Notices by Matthew Garrett (mjg59@nondeterministic.computer), page 6

@ryanc Looking at the RFC it sounds like the server is allowed to send additional information in the connection - a client that understood this would presumably be able to alter its behaviour (eg, send a desired hostname, get connected to the appropriate backend, re-start negotiation)?

@ryanc Oh hmm is this a "If we send any sort of extension packet here existing clients will break" situation?

Being a middle aged homeowner means getting unreasonably excited about finally replacing all those 4000K recessed bulbs with something a touch warmer

Yo I've got a PhD in genetics from Cambridge and on the off-chance you need it I give you permission to say that Dawkins is a hack

If you're standing there facing people and thinking "They're not going to care about what I have to say" remember that a committee of people who know what the audience is interested in has already decided that the audience is interested in what you have to say

The first real conference talk I gave was on a large stage and I was timetabled against the first public presentation of d-bus and it was a community I had no real prior experience with and yeah it was fucking terrifying but I promise it does get easier

RIP to everyone killed by the borrow checker for their hubris but im different. and better. maybe even better than the borrow checker

@sil I think this is an extremely interesting answer! From the FSF definition we assert that the source code alone is sufficient to understand, but in this hypothetical english→binary compiler we don't necessarily believe the english is sufficient because we don't know what happens next. Why doesn't this apply in existing languages?

@sil That's a strong argument, but what if we had a deterministically trained LLM with only free software inputs?

I have, for a number of reasons, seen a shitload of proprietary source code. Am I disqualified from writing free software because I might incorporate some of the concepts from that proprietary code into my allegedly free software?

@tante What if we also had a model that could take a binary generated in this way and give you the prompt that generated the output?

@tante That kind of suggests that something written in Erlang isn't free software for me if I can't read Erlang

@clacke emacs was non-free before gcc could build it?

@sil The compiler being itself free software has not traditionally been part of the definition of free software

@SpaceLifeForm I am curious about whether people feel the free software definition is philosophical or pragmatic

I think it's fair for a requirement to be that the model that generates this is free software in itself, even though that wasn't a hard requirement in the early free software days (eg, free software was free even if you needed a non-free toolchain to build it before gcc was bootstrapped)

Thought experiment: imagine a language model where you can describe exactly how you want software to behave, and it produces a binary that does that. You don't get the source code, but it works 100% of the time. As long as you can install this binary on whatever device you have, does this achieve the goals of free software?

Turns out the actual reason my video streaming was broken was an upstream kernel bug where under certain circumstances if a packet too big ICMP was received on one interface but a different interface was sending the traffic, the cache on the egress interface wouldn't be properly updated, so full marks to Fastly for diagnosing that and working to get it upstream: https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/4be64c29-f495-4fdb-a565-2540745d5412@fastly.com/T/

If your argument is that vendors should use email for 2FA and password resets instead of SMS then how do you propose Google allow typical users to recover their Gmail password

Random question is CVE-2024-23832 mitigated if you use Soapbox as a Mastodon frontend and if not has anyone checked whether Truth Social (who last updated their Mastodon source download in June 2022) is vulnerable because well