>be me, day 16 of AOC

>write a solution to part one that only considers nodes with values > 0

>runs pretty quickly, could be better

>get to part two, considering two players

> obviously it is equivalent to a single player playing the game twice and not visiting previously visited nodes, right?

>try solution on test input, doesn't work

>shit, forgot about the case where the players run out of time before reaching the end

>rewrite algorithim for two players (tedious af)

>press run

one eternity later

>shit, guess I need to improve the algorithim

>rewrite the algorithm to use a matrix of distances instead of recomputing the distance each time

>part 1 runs 21x faster

> surely this is the correct implementation

one eternity later

>what the frick do they want from me

>how could i possibly do this any faster

>wonder if there is a linear time solution i'm missing

>scrawl a page of nonsense with matrices, realize that none of it matters because it would be running slower than my interpretation

>fine, i'll check the solution thread on rdrama

>see a comment from @ihsoy

I solve part two simply by dfs through the part once, and then if time gets to zero, i restart the dfs.

>wtf, that doesn't work, i already tried that on the test input

>try it on the actual input

>mfw it works

>mfw i wasted hours because the test input was nothing like the actual input

I'M GOING TO KILL YOU SANTA CLAUS!!!!!!!!!!!

To nobody's surprise, Gab's "unbiased, uncensored" chatbot is specifically instructed to take a number of right-wing stances. Here's a quick comparison across around a month of them tweaking it, both to change its behavior and to try and cover their ass wrt the prompt https://t.co/o6ITFP60bd pic.twitter.com/jKAuIIod5W

— alexa! (@frog89348645) March 4, 2024

tl;dr

A guy found a bug in kernel on an obscure architecture no one cares about (PowerPC32) and submitted a patch. The maintainer decided the patch was no good and fixed it by himself, crediting the guy with "Reported-by" tag. A year later, the guy wrote a blogpost crying that wasn't enough.

Links

Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/16tf5ne/how_i_got_robbed_of_my_first_kernel_contribution?sort=controversial

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37671991

A lie in the blogpost

I was also open to working with him, addressing his feedback and sending subsequent versions of patches. He said (paraphrasing):

Sorry, I like my version better. If you want to be a Linux kernel contributor, here's an issue you could fix.

I found this really perplexing and insulting.

The funny thing is, the above "paraphrase" is actually a lie and the kernel maintainer was very polite and respectful. This is what he actually said:

Hi Ariel,

I've added Christophe to Cc who works on ppc32.

I haven't actually reproduced the crash with gdbserver, but I have a test case which shows the bug, so I've been able to confirm it and test a fix.

Thanks for your patch, but I wanted to fix it differently. Can you try the patch below and make sure it fixes the bug for you?

I've also attached the test case I've been using.

Christophe are you able to test these on some 32-bit machines? I've tested it in qemu and on one 32-bit machine I have here, but some more real testing would be good.

If the patch works then I'll need to do manual back ports for several of the stable kernels, and then once those are ready I will publish the patch.

cheers

Comment spotlight

The maintainer did exactly what they usually do, I see absolutely nothing unexpected here, note that this was an unsolicited patch sent to a security mailing list.

If this is what the maintainer usually does then the maintainer is a wanker. If they leave the project, the project won't be losing a good person.

Indeed, maintainers are disposable. It's easy to find a codecel willing to put years of quality work into an obscure part of the kernel, for free.

Random users and drive-by contributors are much more important to the health of the project. They are much more likely to be a good person. We must not let them feel unwelcome, at any cost.

Agreed. I see the job of an experienced maintainer as a facilitator who should bend over backward to help other people's contributions land cleanly. The help often involves feedback on style and architecture consistency, but a sign of a great maintainer is someone who credits others, and mostly stays behind the curtain making sure everything goes smoothly.

You WILL bend over backwards for random people sending their shitty patches and you WILL love it.

Amazing how the hostility is perpetuating all through HN here as well.

I have seen (and sadly self experienced!) this kind of story way too often. And let me tell you this: This guy is now burned by this bad interaction and is successfully shooed away.

And some folks wonder why "nerds" and "geeks" are seen as socially inapt...

