This is a blog looking at a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad T470 Ultrabook running Linux.
In this article we put the ThinkPad T470 through some intensive testing. We’ve run a variety of benchmarks on the laptop and compared the results to a motley assortment of machines.
The tests use the Phoronix Test Suite, unless otherwise stated. For ease of reference, the system’s specifications are listed on the final page. Together with the ThinkPad T470, we’ve run the benchmarks on two small form factor PCs (HP EliteDesk 800 G2 and Lenovo M93 Ultra Small PC), three mini PCs, and an Asus laptop. All of these machines are low-power. To put the results into context, we also benchmarked two more modern PCs hosting a 10th generation and 12th generation Intel processor.
Loads of discoveries including picking the best DNS server for your connection, Telnet on the Amiga, some synth thing, markdown notes, and fixing downloaded Twitter data. Plus your feedback about Red Hat and IBM, containers and firewalls, Signal alternatives, and more.
Less is a perfectly functional linux pager but what if you wanted something a little bit more or you might say moar, this is moar the pager that just does the right thing
In this video, I am going to show an overview of deepin 20.8 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Unless you've been living under a rock, you have probably heard of ChatGPT and all its wonderful and terrifying capabilities.
In this video, we are looking at how to install WebStorm on Linux Mint 21.
The 6.1 LTS version of the Linux kernel, which includes initial support for Rust, has been made available for general usage.
Linus Torvalds finally announced that the latest LTS version of the Linux kernel (version 6.1) includes the initial support for the Rust programming language that has been hyped of late. This, of course, comes on the heels of what Torvalds calls the "merge window from hell," thanks to the holidays and his pre-holiday travel.
On this, Torvalds announced he would be very strict with the merge window rules, saying "The rules are that the pull requests sent to me during the merge window should have been ready _before_ the merge window and have seen some time in linux-next. No last-minute batch of experimental new development that hasn't been seen by our test automation."
Of course, the big news for Linux 6.1 is the inclusion of experimental Rust support. It's important to know that this is very much still in the early phase of development, so the implications aren't nearly as game-changing as you might think. This is the very basic implementation of Rust in the kernel, so don't expect to find new and improved Rust-built drivers functioning within the kernel.
Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 6.1, likely to be an LTS kernel, last Sunday:
So here we are, a week late, but last week was nice and slow, and I’m much happier about the state of 6.1 than I was a couple of weeks ago when things didn’t seem to be slowing down.
Time for another status update on libei, the transport layer for bouncing emulated input events between applications and Wayland compositors [1]. And this time it's all about portals and how we're about to use them for libei communication. I've hinted at this in the last post, but of course you're forgiven if you forgot about this in the... uhm.. "interesting" year that was 2022. So, let's recap first:
Our basic premise is that we want to emulate and/or capture input events in the glorious new world that is Wayland (read: where applications can't do whatever they want, whenever they want). libei is a C library [0] that aims to provide this functionality. libei supports "sender" and "receiver" contexts and that just specifies which way the events will flow. A sender context (e.g. xdotool) will send emulated input events to the compositor, a "receiver" context will - you'll never guess! - receive events from the compositor. If you have the InputLeap [2] use-case, the server-side will be a receiver context, the client side a sender context. But libei is really just the transport layer and hasn't had that many changes since the last post - most of the effort was spent on trying to figure out how to exchange the socket between different applications. And for that, we have portals!
The focus in 2022 was on maturing the Wayland driver and keeping up to date with the Wine upstream internal changes. This involved, among other things, splitting the driver into a PE and Unix part, updating it for the latest internal driver APIs, and making preparations to support WoW64.
A significant improvement compared to last year is support for cross-process rendering, which is required by Chromium/CEF applications. Last year the driver was able to run Chrome with the "--in-process" command-line option. Chrome is now supported without any special flags, and is fully GPU accelerated on both OpenGL and Vulkan!
This update also brings enhanced support for the linux-dmabuf v4 Wayland protocol (aka dmabuf-feedback), which allows compositors to dynamically send information about optimal formats and modifiers, e.g., depending on the surface presentation mode (fullscreen vs windowed).
It's been some time since our last Wayland driver update ([1]), and, with the year coming to an end, I wanted to share information about the progress we made this year and discuss future steps.
