Interesting how the numbers between "computer pros" and hobbyists (Steam Survey) diverge. Unsurprisingly for Steam gamers the Windows numbers are way higher but for Linux specifically Ubuntu is crashing hard since a few years from absolute domination to all Ubuntu versions + derivatives (Mint + pop_OS) combined barely making up 20% of the Linux user base whereas at Stack Overflow there's a clear lead of Ubuntu over the rest.
I think for games, people need newer kernels and drivers to support the newer hardware needed to play newer games, and they're willing to put up with the bugs that come along with thay. Ubuntu and Debian (stable) aren't strong at that by definition. I always use an older GPU that supported well by the Ubuntu LTS I run. If it doesn't play something, I'll wait till a new driver lands in that LTS or the next.
Probably because everybody with a Steam Desk shows up as Arch in the survey.
Had you looked up the current stats, you would have known that this is completely false. SteamOS is in massive lead and I used the phrase "general purpose distribution" for a reason.
Ah, I didn't expect the results to be different when looking at the overview, this is what I saw..
Any way to break down that "Other" and see what it contains? If it counts Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS as different operating systems there might be some more Ubuntu versions hiding in there.
It is. It's a rolling release so it has the latest packages. It's not bleeding edge like arch. All software goes thru an automatic testing in OpenQA before they are allowed in the repo so there's some quality control. It's also very stable.
Exactly. And here I am, after 2 days of trying to bend NixOS to my will, and I gave up. Tomorrow, I'm going back to Fedora, where everything worked perfectly, because I fell for "Shiny thing sindrome", or the "grass is greener on the other side" stuff. Should have never doubted it. After 2 years of full time Linux and a lot of distrohopping, one would think I'd have known better.
NixOS is a nightmare. It works then you want to do something that can be done on another distro and you canât. Same just went to silver blue at least acts like a regular distro.
Top paying technologies interestingly has Go, Rust and Zig almost same medium salary, and very close (in that order). Immadiately followed by "Bash/Shell"? Yet, the most used languages such as Python and JavaScript are way down. Funny how Bash and Shell scripting is more used than Java, C#, C++ and C, while on the same time earns more money than those languages.
Can you make a living as a "Bash"/"Shell" programmer? :D
I don't think this is a malicious act by Google, yet alone intentional at all. (English is not my native language and I'm unsure of how this sentence turned out. Is my grammar correct?)
Google uses a shit ton of automation on it's services. Youtube being the biggest example with all the unfair bans and copyright strikes. I believe this to be simply a case of those.
Yes it literally has the update notes in fdroid saying they updated their browser integration to comply with Google services. It was most likely an abrupt code and compliance issue generated automatically.
Afrikaner kraftigt överrepresenterade bland offer för dödligt vÄld. Detta enligt en rapport frÄn JÀrvaveckan Research som gjorts med stöd av Socialstyrelsen. Rapporten jÀmfört hÀlsoskillnader och hÀlsoutfall hos personer med bakgrund i Asien och Afrika.
Hamnarbetarförbundet oroat över kokainsmugglingen. Svenska hamnarbetareförbundet Àr enligt vad de sÀger i en artikel i tidningen Arbetaren oroliga för att riskerar att bli mÄltavlor i samband med narkotikasmuggling.
Welcome back to another update. Some short housekeeping notes: Last Week in Fediverse will now release every Wednesday. Furthermore, I’ve split all news about Bluesky and the ATmosphere into it’s own separate newsletter, Last Week in the ATmosphere. I originally wanted to keep them together, but the newsletters were simply getting too big, so it was time to split them. Lots of news this week with FediForum, a Fediverse Discovery Project, and mozilla.social shutting down, so lets dive in.
Welcome back to another update. Some short housekeeping notes: Last Week in Fediverse will now release every Wednesday. Furthermore, Iâve split all news about Bluesky and the ATmosphere into itâs own separate newsletter, Last Week in the ATmosphere. I originally wanted to keep them together, but the newsletters were simply getting too big, so it was time to split them. Lots of news this week with FediForum, a Fediverse Discovery Project, and mozilla.social shutting down, so lets dive in.
Welcome back to another update. Some short housekeeping notes: Last Week in Fediverse will now release every Wednesday. Furthermore, Iâve split all news about Bluesky and the ATmosphere into itâs own separate newsletter, Last Week in the ATmosphere. I originally wanted to keep them together, but the newsletters were simply getting too big, so it was time to split them. Lots of news this week with FediForum, a Fediverse Discovery Project, and mozilla.social shutting down, so lets dive in.
The news
The fourth edition of FediForum happened this week, a three-day unconference with speed demos of fediverse projects as well as some 40 open sessions about anything related to the fediverse. There were 14 demos, of which the video recordings should be available soon. Two demos stood out to me, showing products that have not been seen before, with Newsmast with channel.org, and Darius Kazemiâs ActivityPub Data Observatory. While there were lots of other great demos as well (Bandwagon for example), these mainly featured existing products.
Channel.org is the latest project by Newsmast, and is a way for organisations, nonprofits, and news publishers to build their own channel for outreach. It is fully connected to the fediverse with the front-end providing a clear and simplified interface that simply shows the latest posts by a channel. This can be seen with the demo Channel for the Kamala Harris Group, which recently got switched over to use Patchwork, Newsmast other fediverse project. Channel.org is based on Patchwork, which is a plug-in architecture that Mastodon server admins can run on top of their Mastodon server. Patchwork is getting close to being released, and Newsmast is currently looking for admins who are willing participate. Patchwork is free and publicly available, while Channel.org will require a paid membership and targets larger public organisations.
The ActivityPub Data Observatory allows fediverse developers to scan the structure (not the content!) of data that gets send around on the fediverse, allowing developers to easily compare how different sofware structures their ActivityPub data. For example, you can easily compare how Misskey structures the ActivityPub code of a note, versus how Mastodon sends the ActivityPub code for a note. The open-ended nature of ActivityPub allows developers to give their own spin on implementing ActivityPub
As for the sessions, one recurring theme I noted is the need and demand for spaces to discuss the governance and social side of the fediverse and fediverse developments. While there are spaces for the technical aspects of the discussion of the fediverse and the protocol with the SocialCG, the SocialHub and the Fediverse Developer Network, these communities are less accessible to the technical inclined people. This is a conversation that also has come up during previous FediForum sessions. The Fediverse Governance Report also notes a lack of formal channels for Federated Diplomacy. While the need and demand is clearly there, it seems to be hard to figure out a way to establish such communications channels in a way that also establishes them as legitimate places for discussions and diplomacy.