I don't even think that Mr. Ellerman had any malicious intents. But it just shows again, that the so called people skills are nothing to be neglected when choosing leading figures.

To paraphrase George Carlin: "It's a big club. And you're not in it!"

The maintainer should be immediately removed from his position and replaced with someone with good people skills. Ideally from an underrepresented demographic.

Funny how it's the small contributors that inevitably end up being the ones who have to set their ego aside and not the well known committers. Sounds very much like an old boys club.

Yeah, it's shocking that established contributors set the norms for the project.

Orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38643348

Roddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/18hs684/no_official_announcement_on_security_breaches?sort=controversial

https://t.co/xIcnZ6JC8y pic.twitter.com/LL6kGOdWGP

— Flo Crivello (@Altimor) July 12, 2023

Acceleration chads WYA?

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/13tbaik/dear_ubuntu/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/13qdakw/dear_ubuntu_i_hope_this_letter_finds_you_well_i/

I decided to download starfield from Xbox store. My provider disconnects my pc from the internet

If I call them they will tell me they didn't do anything and when I start pressing they will start bitching that I downloading to much and if I tell but I pay for limitless internet and then they start philosophical question what's limitless

So I turned vpn and put location to my country/city and started downloading

I am paying 90 euro a that's almost 100 buks for a non Fiber internet and best part they been promoting Fiber internet since 2014 telling next month we will start doing Fiber

Human body activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system. A server may provide a task to a device of a user which is communicatively coupled to the server. A sensor communicatively coupled to or comprised in the device of the user may sense body activity of the user. Body activity data may be generated based on the sensed body activity of the user. The cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user may verify if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set by the cryptocurrency system, and award cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data is verified.

!nooticers

You can't convince me otherwise

@lain @LinuxShill idk who else to ping but I'm starting to learn these things and she'd absolutely wipe the floor with me. She even mentions bloat, at this rate I wonder if she shitposts on /g/ in between making tutorials

Introducing Whisper

We’ve trained and are open-sourcing a neural net called Whisper that approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition.

Read Paper

View Code

View Model Card

Whisper examples:

Whisper is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web. We show that the use of such a large and diverse dataset leads to improved robustness to accents, background noise and technical language. Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into English. We are open-sourcing models and inference code to serve as a foundation for building useful applications and for further research on robust speech processing.

The Whisper architecture is a simple end-to-end approach, implemented as an encoder-decoder Transformer. Input audio is split into 30-second chunks, converted into a log-Mel spectrogram, and then passed into an encoder. A decoder is trained to predict the corresponding text caption, intermixed with special tokens that direct the single model to perform tasks such as language identification, phrase-level timestamps, multilingual speech transcription, and to-English speech translation.

SHOW MORE

Disgusting

The original post is called "Losing my son", a blog post from a semi-popular tech figure whose son suddenly fell into a coma during routine surgery and will never recover. The comments are full of people giving their consolations, including this guy:

I'm really feeling sorry for both the author and his family. Can't imagine what they must be going through.

When I was 10 my oldest sibling went through a coma and after coming out of it some time later she did some things that my parents were not happy about. My family was going through some things and me being the youngest was completely neglected. I was shoved in a room and my family being well off all the problems were tried to be solved by money. Then just as things were getting a little better for me between 11-12 I was molested a few times. I was too scared to talk to anyone. My parents were not bothered much. 19 years later today I have PTSD and I struggle with anxiety depression panic. In my entire life I had no one to talk to and no one loved me. I was unable to make any connections in life. I do therapy which helps a little. I fell in love with someone 12 years ago which was the only time I felt something in life but she never liked me and till this day I hope for a miracle. There was a time few years ago I was unable to leave my room without panic attacks as that was the only place I felt safe. Somehow I was able to work my way into a graduate degree in computer science from a top school and a job. However I still spent the last 3 days crying alone. I deal with it every single day every single hour of my life. Life gets better some days and worse some days.

Anyway my point is that your children and your spouse need you the most right now. This is a turning point for everyone in the family. Hold them close. Talk to them. They may show they are strong and handling it well but they need you more than you might think. Some things cannot be undone. Some things cannot be changed. But many are in control today and a lot will be decided about the future at this time. So please just hold them close and tell them you love them. I will pray for you and your family.

