Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 14/03/2023: AMD Defects and GNOME 44 Release Candidate



  • GNU/Linux

    • Kernel Space

    • Applications

      • Linux Links13 Best Free Linux Speech Recognition Tools

        There aren’t that many speech recognition toolkits available, and some of them are proprietary software. Fortunately, there are some very exciting open source speech recognition toolkits available. These toolkits are meant to be the foundation to build a speech recognition engine.

        This article highlights the best open source speech recognition software for Linux. The rating chart summarizes our verdict.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • KDEKDE Plasma 5.27.3, Bugfix Release for March
          Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.27.3.

          Plasma 5.27 was released in February 2023 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

          This release adds two weeks' worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include...

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • Linux MagazineGNOME 44 Release Candidate Now Available
          GNOME 44 is upon us. Many GNOME fans have tested the beta version and found it to be the perfect next step for the open-source desktop environment. And with the projected release of March 22, 2023, this release candidate arrives at the perfect time.

          Surprisingly, however, the development team has added a few changes to the desktop. No, these are not new features but more bug fixes and cleanups.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Funding

      • Data SwampLaunching on Patreon

        Why would you do that in the first place? Well, this would allow me to take time off my job, and spend it either writing on the blog, or by contributing to open source projects, mainly OpenBSD or a bit of nixpkgs.

    • Programming/Development

      • Python

        • DebugPointInput Function in Python: Concepts and Examples

          Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, and it is widely used in various applications. One of the basic concepts in Python is the Input() function, which allows users to interact with the program by providing input values.

          Let's find out the input function, how it works, and how you can use it effectively in your Python programs.

  • Leftovers

    • New construction regulation in İstanbul for earthquake resistance

      A new regulation is being introduced that will forbid mezzanine floors in buildings, and require basement floors to be constructed in all buildings that have more than two floors if adopted by the municipality council.

    • ErdoÄŸan once again asks for people's 'forgiveness' over earthquakes

      The president addressed a crowd in Hatay, a heavily hit province by the earthquakes.

    • New York TimesWith Fingerprints, DNA and Photos, Turkey Seeks Families of the Missing

      More than a thousand earthquake victims are still unaccounted for. Some families waited for days by ruined buildings, hoping to see bodies that never surfaced.

    • HackadayHacking Skis, Rules, And Friendships

      The American Birkebeiner is the second largest cross-country skiing race in the world and is quite a big deal within that sport. At 55 kilometers it’s not a short event, either, requiring a significant amount of training to even complete, let alone perform well enough to be competitive. Around a decade ago, friends [Joe] and [Chris] ran afoul of the rules when [Joe] accidentally won the race wearing [Chris]’s assigned entry number, a technicality that resulted in both being banned from the race for two years. Now they’re back, having learned their lesson, and are strictly adhering to those rules this time using these tandem cross-country skis.

    • Vice Media GroupThe Worst Transit Project in the U.S. Is Officially Dead

      The LaGuardia AirTrain, which would have cost more than $2 billion to make getting to the airport worse for everyone, will not be built because its main booster got kicked out of office.

    • Vice Media GroupJordan Peterson Very Concerned by Milking Porn Factory

      After the internet celebrity psychologist tweeted a fetish porn clip and called it "CCP hell," the phrase "Chinese dick sucking factory" went viral.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • A Little Vacation

        These last few months have not been pleasant for me. Too much work, too many obligations, and generally so many different tasks that ended up with me not taking care of myself. Fortunately, I had a two-week vacation planned and so I'm going to catch up on sleep, get some swimming done, and work on those “big ticket” items that need time to concentrate to move forward.

      • Moose Gazing 2023-03-14 Morning (Fairbanks, AK, USA)

        I tried to do some stargazing early this morning before work, as there were several indications that conditions would be good. After a comedy of errors and difficulties, that plan didn't really work out. But, I did have one interesting experience. When I went barreling out the apartment door this morning to get the SUV started, I nearly ran headlong into a cow moose.

      • 🔤SpellBinding: AINOSXU Wordo: SYNCH
      • Extraterrestrial Signals

        One high-tech endeavor of humanity is the search for life on other planets, especially intelligent life. We've built vast radio telescopes, such as the Low Frequency Array in the Netherlands and the Allen Telescope Array in California, for just this purpose.