Another aspect that stood out to me is the lack of discussions that I noticed about Bluesky during FediForum, and what lessons can be learned that can be applied to the fediverse. Bluesky has managed to grow significantly bigger than the fediverse at this point, with around 5 times as many monthly active users, as well as onboarding the Brazilian community. It seems to me that it is worth reflecting on why that is, and how the fediverse can better show itself as a good, ethical social network that people would like to join.
Fediverse Discovery Providers
The organisation behind Mastodon (Mastodon gGmbH) has announced a new project, Fediscovery, that explores decentralised search and discovery for the fediverse. The project got funded by NGI Search, and âexplores the possibilities for better search and discovery on the Fediverse in the form of an optional, pluggable service. This service should be decentralized, independent of any one specific Fediverse service and respect user choice and privacy.â Mastodon gGmbH is explicitly not building only for Mastodon, they make it clear that they intend Fediscovery to be used by the wider fediverse, not only Mastodon.
What Mastodon gGmbH is building here is what they call a âFediverse Auxiliary Service Providersâ. These auxiliary service providers can potentially do a variety of different services. The Fediscovery project is about building one of these service providers, a disovery provider, as a minimum proof of concept and as a demonstration what types of services other people can build as well. The plans are currently still in the very early stages, and more information expected at the end of September. For my own understanding I think of a Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider as pretty much a Relay, with some minor yet-to-be-announced differences.
Mastodon gGmbH is also explicit in focusing on opt-in consent for the service, stating that it will âonly ingest content from creators who opted in to discovery in the first place. Instances sending content to discovery providers should make sure to only send such content in the first place as well. All other information a discovery provider gathers should be anonymous.â
During a FediForum session about Fediscovery, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput confirmed that between 8% and 10% of active accounts have opted into Mastodonâs search, a year after it has been released. It indicates one of the fundamental challenges of any design that is opt-in: very few people will change the default settings, irregardless of what the settings are about. As Discovery and Search systems gain value by covering a bigger network, it shows the fundamental tensions that Mastodon gGmbH will have to grapple with while building Fediscovery.
Mozilla shuts down mozilla.social fediverse server
Mozilla has announced that they will shut down the mozilla.social server in December 2024. The server was announced in December 2022 as a way to âexplore healthy social media alternativeâ. The project was originally quite big in scope, with planned integrations to log in with Firefox, and the GitHub repo showed their own mobile clients, and a custom front-end based on Elk. In 2023 Mozilla started to very slowly open up in a private beta, but the number of people getting access has been low. In February 2024 Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox, scaling back their investments in various products, including their mozilla.social fediverse server. In an accompanying memo Mozilla stated at the time: âThe actions weâre taking today will make this strategic correction, working through a much smaller team to participate in the Mastodon ecosystem and more rapidly bring smaller experiments to people that choose to live on the mozilla.social instance.â
It seems like these more rapid smaller experiments never came, nor did it seem that Mozilla was particularly interested in growing the server. I honestly cannot find out if the server ever opened up for open registrations after they ran a waitlist for a long time, but it seems like it they have not. At any rate, the experiment stayed small, and mozilla.social currently has just below 300 active users.
The shutdown of Mozilla.social does raise questions about the server-centric model that the fediverse is based around: are there organisations that are willing to run large general-purpose fediverse servers, and have the ability to handle the infrastructure costs and moderation requirements that come with it. Mozilla seemed like it would be a good organisation to potentially do that. With Mozilla now pulling back, focusing on smaller servers might be a more logical direction going forward.
In Other News
Threads has figured out how maximise publicity by making minimal incremental updates to their ActivityPub implementation, edition 501.
Bonfire showcases how with third-party extensions scientists can display ârelevant data about their work and research topics directly on their profiles.â Bonfire does not yet know when the platform will launch.
The client Kaiteki, which focused on being a client for all the different microblogging platforms in the fediverse, stops development.
The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research had stopped using their Mastodon account in October 2023, and after not posting for most of the year they said theyâd close the account. After a large pushback from the community they reconsidered the decision and said theyâd continue using the account again.
The new Trust and Safety Taskforce with the SocialCG has set up an issue tracker for protocol level and/or specification changes to improve trust and safety on the fediverse.
The Fediverse Berlin Day had multiple sessions about, well, the fediverse. Full live stream available here, with the German publisher ARD talking about their fediverse experience and strategy. Evan Prodromou also gave a talk about a âbigger, better fediverseâ, which you can watch here. I do want to note that I find it very hard to square Prodromouâs estimation of 10 million federated Threads account with the fact that Mastodon.social (which accounts for a quarter of the entire fediverseâ monthly active users) currently knows about 18000 federated Threads accounts.
It's probably hard for me to say this, but... Kaiteki will go the way of Megalodon, so development will stop. For the past few months, I've been struggling to make any progress at all.
I can't say I ever really understood what Newsmast is up to, but Channel.org looks pretty nifty. It seems like a good way for organisations consisting of several independent people to get together and present all their federated content in one public channel.
"Bluesky has managed to grow significantly bigger than the fediverse at this point, with around 5 times as many monthly active users, as well as onboarding the Brazilian community. It seems to me that it is worth reflecting on why that is, and how the fediverse can better show itself as a good, ethical social network that people would like to join."
Yeah, why is that? On the one hand, LGBTQ is strong in the Fediverse, and tech nerds of course. But other than that ... the Fediverse never had this kind of cultural momentum.
I guess mastodon.social? Its not only the Brazilians, its also BTS army, and the japanese community. They also went to Bluesky instead of Fedi. Maybe the fediverse is too euro-centric?
Maybe at some point swifties could join the Fediverse?
I used to watch "This Week in Tech" with Leo Laporte, before I realized he was a massive douche. And he always shortened his show name to TwiT.
I tried to do the same thing with your show name, and got "LwiF", which when I said it outloud made me sound like I was inventing a new french word. Say it outloud. It's fun to say. LWIF!
Minskat stöd till solceller bromsar klimatomstÀllningen. Svensk Solenergi Àr starkt kritiska till att regeringen föreslÄr att minska ett stöd och helt ta bort ett annat i samma svep. Stödsystemen som regeringen angriper Àr och har varit viktiga för att accelerera hushÄllens och smÄföretagens elektrifiering.
