What is Hackers' Pub?

I hope this email finds you, wherever they find you, that it helps your brand too.

As a former math major, honestly my calculator history is probably way more embarrassing to me than my browser history

Wow, never seen a ping like this. Thanks for the quick warning, broadcasting here in case someone affected is not in the Matrix room.

This is the bug it runs into, breaks booting (can still roll back to an older gen if you have physical access): https://lore.kernel.org/all/bb9ab61c-3bed-4c3d-baf0-0bce4e142292@moonlit-rail.com/

#NixOS

ein spiel ist erst richtig linux-native wenns mir das inventar als FUSE gibt und ich meine stats greppen kann

100 gecs – 10,000 gecs

is she, you know (moves her hand as if signing a non-disclosure agreement) a fae?

(i was reminded of this again)

you know, a lot of things about the electronics industry make sense if you keep in mind that when you request assistance from a vendor they send fae your way

​​

This is the thing, right?

When a _person_ does something absolutely inane and I call them on it, they will eventually stop doing the inane thing.

I worked with this guy a while back. He was junior, I was the tech lead on the project. I set the coding standards for it and he didn't like what I picked because it required a lot of work up front. It required docs on public methods, it required fairly high test coverage targets (both branch and instruction), it required following specific naming conventions and programming standards. I often would tell him to make his commits smaller.

No smaller than that.

Smaller still.

You couldn't just turn your brain off.

He fought me every step of the way, but eventually:

He learned and what's more, he began to internalize why I was doing it the way that I did.

Code reviews started flying by. It became _easy_.

AIs, even the really good ones, don't learn from this sort of process. Oh sure they have _memory_, but it is itself unreliable and subject to the same context window restrictions as everything else. They are by their nature ephemeral.

So there's a lot less incentive in me giving it a thorough review.

Unless it is my agent and my project.

Deprecate confusing APIs like “os.path.commonprefix()”. After fixing a vulnerability in #pip, I started digging into the confusing API and found more than I expected.

👉 https://sethmlarson.dev/deprecate-confusing-apis-like-os-path-commonprefix

#python #oss #opensource #security

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sethmlarson/116143641143643176

Seth really did the work here. He even reported an incorrect usage in Whitenoise, which we released the fix for yesterday!

So. Und jetzt hoffen, dass nix genommen wird, weil sonst ist das viel Arbeit im März....
#eh23

Instant LLM Updates with Doc-to-LoRA and Text-to-LoRA https://lobste.rs/s/l2nahy #ai
https://pub.sakana.ai/doc-to-lora/

Když se dívám na "Živé kanály", tak v podstatě už nikdo kromě robotů téměř nic nepublikuje. Na celém mastodonczech odhaduju cca 3 aktivní lidi.

Direct current brain stimulation has been approved by the #FDA to treat #depression at home. Millions of people may now have access to a non-invasive, at-home treatment. https://spectrum.ieee.org/flow-neuroscience-tdcs-depression-fda?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Mastodon-Daily-Pipeline

Why are there usb ports on the microwave?

wrong answers only

Rob Grant, creator of Red Dwarf, has died

Link: https://www.beyondthejoke.co.uk/content/17193/red-dwarf-rob-grant
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47184480

When I first started working with #ActivityPub, before #Fedify existed, it felt like writing web apps in Perl and CGI in the late '90s. Interesting, even exciting—but never comfortable. That era where your business logic and your protocol plumbing were just… the same thing:

print "HTTP/1.1 200 OK"
print "Content-Type: text/html"
print
print "Hello, world!"

Decades of web development have given us layers of abstraction we now take for granted. Nobody hand-parses application/x-www-form-urlencoded query strings anymore. Nobody writes their own JSON codec, or manually constructs HTTP request/response messages. These things just aren't your problem when you're building an app.

ActivityPub development still feels like they are your problem. What do you do when the https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#actor property comes in as a string instead of an array? What about when https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#object is an embedded entity rather than a URI? How exactly do you implement HTTP Signatures? And wait—what's Linked Data Signatures, and do you need that too?

The real issue isn't that ActivityPub is complicated per se. It's that you can't get away with understanding it at a high level. You have to know it the way an implementor knows it—every edge case, every inconsistency in how different servers serialize JSON-LD, every signature scheme that exists in the wild. That's a lot to learn before you can even start thinking about your actual app. And when developers understandably cut corners on the protocol to focus on their product, it quietly becomes an interoperability problem for the whole ecosystem.

What I want ActivityPub development to feel like: you spend a day understanding the big picture, and then you just… build your app. That was the goal when I started Fedify, and honestly, we're not fully there yet. But it's where I want to get.

#fedidev #fediverse

なにもできないまま終わりたくない

never have my biases been confirmed so hard

https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/new-poll-democrats-real-problem-isnt

@zkatkat 1/ I am a Software Engineer, and I agree that it is a misused title. As is Software Developer.

As a software engineer, I have dealt with process issues, ethics issues, legal issues, documentation of the software life cycle in a software development plan... built from requirements documents that precluded design documents.... Part of it was training (Carnegie Melon). Part of it was experience.

I earned the title at a fortune 500 company. I keep it.

買了胖鳥❕❕❕

hm

at first i was like "why not use features or platform tags on sub packages?" eg, have `mypkg[nvidia]` refer to `some-nvidia-thing`

but having compilation variant wheels (eg, AVX2 vs AVX-512) makes a lot of sense to me.