        Our own radio communications have evolved in the last several decades. We began with fully analog systems transmitting audio data in the clear: any device capable of receiving signals at the given frequency could hear everything. That soon changed to analog encoding of digital signals--already indecipherable to living organisms but perfectly understandable to a computer.

      • The steep slippery slope of ‘internalised X’

        The concept of ‘internalised X’, e.g. ‘internalised queerphobia’, can be a useful tool. But there's a steep slippery slope from there to using it for totalitarian-style ‘thought reform’[a].

        It can be a useful tool for encouraging self-reflection on the whether at least some of one's beliefs and behaviours might actually be rooted in social prejudices and structures. For example: “Perhaps you're hostile towards other gay men being ‘too effeminate’ because of internalised queerphobia?”

        Problems arise, however, when it becomes less of a tool for trying to disentangle oneself from the various components of the kyriarchy, and more about declaring a given thing to _objectively_ be ‘internalised X’.

      • Commonplace

        I have some longer-form pieces in the works, but in the meantime, am trying to do smaller posts in the meantime as well.

        Organization has been an ongoing struggle for me, as I tend to take on too many things at any given time. This is further exacerbated by an innate curiosity: I want to find out about all the things, even if I don't go deep into anything specific.

        In addition to collecting information, I tend to collect online identities. It's a problem of over-specializing, mostly, and also conflicting desires for anonymity and wanting to share at least some of what I do with others. As usual, this resulted in more than a little decision paralysis as I tried to figure out what kinds of stuff I was going to do where, and what each of these identities would deal with/talk about. I've decided that, at least for now, is to focus on the name you see on this page, which is the one that I keep anonymous. If nothing else, I'm trying to become less dependent on electronic communication with people I know in real life.

      • Releasing control

        Two days ago, I thought I'd be in Pittsburgh right now, jumping from museum to park to aviary, taking in all that the Steel City has to offer. My entire break from school was about as planned out as my life usually is, with various events planned, calendar entries created, and reservations booked. And then I ate one tiny snack.

        An anaphylactic reaction and ER visit later, and all of that has changed. And the freedom I feel is astounding. I'm blessed to have a support system around me at the moment, and thankful that this happened in my hometown rather than at school, but nonetheless I haven't been physically forced to release control in this way for years. Even other times when I've been ill I never fully stopped trying to be productive or get things done, but coming off the epinephrine, even my muscles won't engage fully no matter how much I ask them to (I can move fine enough, but I have yet to summon enough grip strength to open a bottle).

      • The gnat hitch

        I had trouble sleeping a few nights ago. This happens to me from time to time. I know that looking at a screen when you're trying to sleep is a terrible idea, and if I have a paper book on the go sometimes I'm good and I'll get up for a bit and read that. But often I end up cruising around the small internet instead. Lettuce's gemlog, after all, is best visited between 1am and 6am local time. Says so right on the landing page[1].

    • Politics

    • Technical

      • Guix: Listing Operating System Services

        The 'operating-system' is a Guile record defined in 'gnu/system.scm' of a guix checkout, and likewise 'service' is defined in gnu/services.scm. See the 'exports' of each of these files to find record accessors.

      • Mirrors for Minetest & Mineclone2

        Minetest and mineclone2 are important projects to me. I've been contributing a bit to mineclone2 code and resources over the months and play on it alot. I thought it would be a fun excercise to make some unofficial gemini mirrors for them.

        There used to be a gemini mirror of minetest (gemini://gemini.minetest.land/) but it seems to be quite dead and has been for months, no cached archive either. so I decided to make my own for both the minetest engine and mineclone2 game. I got the thumbs up from the mcl2 project maintainers for this.

      • Trying Regicide (The Game)

        The game is a refreshingly original take on what kind of games can be played with a standard deck. Your hand acts as both your health and your attack options, creating interesting tactical decisions between what you want to discard when you take damage versus what you need to keep to complete the battle.

        The value on each card acts as an attack value, and it's suit provides an extra power when it's played. Each boss gets progressively more difficult as you advance through the game. At first it can seem like a lot to learn. But it doesn't take long to get the hang of. At that point it's easy to keep it all in your head and the pace of the game flows quick and smooth.