I reinstalled tlp because installing gdm3 removed it
After selecting an app search result, instead of a new window opening, an existing window was focused, and this led to me discovering that my built-in extensions were gone
While writing this post, I got the idea of using the list of removed packages in the apt history log output from apt install libpipewire-0.3-0/bookworm-backports to see what packages to install again, so I did that, then I also had to uninstall firefox-esr again
I rebooted, and my built-in extensions and other stuff were resurrected, so now I have full redemption
Another Window Session Manager restored my windows in a way that pissed me off
(Failed attempts of recovery are not listed)
Edit: actually I made the mistake 1 minute before the start of class
Reminds me of what happened with PopOS. I did not expect this to happen with Debian. I'm glad you figured something out and have a working system again! Maybe we really need Atomic style distributions for stable environments.
You should consider switching to some immutable distro like Silver Blue, uBlue, etc. for the peace of mind and the easiness to revert back to some stable system. I am currently using one in conjunction with Nix and it is truly a blessing.
Okay, here me out, but the other day I accidentally rebased my nvidia Bazzite system to the testing version of the deck image. It would fuzz out before even the bios splash. So yeah, you can still mess it up lol
Yeah, I realise a comment like this is mostly unhelpful (switching distros is a pain, of course - even just the hassle of moving over your data), but it does remind me how glad I am that I did it at some point. Painless upgrades are amazing.
(That said, it's not entirely risk-free; although I never got an unworkable system, at some point upgrades were blocked until I did some manual work. Universal Blue had similar issues.)
Damn, I didn't even realize that was doable lol. At least the nix part, the rest definitely sounds like stuff I might've accidentally done myself while learning the ropes.
That's why it's a good idea to take a btrfs snapshot before updating or changing things. Snapshots are almost instant and sure save a lot of work if you break something.
I feel you. I once was messing around with python and realized I had too many python versions installed for no reason, so I uninstalled them all to install a single one.
True, I still think it's fair to criticize the package managers and distros for not anticipating this common scenario and having the ability to roll back easily. How many millions of Linux users have experienced this issue? I'll bet a few.
Debian, Gentoo come from another generation and sometimes it shows, I mean snapshots weren't even a thing yet AFAIK.
Actually, I don't think you could break a system in quite this way in Gentoo these days. Portage generally doesn't remove packages during upgrades (certainly not unrelated ones that would break the depgraph!). It would have exited with (in this case) a message about version conflicts before changing any packages and left it for the user to sort out. Modern versions of portage do a pretty good job of keeping you from shooting yourself in the foot by accident, while leaving you with a lot of leeway for doing so on purpose.
This is one of the reasons I love nix. Most of the time if I break it I just roll back, if I really fuck it up I just reinstall, rebuild my config and I'm back
What is wrong with your system that requires disabeling updates? Been running debian stable on a few hundred servers for 25 ish years. And I always install and enable unattended upgrades. And it have never been a problem. Not even once.
This is why I love ostree distributions so much for my laptop. Not only can I safely update in class, I once switched distributions twice in one day of classes with only like 30s of total downtime, I just waited for the professor to go off on a tangent I didn't need to take notes about so I could reboot.
This was definitely one of my least favorite things when I used Debian.
It shows that we need to think about how users are performing tasks and how to intuitively make their usage more successful. The OS should try to get out of the way and always have the ability to easily revert in the case of platform failure.
There should be an undo oopsies feature you can turn on and off somewhere so in terminal when I accidentally rm -f * the entire system doesn't eat it's own tail.
While that sounds good it would be extremely complex to actually implement. The only real-world feature like this is btrfs snapshots (or filesystem snapshots generally). The good thing is that snapshots only store the difference in data and so they don't have to take up much space.
If files are removed from the Index it would only seem natural that they can be undeleted until their physical address is recycled and overwritten.
In fact I remember something like this pre Windows 95 era where files were crossed out. Undeleting them was like magic.
This is why the windows term "Recycle" is more appropriate because the data remains until the space is reused or zero'd out.
This is the kind of reexamining we need, does our current iteration make sense from an engineering perspective or is it just a evolution of a bunch of archaic stuff from a time that doesn't represent the present tech world at all.
I would be okay with replacing rm with recycle and shred as their function is more clear in the name.
There's a colossal amount of work that goes into making that command usable and reliable, and I'm glad to say the yum-adjacent distros are still putting in the effort. That may change, but so far it's been there to save my bacon when I need it.
Good person! This is how you learn Linux and gain experience. Trying to understand why something happened and trying to fix it using that understanding. Not "just reinstall" or worse "you should use X distro instead."
This doesn't feel like something that should happen. Like at all. I don't want experience repairing stuff. I want stuff not breaking. I know mos tpeople here treat a OS like a hobby, but for most people its a tool.
More memory because Firefox forks browser tab processes to save memory, and you spawn an entire separate browser with more processes apart from just the one tab.
You might be interested in reading the Unix Haters Handbook. I mean, that the command to install a backport so easily allowed you to remove core packages without a... Better warning, is an old complaint
This is why I use Debian 12 with minimal backports on my main college laptop. (I just have backports kernel and firmware for the Wi-Fi card as well as backports smartctl due to a bugfix).
Hard lesson to learn, I've been taught the same myself.
Some others have said it already, but I will repeat the gospel, use Timeshift!
I did nearly the exact same thing you did on my Debian laptop at a tech conference right at the beginning of an important session.
I decided to mess around with my wireless drivers. IDK why I thought that was a good idea, I don't remember what I was trying to do, but I borked my networking stack completely.
couldn't get it to reconnect, couldn't get the settings to revert or anything.
I quickly ran Timeshift and selected my most recent automatic daily restore point. 5 minutes later I was back 100% Internet was working perfectly, nothing funky, and I was able to catch up and follow the lecture again.
Timeshift is awesome too because it runs from the command line if you need it to. So even borking your GUI isn't a death sentence, you can still run Timeshift from the terminal and restore your system.
At the center of the debate are key changes in the language used to describe Zionism, the movement that called for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in what is now Israel.
The 2023 version of the page framed Zionism as a nationalist movement born in the 19th century that sought to secure Jewish self-determination.
In contrast, the 2024 version of the entry introduces more charged terminology, describing Zionism as an âethno-cultural nationalistâ movement that engaged in âcolonization of a land outside of Europe,â with a heightened focus on the resulting conflicts with Palestinian Arabs.
âZionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible,â it reads.
"near the end of the ottoman empire there was a very brief period where there was some coexistence" @Lets_Eat_Grandma
For centuries, Muslims, Christians and Jews shared Palestine. How "peaceful" that was is debatable. That Palestinians of all creeds had homes on those lands is beyond dispute.
