Notices by Fabio Manganiello (fabio@manganiello.social)

If you still had some doubts that Israel in its current incarnation is run by a bunch of over-charged genocidal Nazis who don’t even bother to hide it, it’s time to revise your doubts.

Blocking all aid to the enclave as a way to “reduce obesity” is something worth of the worst Nazi executioner operating the worst concentration camp.

Wondering why they don’t try to also block food supplies to their own people as a way to reduce obesity.

No matter how this war ends up, Netanyahu and his entourage will forever be remembered by history as the worst incarnation of Nazi ideology in the 21st century.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/10/uk-lawyers-for-israel-condemned-over-claim-war-may-reduce-obesity-in-gaza

@malteengeler I’m an ironclad atheist and antichristian. And today I’m actually mourning Bergoglio.

When Ratzinger first abdicated I was actually disappointed. I considered him the perfect representation of what the Church deserved. An embalmed simulacrum teleported from the Middle Ages who bitched about social rights, equality, women’s self-determination and relativism. I thought that, had the Church continued on such a dull path of expired ideologies, millions would have been alienated and would have left that rotting institution.

It didn’t happen. Ratzinger only emboldened that bigot far-right that is supposed to be our sworn enemy. His retrograde views only legitimated those ultraconservative folks who recycled his doctrine to justify their opposition to gay rights, to abortion, to women’s emancipation, to religious tolerance, to sexual contraception and to racial integration.

I’d love to live in a world where religious institutions don’t have such a heavy grip on people’s thoughts. The problem is that such a world isn’t going to happen any time soon. Even if you take the religious comfort away from some folks, they’ll probably just replace it with conspiracy bullshit (which is this century’s dominant religion), as you’ll leave a hole inside of their system of beliefs that makes them vulnerable to exploitation. At that point it’s better to just give them an imaginary friend and a guy who dresses up like it’s Carnival every day.

If someone can convince people to be good and caring, if someone can take gasoline away from the fascist dumpster fires, if someone is brave enough to back progressive values like equality, fairness and solidarity even when the political wind around him starts to heavily blow to the right, then I’m on that guy’s side. I dont care if he’s a representative of Jesus or a representative of the Flying Pink Unicorn.

@ErikJonker it’s time to also actively boycott science and tech conferences hosted on US soil https://boycott-ietf127.org/

Now that the US can no longer guarantee the safety of those who travel to attend these conferences, it’s time to actively isolate them from the rest of the academic community.

The trends in frontend development are making it hard to build products that will still be around in 5 or 10 years.

The frontend framework or build toolchain that you pick for your job today is likely to be deprecated and affected by countless breaking changes already in 6 months - let alone survive the next 10 years.

It sounds like frontend development has become this eternal “let’s rewrite everything” black hole of wastefulness, fed by a toxic market made of useless influencers, useless conferences, useless certifications and useless developers who have made a certain framework part of their identity, and whenever they join a new job their only contribution is “I see that you use X for your frontend - can we rewrite all with Y?”

If you have to pick a frontend framework, pick one and stick with it. Master it inside out. Resist any push to change. Success is defined by the usefulness of your final product, not by choosing Vue 3 + Vite, React with Remix, Svelte or Apollo CLI, nor by your ability to stay up-to-date with whatever new trend or useless abstraction the frontend parasites have thrown in the cogs of our industry just to make a bit more money out of courses and conferences. Nor by your ability to attract frontend developers who master the new shiny thing. A developer is first of all a problem solver who is able to solve problems regardless of the tools - it could also be vanilla JS or jQuery. Those who can only solve problems with a specific configuration of dependencies and frameworks are fanboys, not developers.

https://polotek.net/posts/the-frontend-treadmill/

A tip to all the #Searxng admins out there: replace all results to paywalled sources with links to archive.is / archive.ph.

This is my configuration for example:

In a time where democracy is threatened by late-stage capitalism and paywalls (voters can’t take sound decisions if access to reliable information is protected by dozens of subscriptions, and all that is left for free is social media memes and 3rd-hand misinformation), and where we seriously run the risk of the next generations being unable to even access the news from our age, this is a civic duty.