        I've played three times so far, each solo. The creators did a good job balancing for solo play, and I believe it would scale well to the decided 4 players. Something I rarely see in games.

      • Static website using Grav

        Grav is a very good and fast CMS system. It€´s minimalistic with no database and is based on markdown.

      • Science/Sci-Fi

        • Extraterrestrial Signals

          Radio signals are a recent phenomena; the "Great Oxidation Event" may have been notable somewhere around 2 billion years ago, if someone had been looking and knew what to look for and could detect the change at however far the light has gone since.

        • Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein - my biased thoughts on the book

          I finally read Starship Troopers, one of the sci-fi classics and subject of much criticism and political discussion, and these are my (biased) thoughts on it.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • internet blog for design & stuff

          Long time no see. I've been considering starting an internet blog for design & stuff... idk if I should. I haven't kept up with this gemlog very well, but maybe it'd be different. I'd be able to switch my online store to it if I did Squarespace. It'd be nice to branch out.

        • Christina's 5 questions

          2. Most unusual way I've made a friend?

          Hard to say. Met most friends in unusual circ- umstances. Saw Kara writing on a pad in the Square when I was 17 and asked for her auto- graph. "What are you doing in a body?" She asked, shocked, when she looked up.

          Asked bugz to lay on my tools when I was doing something extremely illegal and the police-FBI joint patrols got too close. She did. We went on to move rice in the Haitian earthquake and a million other things over two decades.

          Met Etta when she let me, Alison, and Thaddeus stay in the abandoned house next to hers when we passed through town and cooked us breakfast.

        • activity pub

          I was looking into how Questions are supposed to be done. The example I grabbed from having a mastodon account send one to my inbox showed that a question as being used as an object inside of a create activity.

      • Programming

        • "The Pragmatic Programmer" book notes

          These are my personal takeaways after reading "The Pragmatic Programmer" by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt. Note that the book contains much more knowledge and pearls of wisdom and that the following notes only contain points I personally found worth writing down. This is mainly for my own use, but you might find it helpful too.

        • awk

          I came across awk this morning, and not knowing anything about it, I'm hitting the books now to learn what I can. I should learn how to use sed and grep after that. I just need to find the time to study.

        • Emacs undo and me

          Maybe I’ll switch over to one of them one of these days (and knowing how I usually work, probably right after writing an essay like this where I’ve just been like “oh I for sure don’t use any of those packages” and then three seconds later I get roped in (by myself if nothing else) to switching to one of them) but right now I use the same default way it works and has worked for twenty-five years.

          In some weirdo chain my brain don’t fully understand but my fingers seem to know how to work. I can undo in one “direction” but then if I do anything else (just move the cursor or set the mark) it switches direction because the undos themselves are getting undone. It’s a mess but it somehow works, even for undos really far back.

          But I would be dishonest if I didn’t also mention the other thing I do which sort of saves that messy system from being unusable: “save states”. I just save the file, usually with the default command, C-x C-s, but I also have mapped C-c A which saves a copy (to a standard location, always using the same name, it doesn't prompt) without saving the local buffer at all, and C-c r which reverts the file, and if I revert by mistake I can still undo the revert. Usually.

        • Grawlix

          There is some semantic drift about whether or not ASCII only means the original 7 bit wide subset of what later became UTF-8. Like Thrig, I grew up with having to be constantly aware of what encoding system was used since ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 were fundamentally incompatible while also being hard for machines to tell apart.

        • Escape hatches

          By now, y’all should know about the Alternate Hard and Soft Layers pattern. It’s the idea of designing a system with some rules carved in granite (like Emacs’ C primitives) and some loosy-goosy (like Emacs’ Lisp extensions).

          “In a cloud, bones of steel” as Charles Reznikoff put it. But what supercharges this design pattern for hackers is if you don’t make the boundaries between the layers too strict, if you provide ways to fall back through the patterns.

          This “make the abstractions intentionally leaky” is a design decision that everytime I implement it, I get rewarded many times over (like how call-tables gives you easy, convenient access to the underlying hash-tables; I wasn’t sure if I was ever gonna use that but I’ve ended up using that again and again in many unforseen ways), and each time I forget to do it, I end up with a library that’s languishing from disuse and “What was I thinking?” and I don’t even use it myself.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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