (Open and Lockdown), the latter allowing you to restrict federation with allowed instances only (and enforced via AuthorizedFetch)

You can also disable Federation support

I'll have a better ETA this weekend after some more testing ✨

Thanks to phpstan, this may even ship this weekend 🚀

Loops Admin Dashboard Federation SettingsLoops Admin Dashboard Federation SettingsLoops Admin Dashboard Federation SettingsLoops Admin Dashboard Federation Settings
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Loops leverages a clever and extensible `matchUrlTemplate` helper that is used to validate existence when handling federated Activities.

Unlike Pixelfed and Mastodon, we have seperate tables/models for Comments and Comment Replies (and Reposts/Boosts), leading to more performant queries.

One more thing, we also plan to support username changes by referencing profile ids in activities, instead of usernames 😎

Loops federation source code that handles dereferencing activity objects
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I think this needs to be repeated, since I tend to be quite negative about all of the 'AI' hype:

I am not opposed to machine learning. I used machine learning in my PhD and it was great. I built a system for predicting the next elements you'd want to fetch from disk or a remote server that didn't require knowledge of the algorithm that you were using for traversal and would learn patterns. This performed as well as a prefetcher that did have detailed knowledge of the algorithm that defined the access path. Modern branch predictors use neural networks. Machine learning is amazing if:

  • The problem is too hard to write a rule-based system for or the requirements change sufficiently quickly that it isn't worth writing such a thing and,
  • The value of a correct answer is much higher than the cost of an incorrect answer.

The second of these is really important. Most machine-learning systems will have errors (the exceptions are those where ML is really used for compression[1]). For prefetching, branch prediction, and so on, the cost of a wrong answer is very low, you just do a small amount of wasted work, but the benefit of a correct answer is huge: you don't sit idle for a long period. These are basically perfect use cases.

Similarly, face detection in a camera is great. If you can find faces and adjust the focal depth automatically to keep them in focus, you improve photos, and if you do it wrong then the person can tap on the bit of the photo they want to be in focus to adjust it, so even if you're right only 50% of the time, you're better than the baseline of right 0% of the time.

In some cases, you can bias the results. Maybe a false positive is very bad, but a false negative is fine. Spam filters (which have used machine learning for decades) fit here. Marking a real message as spam can be problematic because the recipient may miss something important, letting the occasional spam message through wastes a few seconds. Blocking a hundred spam messages a day is a huge productivity win. You can tune the probabilities to hit this kind of threshold. And you can't easily write a rule-based algorithm for spotting spam because spammers will adapt their behaviour.

Translating a menu is probably fine, the worst that can happen is that you get to eat something unexpected. Unless you have a specific food allergy, in which case you might die from a translation error.

And that's where I start to get really annoyed by a lot of the LLM hype. It's pushing machine-learning approaches into places where there are significant harms for sometimes giving the wrong answer. And it's doing so while trying to outsource the liability to the customers who are using these machines in ways in which they are advertised as working. It's great for translation! Unless a mistranslated word could kill a business deal or start a war. It's great for summarisation! Unless missing a key point could cost you a load of money. It's great for writing code! Unless a security vulnerability would cost you lost revenue or a copyright infringement lawsuit from having accidentally put something from the training set directly in your codebase in contravention of its license would kill your business. And so on. Lots of risks that are outsourced and liabilities that are passed directly to the user.

And that's ignoring all of the societal harms.

[1] My favourite of these is actually very old. The hyphenation algorithm in TeX trains short Markov chains on a corpus of words with ground truth for correct hyphenation. The result is a Markov chain that is correct on most words in the corpus and is much smaller than the corpus. The next step uses it to predict the correct breaking points in all of the words in the corpus and records the outliers. This gives you a generic algorithm that works across a load of languages and is guaranteed to be correct for all words in the training corpus and is mostly correct for others. English and American have completely different hyphenation rules for mostly the same set of words, and both end up with around 70 outliers that need to be in the special-case list in this approach. Writing a rule-based system for American is moderately easy, but for English is very hard. American breaks on syllable boundaries, which are fairly well defined, but English breaks on root words and some of those depend on which language we stole the word from.