The end of 2022 is very close so I’m just in time for some self-promotion. As you may know, the ongoing collaboration between Valve and Igalia lets me and some of my colleagues work on improving the open-source Vulkan and OpenGL Conformance Test Suite. This work is essential to ship quality Vulkan drivers and, from the Khronos side, to improve the Vulkan standard further by, among other things, adding new functionality through API extensions. When creating a new extension, apart from reaching consensus among vendors about the scope and shape of the new APIs, CTS tests are developed in order to check the specification text is clear and vendors provide a uniform implementation of the basic functionality, corner cases and, sometimes, interactions with other extensions.
In addition to our CTS work, many times we review the Vulkan specification text from those extensions we develop tests for. We also do the same for other extensions and changes, and we also submit fixes and improvements of our own.
In 2022, our work was important to be able to ship a bunch of extensions you can probably see implemented in Mesa and used by VKD3D-Proton when playing your favorite games on Linux, be it on your PC or perhaps on the fantastic Steam Deck. Or maybe used by Zink when implementing OpenGL on top of your favorite Vulkan driver. Anyway, without further ado, let’s take a look.
A few weeks ago I posed a question about a note-taking app to beat Vim, Markdown and Git. So far, that winner is Joplin.
I’d tried Joplin once or twice but bounced off of it for one reason or another. The UI is a little less compelling than other native apps, I’d like a bit more between-note linking features, but after a couple of weeks of sticking with it, it’s growing on me.
In this short and simple post, you will learn how to install Lighttpd on Ubuntu 22.04. You will also learn how to add PHP support.
For those who don’t know, lighttpd is a secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web server that has been optimized for high-performance environments.
One of the main things that make it so popular is that it is quite lightweight and can revive web servers.
Fedora users usually have a relatively recent Linux Kernel installed on their system. Currently, this is Linux kernel 6.0. However, given Fedora is an upstream release and many users often install upstream distributions with newer hardware, you may want to pre-install the latest Linux kernel 6.1 mainline release for better hardware support. The new Linux Kernel release brings improvements and hardware support along with the initial Rust language support in the mainline Kernel for better security and memory-safe code.
While walking in your Linux journey, you might hit yourself with the term “chroot” (or “chroot jail”), and that’s what you’re about to learn today: what they are and their usage.
LibreWolf is a Firefox fork designed to enhance your privacy and security while browsing the Internet and works well on Ubuntu desktops as an alternative browser. It eliminates telemetry and other tracking techniques that can be intrusive to your personal information, along with a few additional security improvements to give you added peace of mind when browsing. On top of that, LibreWolf also incorporates protection against fingerprinting to ensure that marketers aren’t able to track you online. If your online safety is important, LibreWolf could be an ideal web browser for you to use daily or a secondary browser for certain types of browsing.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install LibreWolf Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish and Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa LTS. The tutorial will go over importing the official repository and gpg key with CLI commands and installing the browser, along with some additional commands and tips for keeping the browser up-to-date.
Redis is quickly becoming an industry standard for an in-memory data structure store due to its open-source design, comprehensive list of supported data structures, and scalability through automated partitioning across nodes. High availability can be achieved with minimal configuration using Redis Sentinel software logic. This allows developers to focus on building their applications versus managing and configuring their databases. The ability to use Redis as a database, cache, and message broker with considerable options makes this open-source technology a powerful choice.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Redis on Fedora 37/36/35 Linux workstation or server using the terminal command line and some basic setup instructions to get you started using the command line terminal.
A cheat sheet for determining whether a drive is SSD or HDD is available here for Linux-based distributions so first let's get started with lsblk command
Ever since the demise of Google Reader I have been looking for a suitable replacement RSS reader. In the past I used to use Liferea but that was when I used a single desktop machine; these days I want to be able to read on my phone and multiple machines. I moved to Feedly and it’s been mostly ok, but I’m hitting the limit of feeds available in the free tier, and $72/year is a bit more than I can justify to myself. Especially when I have machines already available to me where I could self host something.
Docker is a popular tool for deploying and managing applications in containers. Containers allow developers to package an application with all of its dependencies and libraries, so it can be run consistently across different environments.
Today we are looking at how to install AbiWord on a Chromebook.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a Rumble comment and we would be happy to assist you!
Please use the video as a visual guide, and the commands and links below to install it on your Chromebook.