Other discussion https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/z2i2wn/using_rust_at_a_startup_a_cautionary_tale/?sort=controversial

Orange site https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33714007

Article https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautionary-tale-42ab823d9454

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33538838

Edit: New Link:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/09/cryptocurrencies-pressured-as-investors-digest-ftx-fallout-solana-loses-another-20percent.html

Better late than never: Microsoft finally introduced native support for RAR archives earlier this year, just three decades after the format's official introduction in 1993. Windows 11 development is now progressing at an accelerated pace, therefore support for a whole lot of new (ancient) archive formats is coming soon.

Windows 11 users can now manage RAR archives natively, with no need for third-party software or questionable archive "unpackers." Windows 11 22H2, the past year's last major release of the operating system (distributed on September 20, 2022), will soon become even more proficient in managing different kinds of archive files and formats.

Microsoft recently released KB5031455, an optional, feature-rich preview cumulative update for Windows 11, refreshing the list of archive formats natively supported in the OS. Windows 11 22H2 and later versions can now manage files compressed in the following archive types: .rar, .7z, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.zst, .tar.xz, .tgz, .tbz2, .tzst, .txz. Support for password-encrypted archives is not available yet.

Redmond programmers added support for the aforementioned archive files thanks to the libarchive library, an open source project designed to develop a portable, efficient C library that can "read and write streaming archives" in a variety of formats. Libarchive supports additional archive types (Lzh, Xar) that could eventually come to Windows 11 as well.

Being an optional, non-mandatory update, the KB5031455 patch needs to be installed manually by going through the Windows Update settings page on Windows 11 and searching for newly released updates. If everything goes well with "early testers," the update's contents should eventually come to the majority of Windows users through the next batch of cumulative patches scheduled for November's 2023 Patch Tuesday.

The ability to support additional archive types (besides RAR and Zip) was hinted at by Panos Panay, who talked about the upcoming feature in one of his Build blog posts before he departed Microsoft. Windows 11 users can now get improved performance of archive functionality during compression, Panay said in May 2023.

Extended file type support is part of the Moment 4 package, a new feature update for Windows 11 that provides 72 new features and improvements to the cloud/AI-centric OS. KB5031455 features include the "centralized AI assistance" for Windows known as Copilot, an overhauled File Explorer "experience," a new Microsoft Backup app, a built-in Passkey Manager, and much more. Meanwhile, Windows 10 users can keep using trustworthy third-party archive managers like WinRAR for the foreseeable future.

I'd give it at least 3-5 years before it collapses. And almost nothing of value was lost if it collapses.

https://old.reddit.com/r/weirdcollapse/comments/ysgopl/twitters_potential_collapse_could_wipe_out_vast/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/ysgody/twitters_potential_collapse_could_wipe_out_vast/?sort=controversial

Read article

How conservative Facebook groups are changing what books children read in school

Conservative Facebook groups that rate and review children’s books are being used as a way to campaign for restricting certain books in school libraries or removing them altogether.

It’s the latest development in a debate tearing up the US in recent weeks as schools open for the new year. In October 2021, Matt Krause, a Republican member of the Texas state legislature, created a spreadsheet of books affected by the state’s House Bill 3979, which bans the teaching of materials that would lead to “an individual [feeling] discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or s*x.”

That spreadsheet has now become a blueprint for conservative groups, which have adopted it as a guide to challenging books in school districts and in some cases successfully removing them from schools.

Anti-book-ban activists say the groups aren't objective and are doing harm. Laney Hawes is a mother in Keller Independent School District in Tarrant County, Texas, where 41 books were recently pulled after lobbying from Facebook parent groups. She says she and other parents are open to compromise and discussion but that conservative parents aren't bending.

“We are never all going to agree on what’s appropriate for our children, but I have to make that decision for my children, and it is not my right to make that decision for every other child,” says Hawes, who leads several Facebook parent groups countering local books bans. “These books share the stories of the most marginalized people, and oppression and marginalization can be gritty and uncomfortable and violent, and unfortunately, it can be sexual. But it’s so important we don’t quiet them.”