Then, the Zionists started arriving. They wanted to be the Master Race of the region. That's the problem.
The claim the other person was making was very, very obviously not the absurdity you represent it as.
The residents of Palestine were peacefully coexisting Jews, Arabs, and Muslim descendants of the bronze-age indigenous people before the inception of Zionism by the British Empire in the early 1900s.
Nowhere does this say "were peacefully coexisting since the bronze age," it says "these populations that descended from groups there since the bronze age were, during some period of time prior to zionism, peacefully coexisting."
There are other problems with what you said, e.g. I wouldn't blame the indigenous Christian inhabitants for the Crusades, but I don't really want to get into this, I just want to point out that you wildly misrepresented your interlocutor.
Linus Torvalds Speaks on the the divide between Rust and C Linux developers an the future Linux. Will things like fragmentation among the open source community hurt the Linux Kernel? We'll listen to the Creator of Linux.
I took notes for the benefit of anyone who doesn't like their info in video form. My attempt to summarize what Linus says:
He enjoys the arguments, it's nice that Rust has livened up the discussion. It shows that people care.
It's more contentious than it should be sometimes with religious overtones reminiscent of vi versus emacs. Some like it, some don't, and that's okay.
Too early to see if Rust in the kernel ultimately fails or succeeds, that will take time, but he's optimistic about it.
The kernel is not normal C. They use tools that enforce rules that are not part of the language, including memory safety infrastructure. This has been incrementally added over a long time, which is what allowed people to do it without the kind of outcry that the Rust efforts produce by trying to change things more quickly.
There aren't many languages that can deal with system issues, so unless you want to use assembler it's going to be C, C-like, or Rust. So probably there will be some systems other than Linux that do use Rust.
If you make your own he's looking forward to seeing it.
Nor does Forth (which used to be a common choice for "first thing to bootstrap on this new chip architecture we have no real OS for yet"). Alas, they're just not popular languages these days.
Forth is fun but not really suitable for large, long-lasting projects with huge developer communities. Linux isn't being bootstrapped, it's already here and has been around for decades and it's huge. And, I think bootstrapping-by-poking-around on a new architecture has stopped being important. Today, you have compiler and OS's targeted to the new architecture under simulation long before there is any hardware, with excellent debugging tools available in the simulator.
I have played with Ada but not done anything "real" with it. I think I'd be ok with using it. It seems better than C in most regards. I haven't really looked into Rust but from what I can gather, its main innovation is the borrow checker, and Ada might get something like that too (influenced by Rust).
I don't understand why Linux is so huge and complicaed anyway. At least on servers, most Linux kernels are running under hypervisors that abstract away the hardware. So what else is going on in there? Linux is at least 10x as much code as BSD kernels from back in the day (idk about now). It might be feasible to write a usable Posix kernel as a hypervisor guest in a garbage collected language. But, I haven't looked into this very much.
I don't think Ada in the kernel would get any cultural acceptance. Rust has been hard enough. C++ was vehemently rejected decades ago though the reasons made some sense at the time. Adopting C++ today would be pretty crazy. I don't see much alternative to Rust (or in a different world, Ada) in the monolithic kernel. But Rust seems like it's still in beta test, and the kernel architecture itself seems like a legacy beast. Do you know of anything else? I can't take D or Eiffel or anything like that seriously. And part of it is the crappiness of the hardware companies. Maybe it will have to be left to future generations.
If we can believe random strangers in the internet, then Linus uses a self maintained lighter version of Emacs, or has. Looks like Linus is an Emacs guy.
In testing, to settle a bet by a rabid cult-of-vi peer, I opened a given set of files in each editor, each a day apart because I couldn't be arsed to clear caches. This guy, otherwise a prince, was railing about emacs, but otherwise suffered days of waiting.
10/10 the memory usage by his precious vi was same-or-more than emacs.
There's so many shared libs pulled in by the shell that all the fuddy doomsaying about bloat is now just noise.
I avoid vi because even in 1992 it was crusty and wrong-headed. 30 years on the hard-headed cult and the app haven't changed.
I don't see how microEmacs can improve on what we have by default, and I worry that the more niche the product is the harder it will be to find answers online. But I'm willing to be swayed if anyone can pitch its virtues.
MicroEmacs was written in 1985 and has nothing to do with GNU Emacs (which people just call Emacs these days). Itâs entirely outside of the vi-vs-emacs war.
Linus did have emotion control issues and was not always completely rational, but he's gone a long way towards being incredibly responsible to his child that powers the world.
Also, he long understands that Linux ain't a hobby project, which some programmers still get to think.
He just mentioned it as an example of a kernel written in Rust. The interviewer asked if Rust isn't accepted into the Linux kernel, would someone go out and build their own in Rust, and Linus mentioned Redox saying that's already happened.
Linus Torvalds has made some interesting comments on the Rust vs C debate in the Linux kernel. He enjoys the discussions because it shows that people care about the project, even though things can get a little heated like the classic vi vs emacs arguments. The Rust conversation is still in its early days, and while Linus is optimistic about its future in the kernel, it’s too soon to say whether it will ultimately succeed or fail.
He points out that the Linux kernel isn't just "normal" C it's C with additional tools and rules that ensure memory safety and other protections. This incremental approach has allowed for changes without causing the kind of backlash that Rust has faced with its more dramatic changes.
At the end of the day, the kernel has to deal with system-level issues, and unless you're working in assembly, it’s going to be C, C-like, or Rust. Linus is looking forward to seeing how other systems outside of Linux might adopt Rust for their own needs.
If you're interested in exploring more of these tech discussions or maybe looking for some r
... show more
Linus Torvalds has made some interesting comments on the Rust vs C debate in the Linux kernel. He enjoys the discussions because it shows that people care about the project, even though things can get a little heated like the classic vi vs emacs arguments. The Rust conversation is still in its early days, and while Linus is optimistic about its future in the kernel, itâs too soon to say whether it will ultimately succeed or fail.
He points out that the Linux kernel isn't just "normal" C it's C with additional tools and rules that ensure memory safety and other protections. This incremental approach has allowed for changes without causing the kind of backlash that Rust has faced with its more dramatic changes.
At the end of the day, the kernel has to deal with system-level issues, and unless you're working in assembly, itâs going to be C, C-like, or Rust. Linus is looking forward to seeing how other systems outside of Linux might adopt Rust for their own needs.
If you're interested in exploring more of these tech discussions or maybe looking for some related tools, you can download APK for access to various Linux utilities on mobile.
