What is Hackers' Pub?

@reiver@reiver ⊼ (Charles) outbox.json with a separate media collection works very well, some fedi serivces can import those archives (for example, Mitra).

You can use data URIs to embed media in AP objects, but I don't think it is necessary.

#SilentSunday #Rescue

One of the scariest parts of this project was learning more about Starlink's orbital operations. I had always assumed they had some kind of clever configuration of the satellites in the orbital shell that minimized conjunctions, and we would see the number of conjunctions grow over time in our simulations. But no! It's just random! There's no magic here, it's just avoiding collisions by moving a Starlink satellite every 2 minutes. This is bad.

make a programming language and then make a game in it.

https://itch.io/jam/langjamgamejam

https://langjamgamejam.com/
#langjam #gamejam #langjamgamejam

#Wort des Tages:

kaum

The CRASH Clock uses the current density in altitude bins (averaged over eccentric orbits) of satellites, rocket bodies, and tracked debris, assuming typical cross sections for each type and orbital speeds. This calculation tells us how long to a collision if all orbital maneuvers were to suddenly stop.

The CRASH Clock is currently* at 2.8 days.

In 2018 it was 121 days.

*This is actually for June 2025 because that's when we ran it. Will update soon!

@letterusJohannes Brakensiek

People are free to come up with their own name for it.

But note that I wrote that thread (on Fediverse JoinFests) more than 2 years ago — on October 4th, 2023.

An amazing resource by EFF around age verification on the internet.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/age-verification-coming-internet-we-built-you-resource-hub-fight-back

#ageverification #eff #tech #internet #legal #privacy
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Instagram on Linux CLI? It’s geeky, cool, and slightly terrifying.

https://itsfoss.com/instagram-cli/

The widespread use of alt text is one of Mastodon's strengths. Creative and/or highly detailed alt text is a joy.

This chart shows all objects in the Universe, arranged by mass (vertical) and radius (horizontal).

The edge of the upper left corner is the "Schwarzschild radius" - anything along this edge becomes a black hole, so we don't expect stuff above and to the left of that.

The edge of the lower left corner is the "Compton wavelength" - anything here has a size so small that measuring its position that accurately would require enough energy to create a new one.

These two corners intersect in a white dot. This would be a black hole so small that it's heavily affected by quantum mechanics. By definition its mass would be the Planck mass, and its radius the Planck length. Nobody has seen such a thing.

The black region to the left of that dot, labeled "QG", contains imaginary objects that are more compressed than black holes, yet also ruled out by the uncertainty principle. So they're doubly impossible - unless Quantum Gravity, which we don't understand, changes the rules.

The pink strips of slope 3 are lines of constant density. For example "QGP" is the density of quark-gluon plasma, "BBN" is the density of the universe when Big Bang nucleosynthesis was going on, and so on.

The Earth is only slightly more dense than a flea.

The black dot labeled "Hubble radius" is the whole observable universe.

I like this chart a lot. It's from here:

C. H. Lineweaver and V. M. Patel, “All objects and some questions”, American Journal of Physics 91 (2023), 819-825. Free at https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article-pdf/91/10/819/20107261/819_1_5.0150209.pdf

A higher-resolution version is on Wikicommons:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Masses_and_sizes_of_objects_in_our_Universe.png

See the alt text for more!

If you do not have jobs for juniors,

you won't have seniors for the jobs you need them for.

The use of llm-driven tools to eliminate junior-level jobs means you will not have senior-level candidates for the roles you need them for.

No llm is capable of the systemic understanding of projects that a senior developer needs to have.

If you are using llm tools instead of juniors and interns, you are shooting yourself in the foot.

https://restofworld.org/2025/engineering-graduates-ai-job-losses/

posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely?

https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

#SilentSunday #Rescue

Dave Winer, @davewDave Winer ☕️ is basically the inventor of RSS and I take the chance to mention him as I am doing my best to be an RSS advocate with my own possibilities and limits, even with non-technical people who don't understand why I insist in "so complex things" when "commercial platforms give you everything in an instant".
I talked about ActivityPub and RSS during my last WordCamp, Pisa -Italy- 22nd November 2025. Italian, unfortunately; I'll share my talk when it's out on WordPress TV but I fear there won't be English subtitles.

But I limited what I wanted to say because a word could violate WordPress's code of conduct.
It's nothing obscene, it's the metaphoric name of an anchor-stone. But in Venice they call it "coion", like the vulgar word for testicle. It's basically a round stone structure which firmly anchors the arch of a bridge, to its vertical support. It's invisible to human eyes, people even don't know it exists. But it allows Venetian bridges to resist for centuries. It's fundamental. But if for a reason or another it becomes visible, it means that the bridge is damaged.
Same way of a linchpin for a wheel.

This word is even used for a person. When someone is essential for a community, determines its success too, but if they get attention or ask for visibility, they could even become an obstacle. Or they are treated as such. No idea if the word corresponding to "coion" for a person has the same idea in English. I have found "moron" but I don't know if it's the same.
Basically, when you are important and have not a very strong personality, so you let others treat you as invisible, they consider you as always available, always granted. And treat you badly if you raise your hand and say "I'm here too"; they immediately send you back to your place.

RSS is treated the same: many of commercial platform users don't even know about its existence but without RSS, no newspaper or whatever social pages sharing news automatically, could fetch contents.
I agree with Dave when he says that RSS is more important than ActivityPub. Simply RSS can work without ActivityPub but often not vice-versa.