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[일주일 만에 160명의 유저가 선택했습니다]

피그마에서 디자인할 때,
끝나고 나면 레이어 정리가 제일 골칫거리죠.

하나씩 직접 옮기다 보면
시간도 잡아먹고, 스트레스만 쌓입니다.

그래서 클릭 한 번으로 레이어를 자동 정리해주는
플러그인을 직접 만들었습니다.

런칭한 지 일주일, 벌써 160명이 사용 중입니다.
무료로 지금 바로 사용해 보세요!
https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1549672217295099991/layer-sorter

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んもんもっ​:foxjump:
今週もっ!今月もっ!大変お疲れさまでした
🍵
アーカイブをお届けしますもっ🍚
今年のサンマは肉厚ですもっ
:blob_lovepunch:
塩焼きで美味しくいただいちゃいますもっ

おかわりにもう一尾いかがですもっ?

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libxml2's sole maintainer Nick Wellnhofer steps down, meaning libxml2 is now no longer maintained.

discourse.gnome.org/t/stepping

It's hard to estimate just how many companies depend on this software and critical security updates to the library, so I'm certain many will quickly step up and offer sponsorship to ensure a fundamental dependency doesn't just deteriorate without proper support.

Any day now.

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從那一刻起,
幾天以來持續盯著社群上的消息,
很怕光復的朋友出事,
還好認識的人都平安,
但,恢復環境以及財損將會是惡夢。
這是我一個朋友的住家跟店內,
目前家戶內只能自己清,
國軍還在處理街道,
而其他號召的志工,雖然一直有人來,
但還是完全不夠。

每戶裡的現場差不多都是這樣,
大型家具難以靠少數人力搬開,
淤泥寸步難行,
大門卡死,得要暴力破壞,
泥裡挾帶很多垃圾或死魚之類的,
清淤的工作若不搶時間進行,
一是會衍生細菌問題,
二是泥乾掉會非常硬,難度會加倍。

花東各地的朋友很多人已經去現場了,
但真的不夠,
正在生理期的我,先繼續當網路後勤,
隨後應該也會過去。

這邊很抱歉先借貼一下外站連結
因為我沒辦法整合這麼多救災相關資訊
(但以下內容我唯一先保留的是衛服部的捐款管道)

reurl.cc/qYR8QR

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Meet Una Galyeva, one of the Hidden Figures of Python.

With over 19 years of experience in Data and AI, Una Galyeva held various positions, from hands-on Data and AI development to leading Data and AI teams and departments.

As a driving force behind PyLadies Amsterdam, a Microsoft MVP, AI4ALL Advisory board member, and Head of Artificial Intelligence, Una is passionate about challenging perspectives and inspiring others to see things differently.

🧶

Poster announcing ep 10, showing picture of guest: Una Galyeva and pictures of the hosts: Mariatta and Cheuk
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7kgとか8kgとかのデッカイニャンと暮らしている方々が「半分の重さくらいにしか感じないのでいくらでも抱っこしていられる」「数値上は米袋より重いはずなのに羽のように軽い」などと証言しているのでニンゲンに抱っこされているネコチャンには何らかの理由で揚力が発生しているのではないかという図

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I've been busy wrapping up the final parts of Loops ActivityPub federation!

We will ship with two modes (Open and Lockdown), the latter allowing you to restrict federation with allowed instances only (and enforced via AuthorizedFetch)

You can also disable Federation support

I'll have a better ETA this weekend after some more testing ✨

Thanks to phpstan, this may even ship this weekend 🚀

Loops Admin Dashboard Federation SettingsLoops Admin Dashboard Federation SettingsLoops Admin Dashboard Federation SettingsLoops Admin Dashboard Federation Settings
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