If the page the user is looking for hasn’t been archived yet, then the user may be prompted to do so - and, by doing so, the user of your search engine has just become an archivist that ensures that one more piece of information will be available to tomorrow’s historians.

To any student at risk of deportation for joining a pro-Palestine protest: you’re more than welcome to Europe.

Fascist regimes have an interesting feature: their hate towards plurality, diversity and education ends up pushing their best brains out.

Just like America built its fortune during the 1940s thanks to all the European scientists and intellectuals who escaped the horrors of fascism on their continent, so Europe has a chance of rebuilding its fortune by attracting anyone who is rightly disgusted by the horrors of Trump’s fascist regime.

https://gizmodo.com/state-department-will-use-ai-to-search-for-pro-hamas-students-to-deport-2000573143

I’m quite confused when I hear my fellow European citizens worry about our dependence on American Big Tech, and that in case America goes full Nazi we have no way of building our future.

American Big Tech is overwhelmingly dependent on free and open-source software that is overwhelmingly built and maintained by volunteers on both sides of the pond.

From the Linux kernel that powers basically all the large servers in the world, to the most popular distros built around that kernel, to the most popular database systems (MariaDB, Postgres, MongoDB…) and messaging systems (Redis, Kafka…), to Elastic (based in Amsterdam), to Blender (also based in Amsterdam), to all the open programming languages that power today’s world (Rust, PHP, Python [also invented by a Dutch developer], Kotlin [developed by JetBrains, founded in Czech Republic and also headquartered in Amsterdam]), to the Web servers that serve most of the content (nginx, Apache…), to the Grafana+Loki+Prometheus+OTEL stack that makes the backbone of observability in most of today’s large companies, to the numpy+pandas libraries that are the backbone of all of today’s AI hype, large American companies could do NOTHING, and I mean literally NOTHING, without open-source software that is built out of collaborations between European and American developers (who are often unpaid, uncredited and on the verge of burnout).

If you want a glimpse of today’s technological avantgarde, you don’t have to go to flashy and hollow events like ESC in Las Vegas, or any Silicon Valley sponsored event. You have to go to FOSDEM in Belgium.

American Big Tech has the ability of putting together these freely available building blocks, building finished products with them, monetizing them aggressively through unethical business models based on addiction, stalking, profiling and digging monopolistic moats, funding them through some of the richest men in the world (because the VC world is still dominated only by rich white men), locking them up as services that run into their private clouds (companies like AWS literally fill up bottles with free tap water and make outrageous amounts of money by renting access to that water), and sucking up generous subsidies from the federal government, while the EU gives literally peanuts to those building this infrastructure - we had to wait for years and beg the commission before getting something like Next Generation Internet up and running, which provides these projects with literally 0.01% of the money that the US has provided to its already deep-pocketed giants through things like the CHIPS act, and we also have to periodically send them letters like this https://pad.public.cat/lettre-NCP-NGI# to make sure that we don’t lose even those peanuts.

Imagine what we could build in Europe if only we had coherent technological programs that just funded the talent that we already have.

Imagine what we could do if instead of a couple of millions of spare change (and Von der Leyen never putting her wallet where her mouth is, because if we had one million every time she said “EU 🩷 open-source” all the EU-based volunteers on Github will be millionaire by now) we had even a fraction of the funding of acts like CHIPS.

Imagine what we could do if European companies firmly grounded in the values of open-source and ethical business models (like Nextcloud or Blender) had enough funding to compete with the American giants, instead of having to hear technologically illiterate megalomaniacs like Draghi and Macron argue for “European champions” that simply mock the unsustainable and unethical business models championed by America, all while products like Nextcloud often get kicked out of public tenders by the bribes and mafia-worth intimidations of deep-pocketed American giants like Microsoft and Google.

Our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic lately are going a bit nuts (like Nazi nuts). It’s time to start decoupling and de-riskifying from them, nurturing our own sustainable open-source ecosystem, and, if they start leveraging their own Big Tech as a weapon against us, pull the drawbridge and cut them out of the European open-source software that runs their servers. We can survive without their products; they can’t survive without our free code.