Much of my work is driven by my keyboard, and I love finding new ways to do complicated actions in a hurry. That’s why I’m drawn towards tiling window managers like i3 and sway.
My team at work spans the globe and speaks many different languages. Many of these languages have diacritics (such as accents, tildes, or other marks) that completely change the pronunciation (or even the meaning!)_ of the word. Sure, I can type Tomas (TOM-oss) quickly, but it’s not the same as Tomaš (TOM-osh).
In this update, Kdenlive‘s guide/marker system received a major overhaul to help you better organize your projects. The software now organizes all marker (clips) and guide (timeline) features in a new “Guides” dock where displayed content depends on the selection. Due to this change, the “Markers” tab was removed from the clip properties.
Moreover, the new “Guides” dock makes it easier to seek, search, sort, and filter by category or text, and integrates better with keyboard navigation to help you more quickly seek and find a timeline guide. Also, the import and export of markers functionality has been improved.
A new version of Kdenlive is available to download.
Kdenlive 22.12 is said to feature more than 350 commits that add new features, fix issues, and prepare the code base for “exciting changes” planned for the near future (intriguing, huh?).
Chief amongst the changes in this drop is what Kdenlive devs described as a a “major overhaul” to the guide/marker system. Kdenlive (like any good video editor should) already lets users add markers to annotate and pinpoint specific parts of their edit. But in the new release things move up a gear.
A new “Guides” dock is now available in the UI. This supports quickly filtering between different markers and guides, works with keyboard navigation, and supports as many custom categories as a user needs, as this short video from the Kdenlive team demonstrates:
The best free and open-source video editor - Kdenlive 22.12, released with new filters, UI improvements, user-requested features and bug fixes. This release improves Kdenlive on top of its already existing features and gives you a platform to create professional-quality videos.
This is what's new.
It’s a Plasma widget that visualizes what’s going on on your system, music-wise that is. I’ve started this project years ago but only recently found the motivation to get it to a somewhat acceptable state. It’s pretty amazing to have bars flying across the screen to Daft Punk’s `Touch`.
Linux history is littered with successes and failures, as well as failures that then, once again, became successes. Countless open-source projects are created, of which some of them die. That doesn't mean, however, the projects remain dead permanently -- some of them are given a second chance simply because the project was awesome.
Puppy Linux is a super lightweight distro which runs entirely on RAM and requires a very low memory footprint. It is almost loaded with all the necessary applications for everything you need. It is quite remarkable that the Puppy Linux team managed to package all these applications, which run in low memory and surprisingly within 400 MB of ISO size. There are many variants of Puppy Linux based on Ubuntu and other distros - thanks to the fantastic Puppy Builder Woof-CE.
The recent release of Puppy Linux 22.12 is based on the Slackware 15.0 components, which were released in February 2022. At its core, the JWM (Joe's Window Manager) provides flexibility and good performance in Puppy Linux because it runs off the RAM.
So, another day, another update. Today I managed to get hibernation working on my Dell XPS13 Plus (9320) running Debian.
So, a quick recap. I’m running Debian testing. I set up the system with Guided – Use entire disk and Setup LVM. This leaves me with an encrypted root partition. What I want to do now, is to put a reasonably sized swap file there, and make the system hibernate to it.
So, first, I created a 35 GB (35840MB) large swapfile as /swapfile. I prefer to create a swapfile slightly larger than RAM, to ensure that everything fits and my machine comes with 32GB of RAM. I used the instructions in the excellent Arch Wiki to set this up. I also edited /etc/fstab, commenting out the swap partition setup by the installer and adding the swapfile.
Ubuntu Snap is an application framework that makes installing and managing software on your system easier. Not only does this provide the easiest way to access your favourite open-source applications, but it also ensures you have the latest version at all times. With Ubuntu Snap, even those new to Linux can rapidly get set up and running with their desired applications without having to search for compatibility issues or downloads every time. This guide looks at what Ubuntu Snap offers a user and how easy it is to get started!
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 765 for the week of December 4 – 10, 2022.
Imagine: The first time people see your desktop...
The Raspberry Pi SBCs have been in short supply for a couple of years, especially for individual buyers since Raspberry Pi Trading prioritizes commercial customers, but Eben Upton has just announced some good news with over 100,000 boards comprised of a mix of Raspberry Pi Zero W, Pi 3A+, and Raspberry Pi 4 2GB and 4GB variants being made available for single-unit sales through approved resellers.