#rss #ActivityPub #WordPress #blogging #advocacy

@evanEvan Prodromou @reiver@reiver ⊼ (Charles) @ezeno789ekZepp_Pf I love this feature; eg to remove comments from a troll from the thread I started. Would be awesome to have it implemented on Mastodon. I think the argument has been it could be used to silence a valid critic? I do get that, but that critic could also start their own thread.

IT security in the 90s ...

#infosec

Huey Long was not a good guy, but he knew what the people wanted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_Our_Wealth

Finally! After two days of work, I've managed to implement enough of MLS (Messaging Layer Security) to be able to create a new group with a single member, invite another member, then exchange an encrypted message.

I've worked on MLS two years ago, and at the time I got almost all of the test vectors working. This week-end I've fixed the remaining tests, implemented logic required to be an active client (generating groups and various messages), and wired everything up together.

posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely?

https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

ok... I uploaded my one of my absolute favorite KISS100 mixes to my SoundCloud; it's chock full of warm chunky progressive house tracks, including the classic remix of Björk's "All Is Full of Love". Highly highly recommended...

https://soundcloud.com/quephird/osamu-m-20041121-kiss100-mix

Some people want BREAKING NEWS.

RE: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1710701583988896115

#FediUX #Fediverse #FediverseUX #SpreadFediverse

So, my polyfill for Translator API works quite well. But I don’t know how to reasonably make up-to-date, high quality language models easily available for users, without requiring gigabytes of disk storage to host, say, pl-fe. I don’t want to bring too much centralization by hosting a model registry in one place for all pl-fe/polyfill users or favoring a single pl-fe deployment.

RT: https://pl.fediverse.pl/objects/b0908627-8d73-4a15-babc-7d803866a523

@maddiefuzzMaddie’s All Sorted

The widespread use of alt text is one of Mastodon's strengths. Creative and/or highly detailed alt text is a joy.

If I can't pet your cat, seeing photos of them is the next best thing. :3

RE: https://social.coop/@smallcircles/115719061440623488

Just imagine if all that had been kept within an anticapitalist economy.

#silentSunday

It's up there... In the trees.

#Python folks, let's say I want to configure a CI build (perhaps a Github action) that uses the *MINIMUM* version of Python and dependencies specified in a pyproject.toml file for the test. I.E. to ensure that features not present in those versions aren't used in new code added to a library.

Is there already an easy way to do this?

IT security in the 90s ...

#infosec

tired: using an LLM to answer someone's question
wired: using your own knowledge and words to answer someone's question
inspired: writing in the style of an LLM because that's apparently what people trust more

#SilentSunday #sewing

Everyone should have the right to speak up against injustice without ending up in a database. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/how-cops-are-using-flock-safetys-alpr-network-surveil-protesters-and-activists

​​

Yo check it out. Very excited to review this tomorrow. This is the last piece so we’ll definitely be able to ship ARM64 UEFI builds starting with OS 8.1

https://github.com/elementary/website/pull/3922

Without their money, billionaires would be nothing but failing middle-management at best.

"Ahmed al-Ahmad, a 43-year-old Muslim man identified by Australian media, tackled & disarmed one of the shooters in the Bondi Beach attack, in which 11 people were murdered at a Jewish holiday event on Sunday.

Ahmad, whose cousin told Australia's News 7 that he was shot once in the arm & once in the shoulder, is being hailed as a hero on social media.
....Ahmad is currently in surgery & expected to make a full recovery."

Jerusalem Post 14/12/25

A Muslim hero who risked his life saving Jews

Thinking about the conversation in the latest @djangochatDjango Chat Podcast about making it easier for people to test alpha versions of Django before they are released.

Test matrixes are normally how I've made sure that code works across multiple versions, via nox locally and in CI/CD (with a GitHub Action).

Creating a noxfile.py in django-new feels... presumptuous somehow? Also unsure about adding a GH Action for this…

Maybe circling the same thought process as I was thinking about for https://github.com/adamghill/troml/

"AI could invent free renewable energy."

Or, y'know, we could deploy the stuff that works and is already cheaper than the fossil alternative, while doing the hard political work of figuring out how to pass the savings on to households, balancing the interests of shareholders and ratepayers.

#ai #climate #energy

Fuck racism and fuck guns.

I kind of want to buy a new office chair, as my current one is flaking plastic off it & getting uncomfortable. I've seen a few people with cute gaming chairs, but I'm not sure where in Germany would be a good place to buy one.

Without their money, billionaires would be nothing but failing middle-management at best.

@reiver@reiver ⊼ (Charles) @ezeno789ekZepp_Pf we do have the ability to moderate replies built into ActivityPub, though.

Every object has a `replies` collection that is owned and managed by the creator of the object. If you don't want someone's reply to appear in the list of replies, you can remove it.

Mastodon does not surface this feature. It also doesn't show the `replies` collection remotely. That's too bad; it would cover most of what people want from replies management.

RE: https://sfba.social/@fonts/115719285750742239

Yes yes yes:

"What if the web, and most websites besides the few obvious exceptions, were instead more like book publishing? A few thousand dedicated readers out there, at best."

I'd argue it already is and always has been :)

"And perhaps we should let our websites be small and private things once again."

The real disgrace in UK's welfare bill is that so much of it is spent on people in work. We are subsidising jobs that do not pay enough to live on. If we genuinely made sure work paid a decent living, then we would not have such a high bill.

One lesson Democrats should take away from Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is that they should be as unapologetic about policies that help people as Republicans are about those that harm people (e.g ICE, no gun control, cutting healthcare subsidies, government layoffs, research funding cuts, etc).