How Freedesktop/RedHat harass other projects into submission

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-fdo-and-redhat

Freedesktop/RedHat's CoC team is worse than you thought

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-fdo-and-redhat2

Strags respond

https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.html

The Official RDrama Computer Science Reading Group

My dear !codecels, hello and welcome to the first meeting of RDrama's Computer Science Reading Group! Here's the idea - we (read: I) pick a computer science textbook, then post a list of sections and exercises from that textbook each week. In the thread, feel free ask questions, post solutions, and bully people for asking stupid questions or posting stupid solutions. If you don't want to read along, I'll post the complete exercises in the OP, so you can solve them without needing to read the book.

SICP

The book I'm starting with is 'the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs' (abbreviated SICP). It's a software engineering textbook written by Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson from MIT. The book builds programming from the ground up: starting with a very simple dialect of Scheme and growing it into a language with lazy evaluation, object-orientation and a self-hosting compiler. It's a fun book: the exercises are hands-on and interesting, the writing is informative without being droll, and both the book itself and a corresponding lecture series (complete with a 80s synth rendition of 'Also Sprach Zarathustra') are available for free online.

Languages

The book uses (a small subset of) Scheme as its primary language, but feel free to try using a different language. The book's dialect of scheme is available through Racket, but most lisps will work with only minor changes. Other dynamically-typed, garbage-collected languages with higher-order functions will also not require much hacking: there is an edition written in JavaScript , as well as a partial adaptation to python . High-level, statically typed languages might also work: Java/Kotlin/C# seem doable, but I don't know those languages well. Strongly typed languages like Haskell will require some real hacks, and I'd avoid doing it in C, C++ or Rust.

Exercises

The book is split into five chapters:

• Building Abstractions with Procedures
• Building Abstractions with Data
• Modularity, Objects and State
• Metalinguistic Abstraction
• Computing with Register Machines

This week, I'll be posting exercises from the first chapter. The chapter is pretty easy for those familiar with programming already, so I just want to get it out of the way. Here are the selected exercises:

Exercise 1.8

Newton's method for cube roots is based on the fact that if y is an approximation to the cube root of x, then a better approximation is given by the value (x/y² + 2y) / 3. Use this formula to implement a cube-root procedure which is wrong by at most 0.01.

Exercise 1.12

The following pattern of numbers is called Pascal's Triangle.

    1
   1 1
  1 2 1
 1 3 3 1
1 4 6 4 1
   ...

The numbers at the edge of the triangle are all 1, and each number inside the triangle is the sum of the two numbers above it. Write a procedure that computes elements of Pascal's triangle.

Exercise 1.18

Devise a procedure generates an iterative process for multiplying two integers in terms of adding, doubling, and halving and uses a logarithmic number of steps.

Exercise 1.31

Write a procedure called product that returns the product of the values of a function at points over a given range (product(l, r,step,f) = f(l) * f(l+step) * f(l + 2 * step) * ... * f(r)). Show how to define factorial in terms of product. Also use product to compute approximations to using the formula π/4 = (2 * 4 * 4 * 6 * 6 * 8 ...) / (3 * 3 * 5 * 5 * 7 * 7 ...)

Exercise 1.43

If f is a numerical function and n is a positive integer, then we can form the nth repeated application of f, which is defined to be the function whose value at x is f(f(...(f(x))...)). For example, if f is the function x → x + 1, then the nth repeated application of f is the function x → x + n. If f is the operation of squaring a number, then the nth repeated application of f is the function that raises its argument to the 2 * nth power. Write a procedure that takes as inputs a procedure that computes f and a positive integer n and returns the procedure that computes the nth repeated application of f. Your procedure should be able to be used as follows: repeated(square,2)(5) = 625

Have fun!

Potential sites to farm drama

i love this schizo bulgarian grifter so much is unreal, go get that bag kween!

It stopped working many months ago, when Reddit started redirecting image links to their www.reddit.com/media links. The image viewer thing is kind of helpful in that it tells you which post the image came from, but this is overshadowed by the fact that it prevents you from viewing the image directly. Thus, the Wayback Machine cannot archive the image.