Conservative activist Michelle Beavers doesn’t agree. When she went to her child’s junior high school in Florida for a school advisory committee meeting last year, she came across a carousel in the library that contained books she describes as containing “pornography.”

“It was disturbing to me,” Beavers says. She wanted to root out books like these from her child’s school but felt that the effort was too much for her to take on alone. “These books were easy to spot because they’re graphic novels, but other books you have to actually read,” she says. “And that’s a problem. It takes work.”

So Beavers created BookLook, a site that gathers adult volunteers to rate and review children’s books. The ratings are “meant to be a quick guide for busy parents who want to know what objectionable material is found between a book’s covers,” according to the site. Books are graded on a scale of 0 to 5, with 0 being content for everyone and 5 being “aberrant” content, including sexual assault and battery.

In between are markers indicating the amount of parental guidance suggested, based on drug and alcohol use, “hate,” violence, and profanity: 1 for young children, 2 for younger teens, and 3 for older teens. Books that get ratings of 4 (“definitely adult only”) and 5 are often flagged to be pulled off shelves, Beavers says: “These are explicit books. If you want to see those, go to your local bookstore or public library. Not school.”

On Facebook, different conservative groups have different strategies for assessing the books found in schools. Some, like LaVerna in the Library, post screenshots of “offensive” passages so that volunteers can rate them. In others, like Safe Library Books for Kids — Arkansas, parents trade tips about where to look for content they might object to, such as targeting coming-of-age novels or memoirs and searching for specific words. Beavers works with both groups to help identify titles. (Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.)

Conservative activists are becoming increasingly powerful in determining what books are on school shelves. Districts in Texas have begun to require parent approval for books; in Utah, parents not only have the power to control what books their child checks out but have equal standing with educators to challenge and review books for inclusion in the library at all.

That policy in Utah is perhaps one of the conservative parent groups’ first success stories. Beavers says BookLook doesn’t track how parents use the reviews for school policy challenges, but the group Utah Parents United is featured on the site as a “guardian of the library” and was instrumental in getting the state to implement its current system. Beavers herself has testified at her local Brevard County school district, successfully challenging 19 books for review in May.

The fightback

But those challenges aren’t coming without a fight, on Facebook and elsewhere. One organization opposed to the book bans, the Florida Freedom to Read Project, says rating systems like BookLook’s ignore the fact that teachers and librarians are specifically trained to recommend books on the basis of a child’s development, interests, and maturity, even though materials are currently slotted into suggested age ranges by publishers and editors.

“They [conservative rate-and-review groups] want to restrict what is available for everyone else, but these rating systems are done by people who don’t have any expertise,” says Stephana Ferrell, a co-founder of the FFTRP. “We would never do an opposing system. Another rating system is not needed.”

Groups like Ferrell’s are concerned that ratings are erasing the voices of those in marginalized communities. “Those reviewers that focus solely on controversial topics with the goal of limiting access to books with which they disagree reflect a bias that fails to take into account the needs of the diverse families and individuals served by public schools and libraries,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said in a statement.

"Pornography" scare stories

Many parents in the conservative groups say pornography is one of their major concerns. Beavers, for example, cites an oral s*x scene in Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, a coming-of-age graphic novel, as the reason why she was spurred to action. Gender Queer has been banned in many schools across the country.

“We are asking for books to be reviewed and put up against pornography laws and judging what would be appropriate for a school setting,” she says. But her group’s view of what counts as pornographic don’t always tally with the laws. On August 30, a Virginia court dismissed claims that Gender Queer and another book, A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas, were obscene. The dismissal means that liberal groups now have grounds to challenge the book’s bans in other states.

Ferrell says FFTRP’s work was founded when conservative activists began lobbying to remove Gender Queer from her local district. She and her co-founder have purchased books to distribute to local librarians and also held public giveaways of books featuring diverse voices.

To her, the fight is about the quality of education for her children. “Most parents want to give their child more, not less, access,” she says. “I really worry about the future of children’s education because of this.”