Eben however notes there’s more to do, and recommends buying from an approved reseller to get the boards at the recommended retail price (RRP), checking rpilocator to check for availability, and potentially considering switching to the Raspberry Pi Pico or Pico W if the project allows it as there’s plenty of stock for the MCU boards. Industrial and enterprise customers who still have issues can get in touch with the company by email using business <at> raspberrypi.com. But based on some feedback I received, it does not necessarily help if your product ships in really low volumes (< 100 pieces).
Some teachers and students require editing their PDF to add annotations, and study notes.
Editing a PDF file is not an easy task, sometimes because of lack of a proper software. And it gets worse when you want to edit a badly encoded PDF file.
While there are many commercial apps that help to achieve this goal, they are not open-source and not for everyone. Therefore, we offer you our collection of free open-source PDF editors.
Evan Prodromou has been working on decentralized social media for nearly 15 years now, having created an open source Twitter alternative called Identi.ca in 2008. That service morphed a couple of times and eventually became pump.io — which was the genesis for ActivityPub, the core fediverse protocol of 2022.
In an interview with The New Stack, Prodromou talked about how ActivityPub evolved, the pros and cons of Mastodon, and where he sees opportunities for developers in the fediverse.
As I’ve covered in previous articles, it seems like the time for federated social software has finally arrived, in the aftermath of Elon Musk’s messy takeover of Twitter. So I began by asking Prodromou whether he feels a sense of validation in the current popularity of Mastodon.
In the interview, Prodromou, who credits Mastodon’s current success to its “very pragmatic and user-focused development team,” led by Eugen Rochko, explains the history of the Fediverse and shares his ideas about what it could ultimately become.
The Fintech Open Source Foundation has found banks and other financial organizations are no longer just using open-source software, they're building and sharing it.
Next in our interview series, we have Jondale Stratton, a long time supporter of Software Freedom Conservancy. Jondale is the IT Manager for the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis and the Technical Director for his local hackerspace, Knox Makers. In his spare time he enjoys laser cutting, tractors, playing with his bunnies, and replacing people with shell scripts.
A new version of the Firefox web browser is available to download.
Mozilla Firefox 108 is the last release planned for this year. It features a small set of modest improvements designed to improve the usability, security, and stability of the browser when used access all major desktop platforms.
The “headline” new feature is WebMIDI API support. This allows Firefox (more specifically stuff run inside of Firefox) to connect and interact with MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) devices attached to a PC. Not all MIDI devices are musical instruments so the feature has non-melodious applications too.
The final Firefox release of this year is here - Firefox 108, closing an eventful year of this free and open-source web browser from Mozilla.
Release highlights of Firefox 108 which brings WebMIDI API, new developer options for CSS and HTML + more updates.
I’m 36 years old, and I was born in the Gansu Province of China. I love in Beijing and I’m working as an Of Counsel in a leading law firm in Beijing. Some people may think that I’m a lawyer. No, I am not a lawyer – I am a professional accountant. My team work as local counsel on behalf of clients defending on Antidumping and Countervailing Duty investigations initiated by authorities (e.g., the U.S. Department of Commerce, the European Union etc) against companies and industries in China, and accountants play an important role in this field.
Although I am very busy at work every day, I love the internet, computers and programming. I can program using Python+Pandas and SAS, and tools such as these have greatly helped me in my daily data analysis work. I’m also a Linuxer. Many years ago I used Ubuntu, Debian, Arch Linux, and even Gentoo, but now I stick to Fedora Workstation. Currently 99.9% of my daily work is done under Linux, including those mission-critical work we submitted to the U.S. DOC and EU authorities.
I also know some HTML, CSS and PHP, and I have a server running at home with a WordPress instance and a Nextcloud instance. The server also servers as a mirror of some of the Libreoffice bibisect repositories (it is very slow to download from the TDF server here in China, so I need to mirror them).
The popular Drupal open source content management system (CMS) reaches a significant milestone when version 10 is released on December 14. Personally, I think Drupal X sounds way cooler, but so far, my calls to name it that haven't gotten much traction. I enlisted the help of my friend Aaron Judd of Northern Commerce to give us a sense of how cool Drupal X could look...