I sent a wordswordswords email to the Internet Archive about it, and they unfortunately said they couldn't change it.

Hi,

No... I am very sorry but Reddit is much harder to archive now than it was in the past.

We are doing the best we can.

• Mark Graham, Director, the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive

ArchiveTeam also had difficulty archiving Reddit due to bans and paused their project. (Does anyone here know if there are logs of their IRC channel #shreddit?) At least PullPush works (for now), but it doesn't archive images. Luckily, archive.today and ghostarchive.org are still able to save Reddit images.

If you are annoyed by Reddit not letting you view images directly, here are some extensions I have not tried at all. They work by modifying the Accept header sent by your browser.

• Firefox: https://github.com/nopperl/load-reddit-images-directly

• Chrome: https://github.com/MonsterMannen/reddit-load-images-directly-chrome

!germs !christians

Progress update for the first soon to be mass manufactured penetration depth detecting sex robot. pic.twitter.com/c2ubplmor9

— Bry.ai (@prince_of_fakes) April 8, 2024

This is a recording from an official conference/workshop/whatever for xorg- something that is used by most Linux distributions for their desktop environment, so it's not some small or unknown project by any means.

I won't mention anything else, just skip around the video and tell me if you notice anything

See also: Part 2

Spoiler: the bans him

Orange Site discussion

Edit:

The HN comments get to the core of this:

A moderator on Vaxry's groomercord changed a transgender person's pronouns from "they/them" to "who/cares". Vaxry did nothing about it, and even supported this change, stating that the person was making too big a deal about their pronouns

lmao based

Also someone posted screenshots from his Groomercord where he pings everyone asking for hentai:

Reddit discussions:

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1bzna16/hyprland_creator_vaxry_is_now_banned_from/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1bztfry/fdos_conduct_enforcement_actions_regarding_vaxry/?sort=controversial

source for that is https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-amazons-big-bet-on-just-walk-out-stumbled, which I cannot bypass the paywall on

https://old.reddit.com/r/groomercordapp/comments/1brxqrp/groomercord_to_start_showing_ads_for_g?sort=controversial*mers_to_boost/

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1brxt4u/groomercord_to_start_showing_ads_for_g?sort=controversial*mers_to_boost/

https://lemmy.world/post/13762503?scrollToComments=true

archive

"Documents and testimony show that this “man-in-the-middle” approach – which relied on a technology known as a server-side SSL bump performed on Facebook's Onavo servers – was in fact implemented, at scale, between June 2016 and early 2019,” plaintiffs claim.

The spyware capable of acquiring, decrypting, and transferring the data was allegedly deployed against YouTube in 2017-2018 and against Amazon in 2018.

The code included a client-side “kit” that installed a root certificate on Snapchat users' mobile devices. Server-side code allegedly used Facebook's servers to create fake digital certificates to impersonate the apps' trusted analytics servers in order to redirect and decrypt the analytics traffic for Facebook's own analysis.

Facebook's secret program likely violated the Wiretap Act, which prohibits intentionally intercepting electronic communications and using such intercepted communications.

TL;DR apps using facebook/meta api (and some VPN they have bought up) to collect data from millions of users and spy on competition. Naturally, a minuscule fine was applied, a slap on the wrist would have been excessive, judges say.

Rafael putting his @cybertruck to work on Kane Creek Road. pic.twitter.com/BCLaLg4rS1

— Kyle Field (@mrkylefield) March 14, 2024

https://twitter.com/mrkylefield/status/1769549346100629720

Some of the other hardcore offroading the Cybertruck os capable of

https://twitter.com/mrkylefield/status/1769416291650343372

https://twitter.com/mrkylefield/status/1770074529844646243

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2023/02/21/ai-can-now-make-you-immortal--but-should-it/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2023/12/18/a-psychologist-explains-the-appeal-of-mind-upload-technology/

How times have changed. Imagine if all this technology just fails?

Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39709089

This week, @xAI will open source Grok

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 11, 2024

!codecels

!chuds