And at that point, why not have arbitrary tags

https://feedsin.space/feed/peps/items/5901951

@zkatkat I've heard engineering described as something like "the science of reproducibility".

There are software people who live up to that standard. They are not common and they are not always well regarded because their standards are high and their work is methodical.

The title of "software engineer" is all HR talk though and has nothing to do with the job standards.

@zkatkat It looks like we're heading towards extreme polarization, where on one side we have awful irresponsible stuff like the radiology app you described... And on the other hand we have a bunch of people who will take a stand to avoid AI-anything, which is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater 'cuz "AI" is a big concept that has provided a lot of useful tools, including some great free software.

OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

Link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/27/openai-raises-110b-in-one-of-the-largest-private-funding-rounds-in-history/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181211

Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification

Link: https://github.com/c3d/db48x/commit/7819972b641ac808d46c54d3f5d1df70d706d286
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181753

Today I was reading @b0rkJulia Evans 's comic about tar: https://wizardzines.com/comics/tar/?utmsource=satcomics

When I learned how to use `tar` on Linux (probably ~20 years ago?) I learned that you don't need to memorize all the compression flags (`-z`, `-j`, `-J`, `-Z`) because tar auto-detects the compression format when extracting/listing.

This is handy because then I only have to learn the flag for my _favorite_ compression format when creating tarballs, and let the auto-detection figure it out for tarballs I receive.

I'm surprised the example in this comic uses the compression format when listing (`-tjvf`). Does that mean there's a version of `tar` in common usage that doesn't support auto-detection? Or is the auto-detection unreliable in some common circumstance? Or some third possibility I haven't thought of?

The phone review is live!

https://michal.sapka.pl/weblog/2026/bigme-hibreak-s-b-w/

#blog #smartphone #eink #ereader #bigme #review

copying a trend from bsky, bet yall can beat my post there because i get more interactions here

copying a trend from bsky, bet yall can beat my post there because i get more interactions here

RE: https://mastodon.social/@webology/116144224079024413

Talking LLMs now and for a while. Join us via Zoom or send me a DM for an invite.

software gore

@evanEvan Prodromou
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There is also something which Bluesky gets right which the fediverse does not. I mentioned that Bluesky uses decentralization *techniques*, and the most important of those is content-addressing. This allows content to exist even when a server goes down.

This is a great decision and I have advocated that the fediverse do so as well. In fact several years ago I wrote a demo in @spritelyThe Spritely Institute's early days showing off how one could build a content-addressed ActivityPub in a spec-compatible way.

On the fediverse we also see a lot of accusations of Bluesky being owned by Jack Dorsey, and this isn't true. My understanding is that Jay performed an impressive amount of negotiation to allow Bluesky to receive funding independently.

These days Jack Dorsey is instead focusing on Nostr, which I can only describe as "a sequel to Secure Scuttlebutt with extremely bad vibes where bitcoin people talk about bitcoin"

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ThisIsTrue/116143897286092534

[Don’t worry, it’s his sister]

The fediverse has a lot of flaws. Oh trust me, we're gonna get to that.

But comparison-wise: what I mean to say is that architectural decisions matter, and scaling up isn't the only thing that's important, *scaling down matters too*.

If you care about decentralization, anyway.

Now you're hitting the point in this thread where some of you may be thinking "aha! this is where Christine is saying that the fediverse/activitypub are awesome and atproto is terrible!"

you have NO IDEA HOW MUCH I CRITICIZE THE FEDIVERSE ALL THE TIME, I do it all the time, and will later here

As said, tens of thousands of people are self-hosting *today*. Fediverse software doesn't just scale up, it scales *down*.

GotoSocial is cheap enough on resources where you can run it for family and friends on a raspberry pi or spare laptop you have sitting around.

But where was I? Oh yes. We had talked about why PDS'es aren't enough (blog/google analogy), relative costs of hosting things on ATProto vs ActivityPub, etc etc

But we haven't gotten into the really interesting parts which are the structural analysis stuff, so let's move onto that

Now you may be saying, "Christine, this is really unfair, because you're looking at ActivityPub servers which are only dealing with a small amount of the network, what if it were an ActivityPub mega-node? What are the costs THEN huh?" and "What if we hosted just PART of ATProto?"

What then INDEED

ATProto is not designed for the Relay and AppViews to only hold part of the network, not *really*, and ActivityPub is. We'll get to this in a moment.

But Bluesky actually has good justification for this! I will defend it insofar as Bluesky was making a serious *design decision*

I was part of the 45% of the Washington Post newsroom recently laid off by the economically struggling Jeff Bezos. Over at BlueSky, I posted free no-reg archive links to 15 of my favorite stories from the past four years. Thanks for reading! https://bsky.app/profile/joemenn.bsky.social/post/3mfn7fnnfac27

Actually all these critiques of the fediverse are TRUE, these are known challenges, and actually it's not really so bad, but it could be better, and at any rate, Bluesky made a major decision to simplify a lot for new users, and they have. Things seem to just work for people! Incredible!

Now yes, they are using decentralized techniques. Remember when I said content-addressed storage is a good idea and the fediverse should do it too? IT IS! (And as I also said, it's actually fully possible for the fediverse to do, more on that later.)

But the reality is, it's still *centralized*

Now historically, federation has been achieved on the fediverse via "message passing". Actually, this is to the degree where I just always associated message passing with federation, but really, federation is about the distribution of power, creating an abstract whole in a sea of autonomy.