In a world where code and data are the new oil, access to open-source software means access to the raw materials required to make your industry wealthy. We shouldn’t underestimate that.

All governments in the world hate end2end encryption - since the time Phil Zimmerman was tried for terrorism and illegal sale of weapons for releasing PGP.

But few governments have been so keen on breaking it at all costs (even of their own reputation) as the UK.

The UK is a country that feels entitled to spy into anyone’s devices, whether they are British citizens or not.

Not happy with passing the abhorrent Online Safety Bill in 2023 (which is technically impossible to enforce, which says that data can remain encrypted but the hosting company still needs to know what the content is about, and which showed the sheer extent of British lawmakers’ ignorance about encryption technology), the British government has decided to go one step further and demand Apple to open a backdoor on iCloud, which would only be accessible to British government officers (sure…), and that would provide them unlimited access to all content created globally (not only by British citizens) on Apple’s cloud.

I bash Apple and its monopolistic practices a lot, I’m proud that I’ve never in my life purchased a single Apple item, but I respect most of their stances when it comes to user privacy (unlike most of the other tech giants).

If they want to stay coherent with those stances, it’d be probably time for them to threaten to pull iCloud services out of the British market.

A company that defends the right to privacy of their users shouldn’t offer a diminished service to the inhabitants of a country just because their government feels entitled to spy on them - let alone erode the privacy for everyone globally just because one single government feels entitled to have decryption keys for everything.

https://www.theverge.com/news/608145/apple-uk-icloud-encrypted-backups-spying-snoopers-charter

@_elena il fork ha diverse motivazioni, fra cui scismi ideologici fra gli sviluppatori di Pleroma (alcuni dei quali sono fin troppo nel campo del “free speech” a tutti i costi), il fatto che il main developer di Pleroma non era molto presente, e la necessità di implementare features più velocemente (fra cui custom emojis per le reazioni, backend più leggero, ecc.). Più dettagli sono qui: https://coffee-and-dreams.uk/development/2022/06/24/akkoma.html

Per il resto sono quasi al 100% compatibili a vicenda, e permettono anche di installare frontend custom (che è una benedizione perché il frontend di default sembra un salto nel 1999).

@_elena hai gia’ provato Pleroma/Akkoma? Personalmente dopo un paio di anni passati ad amministrare la mia istanza Mastodon mi ero un po’ stufato sia delle feature a cui Eugen risponde sempre con un no secco (tipo limite di caratteri estensibile via configurazione, quotes e supporto per Markdown), sia di quante risorse richiede.

Sono migrato ad Akkoma (fork di Pleroma) e non mi sono piu’ guardato indietro :) (e anche il consumo di RAM sul mio server e’ andato da 6 GB a 500 MB)

This everything-as-a-service craze is a cancer that must be eradicated.

And I want the PMs that only worship the cult of yearly recurring revenue out of my industry for good.

If I buy a product, and that product cost me a lot as well, I want to be able to use that product however I like, for its intended lifetime, without having to pay for an extra subscription.

I honestly don’t give a single fuck about how you are supposed to make money after my purchase - you already made money THROUGH my purchase. If it’s not enough then I’d rather be charged $50 more for my purchase than paying $5/month forever.

https://romanzipp.com/blog/no-you-cant-use-your-6299-canon-camera-as-a-webcam

Proud to see #Trenitalia 🇮🇹 at the top of the most recent comparative analysis of European rail operators. Even above the usually outstanding Swiss and Austrian railways.

Trenitalia, once among the worst operators in Europe, has become in the past decade an example of how to do railways right.

The railway infrastructure itself can be held by a monopoly or quasi-monopolistic entity, which should be never expected to be profitable, nor be subject to market rules. That entity can lease its infrastructure to multiple competitors that run the actual trains (like Italo, which trails not far behind and on par with Swedish and Finnish trains, or smaller, local train operators to fill the gaps on “unprofitable” lines), and those leasing profits can be reinvested into high speed lines, more trains and lower ticket prices.