FWIW, it's a 9 min video and doesn't contain anything earth shattering or easily summarized. Basically there is some friction between C and Rust devs, and Linus doesn't think that it's such a bad thing (there has be interesting discussion) and it's way too early to call Rust in the kernel a failure.
Zig is feasible for systems programming and some, (most notably, the Primeagen in one video) claim it should have gone into the kernel instead of Rust, but I don't know Zig so I don't feel qualified to comment beyond that.
Zig is indeed designed specifically for such tasks as system programming and interoperability with C code. However it is not yet ready for production usage as necessary infrastructure is not yet done and each new version introduces breaking changes. Developers recomend waiting version 1.0 before using it in any serious project.
it's more "it forces you to make it burrow checker friendly".
A burrow checker is not the only mechanism to write safe code. All the mess of Rust is all because this is the strategy they adopted.
And this strategy, like everything in this world, has trade offs. It just happens that there are a lot, like, - a lot -, of trade offs, and those are insufferable when it comes to Rust...
You can't improve and break silence without discussing and making changes. The existing maintainers won't live forever, having Rust in the Kernel is a bet on the future. Linus wouldn't have adopted and accepted Rust, if he wasn't thinking its worth it. And looks like it was already worth it.
No. That does not mean they have to program in both languages. If the programmer only understand one language (which would be a shame), then they only need to program in their field. This increases the talent base, not reduces it. C programmers do not need to be a Rust expert, so what in the world are you saying there? They just need to cooperate!
8 years in a row. I can understand the perspective of someone who spent years honing their craft in C/C++ and not wanting to learn a new language. But, the Harassment of the "Rust in Linux Lead" is ridiculous. I'm not saying you are harassing. But, saying it's a tech bro thing is just negative and doesn't do justice to how many devs just like rust.
I only have something against the syntax, but nothing against anything else about it, nor is my comment meant as a negative against the language. What I referred to was simply about how that stupid sentence is not a good comment and completely personal opinion. I am sure a lot of programming languages would have gotten the same label at one point in time. And many times they have been superseded by the next big thing.
Fair enough. Personally, I am a developer who only has worked professionally in C#. C/C++ scare me. I would get used to it if I were to use it professionally. on the other hand, I picked up rust as a hobby language for some low level stuff because I love the guardrails the compiler provides. I think rust would help make me a better C programmer TBH.
C isn't too hard if you learn about how memory and pointers work, which seems to be something Rust tries to get away from. So I'm not sure it would make you a better C programmer.
If anything I think that the current rust discourse is a fad. I'm not sure what it is about rust that makes people have so strong opinions about it but I can't wait for it to become a "normal" language so that people can chill about it a bit.
@λλλ @x00za Well for what it's worth, there is Redox, a Posix compliant kernel written entirely in Rust. There are some other aspects of Redox I don't like, chiefly it's use of a microkernel, which, while it makes portability better it exacts a performance penalty, and of having all drivers operate in userland, perhaps better from a security standpoint but again exacts a performance penalty.
Zig is safer than C, but not on a level that is comparable to Rust, so it lacks its biggest selling point. Unfortunately just being a more modern language is not enough to sell it.
So imagine if trying to fit in a C-like cousin failed
C++ was not added to Linux because Linus Torvalds thought it was an horrible language, not because it was not possible to integrate in the kernel.
It's more the determinacy, a GC randomly fires up and your systems stops for some long amount of time. There are pauseless GCs but that's a different nightmare.
The kernel has things similar to GCs. They're used for more specialized tasks, and some (like rcu) are absolute nightmares that have take decades to get working.
Zig has other selling points, that are arguably more suitable for system programming. Rust's obsession with safety (which is still not absolute even in rust) is not the only thing to consider.
And because it looks like C, JavaScript, Bash and a few others all mixed up together.
I've heard Rust described as âRust is what you get when you put all the good features of other programming languages together. You can't read it, but it's freaking fast!â
Zig is a very new and immature language. It won't be kernel-ready for at l'East another 10 years.
a better syntax
That's pretty suggestive. Rust syntax is pretty good. Postfix try is just better for example.
Zig also uses special syntax for things like error and nullability instead of having them just be enums, making the language more complex and less flexible for no benefit.
Syntax is also not everything. Rust has extremely good error messages. Going through Zig's learning documentation, half the error messages are unreadable because I have to scroll to see the actual error and data because it's on the same line as the absolute path as the file were the error comes from
No hidden memory allocation
That's a library design question, not a language question. Rust for Linux uses its own data collections that don't perform hidden memory allocations instead of the ones from the standard library.
it's more readable
I don't know, Rust is one of the m
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Zig is a very new and immature language. It won't be kernel-ready for at l'East another 10 years.
a better syntax
That's pretty suggestive. Rust syntax is pretty good. Postfix try is just better for example.
Zig also uses special syntax for things like error and nullability instead of having them just be enums, making the language more complex and less flexible for no benefit.
Syntax is also not everything. Rust has extremely good error messages. Going through Zig's learning documentation, half the error messages are unreadable because I have to scroll to see the actual error and data because it's on the same line as the absolute path as the file were the error comes from
No hidden memory allocation
That's a library design question, not a language question. Rust for Linux uses its own data collections that don't perform hidden memory allocations instead of the ones from the standard library.
it's more readable
I don't know, Rust is one of the most readablelangueage for me.
Fast compile time
Is it still the case once you have a very large project and make use of comptime?
it's simpler to learn
Not true. Because it doesn't have the guardrails that rust has, you must build a mental model of where the guardrails should be so you don't make mistakes. Arguably this is something that C maintainers already know how to do, but it's also not something they do flawlessly from just looking at the bugs that regularly need to be fixed.
Being able to write code faster does not equate being able to write correct code faster.
Really great interop with C
Yes, because it's basically C with some syntax sugar. Rust is a Generational change.
If you believe in ADTs, limiting mutation, & a type system that goes beyond Rustâs affine types + lack of refinements (including a interleaved proof system), you could be writing kernel code in ATS which compiles to C.
Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that you use Coq to prove your theroem, then need to rewrite it in something else. I think there is some OCaml integration, but OCamlâwhile having create performance for a high level language & fairly predictable outputâisnât well-suited for very low-level kernel code. The difference in the ATS case (with the ML syntax similarity đ€) is you can a) write it all in a single language & b) you can interweave proof, type, & value-level code thru the language instead of separating them; which means you functions need to make the proof-level asserts inside their bodies to satisfy the compiler if written with these requirements, or the type level asserting the linear type usage with value-level requirements to deallocate memory as well as compeletly prevent double free & use after free.
Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that you use Coq to prove your theroem, then need to rewrite it in something else. I think there is some OCaml integration, but OCaml—while having create performance for a high level language & fairly predictable output—isn’t well-suited for very low-level kernel code. The difference in the ATS case (with the ML syntax similarity 🤘) is you can a) write it all in a single language & b) you can interweave proof, type, & value-level code thru the language instead of separating them; which means your functions need to make the proof-level asserts inside their bodies to satisfy the compiler if written with these requirements, or the type level asserting the linear type usage with value-level requirements to if allocating memory, must deallocate memory as well as compeletly prevent double free & use after free.
For those in the back: Rust can’t do this with its affine types only preventing using a resource multiple times (at most once), where linear types say you must
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Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that you use Coq to prove your theroem, then need to rewrite it in something else. I think there is some OCaml integration, but OCamlâwhile having create performance for a high level language & fairly predictable outputâisnât well-suited for very low-level kernel code. The difference in the ATS case (with the ML syntax similarity đ€) is you can a) write it all in a single language & b) you can interweave proof, type, & value-level code thru the language instead of separating them; which means your functions need to make the proof-level asserts inside their bodies to satisfy the compiler if written with these requirements, or the type level asserting the linear type usage with value-level requirements to if allocating memory, must deallocate memory as well as compeletly prevent double free & use after free.
For those in the back: Rust canât do this with its affine types only preventing using a resource multiple times (at most once), where linear types say you must use once & can only use once.
You'r right that only OCaml and Haskell can be used as extraction target for Coq programs. However, it is possible to use Coq to write verified C software. On example is the Verified Software Toolchain that lets you translate C programs to a format that Coq understands and can prove theorems regarding their behavior.
I also dont like videos for this stuff. Summarized using kagi's universal summarizer, sharing here:
The integration of Rust into the Linux kernel has been a contentious topic, with some long-term maintainers resisting the changes required for memory-safe Rust code.
The debate over Rust vs. C in the Linux kernel has taken on "almost religious overtones" in certain areas, reflecting the differing design philosophies and expectations.
Linus Torvalds sees the Rust discussion as a positive thing, as it has "livened up some of the discussions" and shows how much people care about the kernel.
Not everyone in the kernel community understands everything about the kernel, and specialization is common - some focus on drivers, others on architectures, filesystems, etc. The same is true for Rust and C.
Linus does not think the Rust integration is a failure, as it's still early, and even if it were, that's how the community learns and improves.
The challenge is that Rust's memory-safe architecture requires changes to the existing infrastructure
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I also dont like videos for this stuff. Summarized using kagi's universal summarizer, sharing here:
The integration of Rust into the Linux kernel has been a contentious topic, with some long-term maintainers resisting the changes required for memory-safe Rust code.
The debate over Rust vs. C in the Linux kernel has taken on "almost religious overtones" in certain areas, reflecting the differing design philosophies and expectations.
Linus Torvalds sees the Rust discussion as a positive thing, as it has "livened up some of the discussions" and shows how much people care about the kernel.
Not everyone in the kernel community understands everything about the kernel, and specialization is common - some focus on drivers, others on architectures, filesystems, etc. The same is true for Rust and C.
Linus does not think the Rust integration is a failure, as it's still early, and even if it were, that's how the community learns and improves.
The challenge is that Rust's memory-safe architecture requires changes to the existing infrastructure, which some long-time maintainers, like the DRM subsystem people, are resistant to.
The Linux kernel has developed a lot of its own memory safety infrastructure over time for C, which has allowed incremental changes, whereas the Rust changes are more "in your face."
Despite the struggles with Rust integration, Linus believes Linux is so widely used and entrenched that alternative "bottom-up grown-up from the start Rust kernels" are unlikely to displace it.
Linus sees the embedded/IoT space as an area where alternative kernels built around different languages like Rust may emerge, but does not see Linux losing its dominance as a general-purpose OS.
Overall, Linus views the Rust debate as a positive sign of the community's passion and an opportunity to learn, even if the integration process is challenging.
UB is only one class of error though. I get nervous when people talk about re-writing battle hardened code which has been used - and reviewed by the community - for decades because there are going to be many subtleties and edge cases which are not immediately apparent for any developer attempting a re-implementation.
This video is full of jarring edits which initially made me wonder if someone had cut out words or phrases to create an abbreviated version. But, then I realized there are way too many of them to have been done manually. I checked the full original video and from the few edits i manually checked it seems like it is just inconsequential pauses etc that were removed: for instance, when Linus says "the other side of that picture" in the original there is an extra "p" sound which is removed here.
Yet another irritating and unnecessary application of neural networks, I guess.
This is the last minor release before v7, but it's packed with interesting new features! Let's have a look :) Separate audio and video streams for mor...
I feel so bad for peertube. It's such a great idea, but until it has a full platform wide search options, and regular content producers in areas OTHER than technology, it will never catch on.
Should be on by default, and unable to be deselected on every instance. Anyways, I went to your instance, searched "Cleveland", and among some other crappy videos that aren't worth watching I found THIS GEM
For me, I found that there were a few channels I subscribe to on youtube that also upload on freetube, so I watch their videos on freetube instead. I also find that the image quality is better than youtube.
Unfortunately the official app is currently only being developed for android so I wonât be able to use it on my iPhone. I should try to support them more so they can get around to it quicker.
I would love to see a Canadian Peertube instance perhaps Fedecan may be able to look into it.
peertube.ca has been registered since last year, but no Peertube instance yet. Perhaps in the future. However, if you check this list instances.joinpeertube.org/ins⊠you will see lots of Canadian instances.
This is the last minor release before v7, but it's packed with interesting new features! Let's have a look :) Separate audio and video streams for mor...
Welcome back to another update. Some short housekeeping notes: Last Week in Fediverse will now release every Wednesday. Furthermore, I’ve split all news about Bluesky and the ATmosphere into it’s own separate newsletter, Last Week in the ATmosphere. I originally wanted to keep them together, but the newsletters were simply getting too big, so it was time to split them. Lots of news this week with FediForum, a Fediverse Discovery Project, and mozilla.social shutting down, so lets dive in.