Drupal is an open source CMS and development framework. While other CMS options focus on simple long-form content (think blogs) or entirely free-form content (like in Wix or Squarespace), Drupal has made a name for itself in handling more complex content architectures, in multiple languages, with robust content governance. Drupal sites (like this site, Opensource.com!) benefit from a strong role-based access control (RBAC) system, unlimited custom roles and workflows, and a powerful and extensible media library.
The latest feature release Git v2.39.0 is now available at the usual places. It is comprised of 483 non-merge commits since v2.38.0, contributed by 86 people, 31 of which are new faces [*].
The tarballs are found at:
https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/
The following public repositories all have a copy of the 'v2.39.0' tag and the 'master' branch that the tag points at:
url = https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git url = https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git url = git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git url = https://github.com/gitster/git
New contributors whose contributions weren't in v2.38.0 are as follows. Welcome to the Git development community!
Alexander Kanavin, Alexander Meshcheryakov, Andreas Hasenack, Anh Le, Arthur Chan, Daniel Sonbolian, Debra Obondo, Diomidis Spinellis, Erik Cervin Edin, Hank Leininger, herr.kaste, John A. Leuenhagen, Julia Ramer, Kevin Backhouse, Kousik Sanagavarapu, Lukáš Doktor, Martin Englund, M Hickford, Michael V. Scovetta, Noah Betzen, Nsengiyumva Wilberforce, orygaw, Oscar Dominguez, Ronan Pigott, Rubén Justo, Sotir Danailov, srz_zumix, Stefano Rivera, Tim Jaacks, Vincent Bernat, and Vlad-Stefan Harbuz.
Returning contributors who helped this release are as follows. Thanks for your continued support.
ì â¢Ã¬Å¾Â¬Ã¬Å¡Â°, Ãâ var Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Alejandro R. Sedeño, Alexander Shopov, Alex Henrie, Bagas Sanjaya, Derrick Stolee, ÃÂoàn Trần Công Danh, Elijah Newren, Emily Shaffer, Emir SARI, Eric DeCosta, Eric Sunshine, Eric Wong, Fangyi Zhou, Glen Choo, Han-Wen Nienhuys, Jan Pokorný, Jean-Noël Avila, Jeff Hostetler, Jeff King, Jerry Zhang, Jiang Xin, Johannes Altmanninger, Johannes Schindelin, John Cai, Jonathan Tan, Jordi Mas, Julien Moutinho, Junio C Hamano, Kyle Meyer, Martin Ãâ¦gren, Martin von Zweigbergk, Matheus Tavares, Matthew John Cheetham, Matthias Rüster, Michael J Gruber, Michael McClimon, Patrick Steinhardt, Paul Smith, Peter Krefting, Philip Oakley, Philippe Blain, Phillip Wood, Ralf Thielow, Randall S. Becker, René Scharfe, Sergey Organov, Shaoxuan Yuan, SZEDER Gábor, Taylor Blau, Torsten Bögershausen, Victoria Dye, Yi-Jyun Pan, and ä¾Âäºâ.
[*] We are counting not just the authorship contribution but issue reporting, mentoring, helping and reviewing that are recorded in the commit trailers.
Version 2.39.0 of the Git source-code management system is out.
Looking at this you can find several interesting things. For example the gray box showing the bleed area is composed of C, M and Y inks instead of only K, even though it was originally defined as a pure gray in RGB. This is how LittleCMS chose to convert it and it might or might not be what the original artist had in mind. High quality PDF generation is full of little quirks like this, blindly throwing numbers at color conversion functions is not enough to get good results, end users might need fairly precise control over low level operations.
Another thing to note is how the renderer has left "holes" for the book title in CMYK plates even though all color is in the gold ink plate. This avoids mixing inks but on the other hand requires someone to do proper trapping. That is its own can of worms, but fortunately most people can let the RIP handle it (I think).
Envious? If not, run zef install Envy and let’s start exploring virtual comp unit repositories.
Hold the phone! What are we doing? We’re going to explore using a module allowing us to have virtual module environments in our very favorite raku.
The past week Vadim Belman has worked on bringing the RakuAST branch up-to-date with the master branch, and renaming it to “main”, and making that the default Rakudo branch from now on.