Not surprised to see the Dutch NS towards the bottom of the chart instead. NS is instead the example of everything that doesn’t work. Once among the best trains in Europe, its services have badly degraded since 2020. Both the Dutch railway operator (ProRail) and the trains operator (NS) are de facto absolute monopolies, but monopolies that are expected to be profitable and subject to market rules, while not being accountable for bad decisions through loss of market share.

That’s literally the worst of the two worlds. It means that both the companies have been struggling with chronic staff shortages for years because their salaries aren’t attractive (something that tends to happen when you run what’s supposed to be a public service while being profitable).

And ticket prices are among the highest in Europe: something that also tends to happen when you have to turn a profit, but you don’t have to worry about overcharging your customers because your customers have nowhere else to go, so the cost of your mismanagement is eventually dumped upon your own users.

And the railway line has been a constant work in progress for the past 5 years, with most of the work running late (because of the aforementioned shortages) and cancelations and delays being the new norm. The Netherlands is the only civilized country I’ve been to where passengers are advised to check in real time if their train is going to run through an app (9292), because even Google Maps can’t keep track of all the mess on their railway. Other countries have already figured out how to stick to their train schedules without surprises.

Oh, and the high speed railway network basically doesn’t exist (besides the French-owned Thalys trains, and the British-owned Eurostar line that Amsterdam will probably see in 2125 given the current construction struggles and delays). That’s because the NS CEO has done a bit of market analysis, noticed that the median trip on one of his trains lasts less than 40 minutes, and decided that Dutch citizens don’t need high speed. This is also the kind of thing that tends to happen when you are expected to be profitable, but you don’t have any competitors to fill the gaps or punish you when you screw things up.

For once, it looks like the efficient Dutch may have a lot to learn from Italians (and French).

As if scraping free content to train #AI models wasn’t enough (and #Meta already has plenty of free content created by billions of users on its platforms), as if refusing to pay a fair share to those content creators wasn’t enough, imagine working in a place where AI engineers send emails asking for clearance to use LibGen or BitTorrent in the office, in order to download GBs of pirated copyrighted work that can be fed to those models, and getting thumbs up from the CEO himself.

The next judge who harshly punishes a teenager for downloading his favorite movie or TV series (or worse the next judge who states that scraping is a crime) deserves to be hit with a rubber hose under his feet. No single user of pirated content ought to be punished until the tech giants that in the past couple of years have played all kinds of dirty games with user content in order to get the best AI model are punished.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/10/meta_libgen_allegation/

@freemo I don’t have an estimate within reach of the shipments carrying green techware, but my working assumption is that that number (in steady conditions) may be at least 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than oil/gas tankers.

After they’ve been built, you need to replace a solar panel or a wind turbine after about 2-3 decades of operation, while you need a continuous supply of oil or gas to burn in order to produce energy.

The only trade that is likely to increase is probably that of lithium and cobalt, as energy storage becomes a more widespread practice, but again the lifespan of a high density battery is much, much longer than that of a barrel of oil.

If we stopped relying on gas and oil imports tomorrow, the number of vessels sailing our seas would also be slashed by half overnight.

Tankers make up half of the world fleet, and their only purpose is to move oil and gas around the world.

In today’s edition of “just because you know how to use a hammer it doesn’t mean that the whole world is made of nails”: LLMs may actually add no value to time series forecasting than more traditional techniques (like multivariate regression, or even a simple attention layer without a full blown LLM downstream). And in many cases their biases may actually make things worse.

Just because a #LLM is good at predicting the next token in natural language contexts, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good at predicting the next numerical value in a time series.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.16964

A new Iranian revolution to overthrow this anachronistic and expired Islamic regime, busy with making people poorer by spending all its money on proxy wars while arresting any woman who dares to show any part of her body, is long overdue.

https://www.dw.com/en/iran-singer-arrested-for-performing-without-hijab/a-71060010

Education in the age of alternative facts, Dunning-Kruger and induced arrogance.