The news
The fourth edition of FediForum happened this week, a three-day unconference with speed demos of fediverse projects as well as some 40 open sessions about anything related to the fediverse. There were 14 demos, of which the video recordings should be available soon. Two demos stood out to me, showing products that have not been seen before, with Newsmast with channel.org, and Darius Ka
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Last Week in Fediverse â ep 84
Welcome back to another update. Some short housekeeping notes: Last Week in Fediverse will now release every Wednesday. Furthermore, Iâve split all news about Bluesky and the ATmosphere into itâs own separate newsletter, Last Week in the ATmosphere. I originally wanted to keep them together, but the newsletters were simply getting too big, so it was time to split them. Lots of news this week with FediForum, a Fediverse Discovery Project, and mozilla.social shutting down, so lets dive in.
The news
The fourth edition of FediForum happened this week, a three-day unconference with speed demos of fediverse projects as well as some 40 open sessions about anything related to the fediverse. There were 14 demos, of which the video recordings should be available soon. Two demos stood out to me, showing products that have not been seen before, with Newsmast with channel.org, and Darius Kazemiâs ActivityPub Data Observatory. While there were lots of other great demos as well (Bandwagon for example), these mainly featured existing products.
Channel.org is the latest project by Newsmast, and is a way for organisations, nonprofits, and news publishers to build their own channel for outreach. It is fully connected to the fediverse with the front-end providing a clear and simplified interface that simply shows the latest posts by a channel. This can be seen with the demo Channel for the Kamala Harris Group, which recently got switched over to use Patchwork, Newsmast other fediverse project. Channel.org is based on Patchwork, which is a plug-in architecture that Mastodon server admins can run on top of their Mastodon server. Patchwork is getting close to being released, and Newsmast is currently looking for admins who are willing participate. Patchwork is free and publicly available, while Channel.org will require a paid membership and targets larger public organisations.
The ActivityPub Data Observatory allows fediverse developers to scan the structure (not the content!) of data that gets send around on the fediverse, allowing developers to easily compare how different sofware structures their ActivityPub data. For example, you can easily compare how Misskey structures the ActivityPub code of a note, versus how Mastodon sends the ActivityPub code for a note. The open-ended nature of ActivityPub allows developers to give their own spin on implementing ActivityPub
As for the sessions, one recurring theme I noted is the need and demand for spaces to discuss the governance and social side of the fediverse and fediverse developments. While there are spaces for the technical aspects of the discussion of the fediverse and the protocol with the SocialCG, the SocialHub and the Fediverse Developer Network, these communities are less accessible to the technical inclined people. This is a conversation that also has come up during previous FediForum sessions. The Fediverse Governance Report also notes a lack of formal channels for Federated Diplomacy. While the need and demand is clearly there, it seems to be hard to figure out a way to establish such communications channels in a way that also establishes them as legitimate places for discussions and diplomacy.
Another aspect that stood out to me is the lack of discussions that I noticed about Bluesky during FediForum, and what lessons can be learned that can be applied to the fediverse. Bluesky has managed to grow significantly bigger than the fediverse at this point, with around 5 times as many monthly active users, as well as onboarding the Brazilian community. It seems to me that it is worth reflecting on why that is, and how the fediverse can better show itself as a good, ethical social network that people would like to join.
Fediverse Discovery Providers
The organisation behind Mastodon (Mastodon gGmbH) has announced a new project, Fediscovery, that explores decentralised search and discovery for the fediverse. The project got funded by NGI Search, and âexplores the possibilities for better search and discovery on the Fediverse in the form of an optional, pluggable service. This service should be decentralized, independent of any one specific Fediverse service and respect user choice and privacy.â Mastodon gGmbH is explicitly not building only for Mastodon, they make it clear that they intend Fediscovery to be used by the wider fediverse, not only Mastodon.
What Mastodon gGmbH is building here is what they call a âFediverse Auxiliary Service Providersâ. These auxiliary service providers can potentially do a variety of different services. The Fediscovery project is about building one of these service providers, a disovery provider, as a minimum proof of concept and as a demonstration what types of services other people can build as well. The plans are currently still in the very early stages, and more information expected at the end of September. For my own understanding I think of a Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider as pretty much a Relay, with some minor yet-to-be-announced differences.
Mastodon gGmbH is also explicit in focusing on opt-in consent for the service, stating that it will âonly ingest content from creators who opted in to discovery in the first place. Instances sending content to discovery providers should make sure to only send such content in the first place as well. All other information a discovery provider gathers should be anonymous.â
During a FediForum session about Fediscovery, Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput confirmed that between 8% and 10% of active accounts have opted into Mastodonâs search, a year after it has been released. It indicates one of the fundamental challenges of any design that is opt-in: very few people will change the default settings, irregardless of what the settings are about. As Discovery and Search systems gain value by covering a bigger network, it shows the fundamental tensions that Mastodon gGmbH will have to grapple with while building Fediscovery.
Mozilla shuts down mozilla.social fediverse server
Mozilla has announced that they will shut down the mozilla.social server in December 2024. The server was announced in December 2022 as a way to âexplore healthy social media alternativeâ. The project was originally quite big in scope, with planned integrations to log in with Firefox, and the GitHub repo showed their own mobile clients, and a custom front-end based on Elk. In 2023 Mozilla started to very slowly open up in a private beta, but the number of people getting access has been low. In February 2024 Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox, scaling back their investments in various products, including their mozilla.social fediverse server. In an accompanying memo Mozilla stated at the time: âThe actions weâre taking today will make this strategic correction, working through a much smaller team to participate in the Mastodon ecosystem and more rapidly bring smaller experiments to people that choose to live on the mozilla.social instance.â
It seems like these more rapid smaller experiments never came, nor did it seem that Mozilla was particularly interested in growing the server. I honestly cannot find out if the server ever opened up for open registrations after they ran a waitlist for a long time, but it seems like it they have not. At any rate, the experiment stayed small, and mozilla.social currently has just below 300 active users.
The shutdown of Mozilla.social does raise questions about the server-centric model that the fediverse is based around: are there organisations that are willing to run large general-purpose fediverse servers, and have the ability to handle the infrastructure costs and moderation requirements that come with it. Mozilla seemed like it would be a good organisation to potentially do that. With Mozilla now pulling back, focusing on smaller servers might be a more logical direction going forward.
In Other News
Threads has figured out how maximise publicity by making minimal incremental updates to their ActivityPub implementation, edition 501.
Bonfire showcases how with third-party extensions scientists can display ârelevant data about their work and research topics directly on their profiles.â Bonfire does not yet know when the platform will launch.
The client Kaiteki, which focused on being a client for all the different microblogging platforms in the fediverse, stops development.
The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research had stopped using their Mastodon account in October 2023, and after not posting for most of the year they said theyâd close the account. After a large pushback from the community they reconsidered the decision and said theyâd continue using the account again.