This means that the next Rakudo release will have some form of RakuAST functionality enabled. It may have felt like a small step, but this will allow developers to try out these new features already, especially for those cases where Raku source code is built programmatically to be EVALled at runtime. So in a lot of ways, this is more of a very big step towards the next Raku Programming Language level. And kudos to all who brought the rakuast branch this far!
The 1.66.0 pre-release is ready for testing. The release is scheduled for December 15. Release notes can be found here.
I explained encoding issues when exchanging files between different countries. But things were even worst since the encodings used by different manufacturers for the same country were not always the same. You can understand what I mean if you had to exchange files between Mac and PC in the 80s.
Is it a coincidence or not, the Unicode project started in 1987, led by people of Xerox and … Apple.
The goal of the project was to define a universal character set allowing to simultaneously use any character used in human writing within the same text. The original Unicode project was limited to 65536 different characters (each character being represented using 16 bits— that is two bytes per character). A number that has proven to be insufficient.
So, in 1996 Unicode has been extended to support up to 1 million different code points. Roughly speaking, a “code point” a number that identifies an entry in the Unicode character table. And one core job of the Unicode project is to make an inventory of all letters, symbols, punctuation marks and other characters that are (or were) used worldwide, and to assign to each of them a code point that will uniquely identify that character.
In Boston, there are reports of people pronouncing the letter “r.” Down in Tennessee, people are noticing a lack of a Southern drawl. And Texans have long worried about losing their distinctive twang.
The built-in H.264/H.265 video encoder and decoder enables quick image recognition and video analytics tasks with various sensors, and software development is done with the Blaize NetDeploy and Picasso software development kit supporting TensorFlow, PyTorch, Caffe2, and ONNX machine learning frameworks with the application layer relying on C/C++ and OpenVX computer vision API.
AAEON has presented a new entry in the UP Xtreme series. Building on the UP Xtreme i11, the UP Xtreme i12 supports Intel Alder Lake-P processors, LPDDR5 RAM and Windows 10 or Ubuntu 22.04. At present, the UP Xtreme i12 comes with a choice of four Intel Alder Lake processors.
Research on Reolink’s RLC-520A smart motion detection camera has turned up an authenticated command injection vulnerability. Exploiting this vulnerability with an injected system command can render the device useless.
Security-savvy Linux sysadmins understand that it's best to assume that their systems are breached. Threats targeting Linux systems are becoming increasingly pervasive due to the growing popularity of the open-source OS. Linux malware reached an all-time high in the first half of 2022.
This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.16.0 and Istio 1.16.1.
This release includes security fixes in Go 1.19.4 (released 2022-12-06) for the os and net/http packages.
Fortinet has released security updates to address a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2022-42475) in FortiOS. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system. This vulnerability has been exploited in the wild.
The SAFE Connections Act becomes law.
I'm wondering if anyone in the Pub has had experience with singleplayer tabletop RPGs?
I think Ironsworn is a good starting point for this.
But trying on a GM hat and a player hat at the same time is really hard.
I've been reading about the Finger protocol over the weekend, and I'm quite intrigued by it.
For how much I love the small Internet, I don't know very much about it beyond Gemini and some Gopher. It's always fascinating to me when I read about some old protocol that's been repurposed in to a robust communication system and see a simple but vibrant community build around them, especially when the protocol already exists but was simply forgotten. I'm reminded of urban explorers or researchers digging into the archives of an ancient library: the world of possibilities is already there, just waiting to be discovered.
In slightly less angst-riddled but also
sort of rambling thoughts, too loose for
the actual gemlog.
So I've been thinking about how, well, I
think most people are getting the
conversation around large machine
learning models (LLMs, CLIP-likes, &c.)
kinda wrong.
Like there's several pieces that I think
need to get disentangled.
The first thing is that building
for-profit systems by taking things that
people have shared in good faith on the
internet is kind of gross
extractionism.
My recent postings on using HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) for my sites reminded one of my readers, White_Rabbit, to send in a link to Discourse on HTTPS [1]. The language may be salty, but it does align with my feelings towards HTTPS—namely, I don't really need it. But as I stated, Google will any day now start with the Big Scary Error Messages on non-secure sites, followed by (possibly—I don't know this for a fact, but a gut feeling) no longer allowing non-secure requests at all. And with Google's Chrome having a ridiculous market share, that's something to be concerned about.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.