Notices by Gabriele Svelto (gabrielesvelto@fosstodon.org)

@Infoseepage @dangoodin I'm not familiar with CWTCH so I can't comment on that. On Matrix you can encrypt group channels, and while it's cumbersome it guarantees that the host cannot access the group's messages so that's something. It can also be self-hosted which helps with securing it. It's still a mostly centralized solution but for group messaging we don't really have that many good alternatives.

@dangoodin these days we mostly use Matrix and mostly open channels too. Slack is still there but it's usage seems to be rapidly declining. It's a closed platform with no form of encryption or even other basic security measures. Matrix isn't perfect, but as a platform that can be both open and secure, it works pretty well. And I'm told that its federated moderation features really helped in rapidly kicking out bad actors and trolls, and ensuring they stay out of it.

@dangoodin when I started working at Mozilla all group communication was on IRC. It wasn't until 2014 that Slack became a thing inside the org, and initially it was mostly used by people outside of the tech sphere (management, marketing, etc...). Several teams moved there over time, but I didn't like it as I was used to our communication channels that weren't company-only, but also open to contributors and the general public. My teams stayed on IRC first, then moved to Matrix.

I did not expect to see a tech race around a technology that is both useless and that no user wants.

This article gave me something to think about: several undocumented instructions were discovered in modern CPUs, by fuzzing the instruction stream. It would be quite interesting to fuzz old CPUs too. Especially the 68000 family :)

https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2025/01/the-invalid-68030-instruction-that-accidentally-allowed-the-mac-classic-ii-to-successfully-boot-up/

@bhearsum I haven't read too much on the topic but it seems that the DeepSeek LLMs are roughly as good (or as bad) as the big bad OpenAI LLMs but need a fraction of the computational power... making Nvidia's future prospect look bad

I had not realized just how bad the news of the DeepSeek chatbot had been for Nvidia's stock price. I suppose that placing all your bets on a bullshit technology that nobody wants has its downsides.

The whole "Roman salute" thing needs some clarification. There's no such thing as a "Roman salute". It was made up by fascists in Italy and then copied by the nazi regime. Only fascists use it. End of story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_salute

It's great to see that some Firefox users are now self-diagnosing hardware issues on their machines thanks to the tools we've implemented to detect faulty memory: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1i0xtkg/comment/m75fr10/

I hope that this year we'll be able to make this type of information accessible to more users and especially non-technical users. Plenty of them are affected by hardware faults that they aren't aware of, if not for general instability. We're the only project doing work in this area to the best of my knowledge.

Now that a few very rich people houses have burnt down do you think that the mainstream press will start caring about global warming? Asking for the hundred of thousands, or even millions, whose lives have been severely affected by it last year but who weren't on the news.

#GlobalWarming

One of the aspects I like the most about this place is that there are several people in here who I genuinely consider friends even though I've never met them IRL. This is what "social" in "social media" is supposed to be for. Creating bonds, discovering things, discussing, growing in knowledge, having my opinions challenged. Not being spoon-fed mediocre entertainment, propaganda and ads.

I'm really fond of @animefeminist and their reviews because they watch all the new stuff and report on all the junk so that I can simply avoid it (and boy there seems to be a lot of hot garbage around). And when they recommend a show I already know I'm gonna like it a lot

So apparently a straight guy having enjoyable sex (for both) with his wife is gay according to MAGA lunatics. Which probably makes me gay too. And in turn this likely means that everybody on the fediverse is now officially gay.

Hurray people, we won.

https://www.salon.com/2024/12/27/tradwives-incels-and-cat-ladies-the-year-maga-broke-heterosexuality/

I'm upgrading my machine to 96 GiB of RAM so I can run two instances of Visual Studio Code at the same time.

FYI O&O ShutUp10++ is a tool that allows you to disable most of Windows user-hostile features (as well as anti-features) from a very simple UI.

It has plain text explanations of what every toggle does, what are their effect on 3rd party software as well as suggested settings.

It's really useful, you can find it here: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

If you have some old CDs sitting around consider ripping them before disc rot makes them unusable. Fortunately you can always rip partially degraded disks using whipper. I've used it to make perfect rips of very old discs, stuff dating back 30 years which I had used and abused as a teenager. It takes some time to do its thing but it's worth the effort:

https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper

#cd #preservation #DigitalPreservation

The way the western press is talking about #Syria makes it sound like Syrians have no agency at all. There has been so much international interference in the past 14 years that they simply cannot believe that what is happening was done by Syrians for Syrians, and by them alone. 1/4

One of the most hilarious aspect of the last few days is that Elon spent billions so that he could simp harder for Putin and let his propagandists run amok. And this week the site has been filled with videos of Putin's allies having their asses handed over to them, Russian flags being burned and a never-ending stream of memes on the topic.

American capitalists may be waking up to the fact that grinding people to dust for profit while also letting them have all the guns they want might not have been a smart idea

@glynmoody yeah, two people with egos so large they affect the orbit of the moon. Can't wait to see what happens the first time they disagree on something.