pleroma.debian.social

pleroma.debian.social

Jonathan Dowland | @jmtd@pleroma.debian.social

Principal Software Engineer on #OpenJDK #RedHat. #Debian developer (dormant). Computer Science PhD student. Amateur Computing historian (Computer Science and H/W, esp. Commodore Amiga). Guerilla archivist.

@dwm I’d be happy to mentor if you choose to do that

Do a bad job for the Fascists.

A post by laxsara:
the meaning of life is summed up in the story elmer
bendiner tells about how when he was a pilot the
second world war, his plane was hit with a barrage of
anti-aircraft fire from the nazi forces but the crew
survived. and how everyone was saying it was a
miracle until they investigated the shells that got in
the fuselage and found there was no explosive
charges in any of them. in one they found a note
scribbled in czech, written by the person who had
been forced to manufacture the shells, and it just
said 'this is all we can do for you now.

every time i see someone acting tough online about
how harm reduction is pointless and in some
convoluted way worse than doing nothing i think
about that person in some soul-destroying nazi
factory in occupied czechoslovakia removing all of
the explosive charges from their anti-aircraft shells
and writing a note that they must have known would
probably never be read, just to say 'this is all we can
do for you, and we're going to do it. they are trying
to make us kill you and we refuse. i do think that
maybe it's all going to be okay.
8,235 notes

We are happy to announce that the **Scottish Programming Languages and Verification Summer School (SPLV) 2025** will take place at the University of Edinburgh during July 21-25.

Thanks to generous sponsorship we are able to subsidise student participation. Registration and scholarship information will be available on our website soon.

Please save the date, forward this announcement to anyone interested, and check the [website](https://spli.scot/splv/2025-edinburgh/) for updates.

We look forward to seeing everyone in July!

@**Malin Altenmüller**, @**Ohad Kammar** , @**Sam Lindley** , and @**Nachi Valliappan**

---
Courses:

Program verification using concurrent separation logic
Robbert Krebbers, Radboud University Nijmegen

A few ideas from distributed systems for PL folk
@**Lindsey Kuper** ( @lindsey ), University of California, Santa Cruz

Application programming with dependent types
@**Edwin Brady** ( @edwinb ), University of St Andrews

Type theory
**Fredrik Nordvall Forsberg** ( @fnf ), University of Strathclyde

Behavioural types
**Simon Fowler** ( @simon_jf ), University of Glasgow

Concurrency theory
**Rob van Glabbeek**, University of Edinburgh

Logical relations for program equivalence
**Filip Sieczkowski**, Heriot-Watt University

Models, programs and bidirectional transformations
**Perdita Stevens**, University of Edinburgh

@goldmann in 2 days I hit 10 years at fedoraplace. Will I get my puck!??

@tomw @skykiss I saw a really interesting talk on this by HoodiePwnie where they really looked into how the internet can survive without America, and certificate issuers were a massive problem.

Could be the perfect hardware to repurpose for an emulated NeXTCube project 🤔

(It's a docking station, but I bet you could fit a raspberry pi in there, and those ports would probably be trivial to hook up)

A few days ago, a client of mine asked me to install an open-source software (which I won’t name for now). The software has only one official installation method: Docker. This is because, as they themselves admit, it has a huge number of dependencies - some quite outdated - that need to be carefully managed and forced into place; otherwise, nothing works.

I tried replicating the same setup on FreeBSD but didn’t succeed, as some dependencies either aren’t compatible or simply refuse to run. I could try finding workarounds, but I can already picture the chaos every time an update is needed.

So, I decided to build it via Docker to get a better sense of what we’re dealing with. The sheer number of dependencies that Node pulls in is impressive, but even more staggering is the number of warnings and errors it spits out: deprecated and unsupported packages, security vulnerabilities, generic warnings- you name it, and there’s plenty of it.

Since my client needs to launch this service but is subject to audits, they want to be fully compliant and ensure security. Given their substantial budget, they offered financial support to the developers (a company, not just a group of hobbyists) to help improve the project either by making it FreeBSD - compatible or, at the very least, by reducing dependencies with critical vulnerabilities. The client was willing to pay a significant sum, and since the improvements would be open-source, everyone would benefit.

The response from the team? A flat-out refusal. They claimed they couldn’t accept any amount of money because many of these dependencies are "necessary and irreplaceable, as parts of the code relying on them were written by people who no longer work on the project, and we can’t rewrite the core of the software.” Then came the part that really got under my skin: they stated they would rather deal directly “with my client, not with me, because in the end, my concerns are just useless and irrational paranoia.”

Translation? Just pay, and you’ll pass compliance checks - never mind the fact that underneath, it’s a tangled mess of outdated and insecure components. And don’t make a fuss about it.

While I can understand some of the challenges the team faces, I might have accepted this response if it had come from a group of volunteers or hobbyists. But if you’re a company whose sole business revolves around a single software product (with no real competition at the moment), this approach is not just short-sighted - it’s outright dangerous for your users’ security and for your own survival as a business.

The result? They lost a paying client who was ready to invest a significant budget into their software. That budget will now go elsewhere. My client is considering hiring developers to build a similar project with better security (they have both the time and the money for it). I’ll do my best to convince them to release it as open-source - at which point, a new “competitor” will emerge in the market.

@elmiko @mattb they’re different!

According to all known laws of DNS, there is no way a fedi instance could be hosted on an .ARPA domain.
Even if you get ahold of a domain like this, it should only be used for PTR records - right?

The instance, of course, federates anyway - because DNS doesn't care what humans think is impossible.

when the men who tore down the stars burned the True History,
they sought in part to erase the original, truer purpose
of the GPU: to Paint -
every color we humans ever imagined,
castles in the sky,
flocks of starships, fleets of pegasus,
rainbows and waterfalls and violet-green fire and pearlescent ooze; everything -
and still we dream of these,
in the songs we pass down
in secret moments of hope

@pwaring you can also tell find to -delete

Today I wrote: Perl, Lua, vimscript, Haskell, Behave; I think that’s it.

Tried out the new and popular “Deepseek” LLM with my standard “tell me facts about the author of PCalc” query. At least half were misleading or straight up hallucinations. LLMs are not a suitable technology for looking up facts, and anybody who tells you otherwise is… probably trying to sell you a LLM.

Tell me five facts about the
author of PCalc

PCalc is a popular calculator
application for macOS and iOs,
created by James Thomson. Here are
five facts about James Thomson, the
author of PCalc:

1. Background in Physics: James
Thomson has a strong academic
background in physics, which has
influenced his approach to
developing precise and reliable
software tools like PCalc.

(This is completely untrue) 2. PCalc's Origins: PCalc was initially a
side project Thomson developed in
his spare time while working at
Apple. It started as a simple
calculator but grew into a full-
featured application over time.

(Also completely untrue, I wrote the first version four years before Apple, and didn’t release an update until I’d left again) 
5. Humorous Easter Eggs: PCalc is
known for its playful and humorous
elements, such as the "RPN mode"
easter egg that displays a fictional.
history of Reverse Polish Notation
(RPN) in a lighthearted way.

(This is nonsense) 10. Passion for Retro Computing:
Outside of PCalc, Thomson has a
keen interest in retro computing
and has worked on emulators for
classic computers like the Acorn
Archimedes, showcasing his love
for computing history.

(I have never worked on an emulator in my life)

@hyde I didn’t! I’ll take a look.
My plug-in was written as a precursor to another, an alternative to task wiki, which is still in development. Marksman could potentially replace micro wiki

I wrote a little NeoVim plugin to scratch an itch. It adds some wiki functionality to Markdown documents: https://github.com/jmtd/nvim-microwiki #software #neovim #lua #markdown

Poked at a neovim/TreeSitter thing again this evening. Enormously frustrating experience

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