The new Trust and Safety Taskforce with the SocialCG has set up an issue tracker for protocol level and/or specification changes to improve trust and safety on the fediverse.
The Fediverse Berlin Day had multiple sessions about, well, the fediverse. Full live stream available here, with the German publisher ARD talking about their fediverse experience and strategy. Evan Prodromou also gave a talk about a âbigger, better fediverseâ, which you can watch here. I do want to note that I find it very hard to square Prodromouâs estimation of 10 million federated Threads account with the fact that Mastodon.social (which accounts for a quarter of the entire fediverseâ monthly active users) currently knows about 18000 federated Threads accounts.
It's probably hard for me to say this, but... Kaiteki will go the way of Megalodon, so development will stop. For the past few months, I've been struggling to make any progress at all.
Mozilla certainly has the capacity to run a server but decided that it didn't further their business goals. Plenty of other organizations will see the benefit of fediverse participation, whether on their own servers or hosted space.
Welcome to the weekly update on everything that’s happened on Bluesky and the broader network called the ATmosphere. A short introduction for people who might not know me: I’m Laurens Hof, and the last year I’ve written a monthly update on all the news that’s happened on Bluesky. I’ve written a weekly newsletter about everything that is happening in the fediverse, the other decentralised social network, as well over the last year and a half. And now you can expect even more regular updates on Bluesky and the ATmosphere as well, coming out every Wednesday. It’s been a busy week* with video, 10 million accounts, and more!
The News
Bluesky has added support for video. The feature has been often requested, especially from the Brazilian community. Over the last few weeks the team has made it their top priority to launch the feature as soon as possible. Videos have indeed been
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Last Week in the ATmosphere
Welcome to the weekly update on everything thatâs happened on Bluesky and the broader network called the ATmosphere. A short introduction for people who might not know me: Iâm Laurens Hof, and the last year Iâve written a monthly update on all the news thatâs happened on Bluesky. Iâve written a weekly newsletter about everything that is happening in the fediverse, the other decentralised social network, as well over the last year and a half. And now you can expect even more regular updates on Bluesky and the ATmosphere as well, coming out every Wednesday. Itâs been a busy week* with video, 10 million accounts, and more!
The News
Bluesky has added support for video. The feature has been often requested, especially from the Brazilian community. Over the last few weeks the team has made it their top priority to launch the feature as soon as possible. Videos have indeed been very popular on Bluesky, with 169 years of videos being served within 2 days, and half a million videos posted within 4 days. Each video can be one minute long, and people can upload 25 videos per day.
There are two things that stand out to me about Blueskyâs video support: videos have shown to be highly popular on Bluesky, and the openness of the ATmosphere network allows people to build new types of network that are more catered towards watching videos specifically. Iâm curious to what extend this will actually happen. Furthermore videos require significantly more resources than text posts, so it is worth watching how this impacts Blueskys thinking about costs and monetization.
Bluemotion is a video hosting app for Bluesky, by the same developer that also makes the audio spaces Bluecast for Bluesky. The developer announced that Bluemotion will be shut down as it has fulfilled its role.
Bluesky crossed 10 million accounts this week, of which around 4 million came in the last month or so after the ban in Brazil on X. It now has around 5.5 million monthly active users. User retention after this new signup wave is also notably high, with daily active users peaking at 1.91 million, and staying at 1.57 million some two weeks later. Every signup wave has a significant amount of churn, as it is very difficult to get people to change their habits and start regularly using a new social platform, and Blueskyâs churn seems low to me. Bluesky celebrated this milestone by letting everyone know which number they joined the network with, and how early they were. The amount of people sharing it shows that people on Bluesky definitely like to show off their early-adopter status.
The adoption of Bluesky by the Brazilian community as the default social network after the ban on X has continued. After the dust has settled it looks like the Brazilians now fairly consistently represent three quarters of the total posts on the network. President Lula (âs social media team) shows that theyâre aware of the features that Bluesky offers, and has used a Starter Pack to promote different candidates for elections. Some of the biggest football clubs in Brazil have established an official presence as well, such as Corinthians and Vasco da Gama. When goals get scored during the games, this is now clearly visible in significant spikes in posts, with the number of posts per second doubling temporarily. Another developer made a directory of Brazilian accounts on Bluesky, sorted by various categories, to help people onboard as well. A Brazilian esports organisation now sells handles with their (sub)domain to raise money for the organisation as well as for people to show they support the team.
The Brazilian Bluesky community also had their first major cultural moment this week. During a televised debate between electoral rivals for mayor of Sao Paolo, one of the candidates hit one of the other candidates with a chair. Videos of the event went viral, and over the last two days the majority of the networkâs top posts have been memes about the event. One of the most popular posts described it as âa really canonical event on this social networkâ. This is also in contrast with Threads, where the event seems to have not gone viral at all.
Skyware is a new lightweight labeler server. Originally, the labeling system was designed by Bluesky to be a content moderation system. Over time, the labeling system has slowly transformed, away from content moderation, and towards labelers that you can self-apply for silly or more practical use-cases as indicating your pronouns (or to recreate Orkut). Skyware is the next evolution in this, where the software is only for labeling accounts, and the moderation part of the system is stripped away altogether. Still, other organisations are experimenting with using labelers for content moderation: News Detective is a fact checking organisation that now has a labeler on Bluesky as well. How effective a fact-checking system is when people have to opt into receiving the fact checks on a social network remains to be seen however.
A research paper that studies how Bluesky has evolved from invitation-only to being open to the public. One of their findings is that Bluesky is a chatty network, something that was already the case before the arrival of the Brazilians: users tend to create more posts than reshare other posts, in contrast with Twitter/X where the dynamic is the other way around.
For the people interested in the nitty-gritty of protocols: NodeInfo is a standardized way of exposing metadata about a server running one of the distributed social networks, and it is currently mainly used for ActivityPub servers. Now there is an effort to expand NodeInfo so it can also be used for a PDS on atproto.
Bridgy Fed is a way to connect Bluesky to other decentralised social networks such as Mastodon. The latest update now also bridges video between the network, and you can let the bridge ask an account via a DM if they want to opt-in to the bridge. Bridgy Fed will only send a DM once, even if someone else also asks.
Graphtracks allows you to check the statistics of atproto accounts, allowing you to see a graph of your follow and likes over time. It shows the power of a completely open API, where anyone can now have full detailed statistics about their account.
Thatâs all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online.
* 10 days actually, I switched from publishing on Sunday to publishing on Wednesday this week as well.
I've never actually done it, because the only extension I use is Blur My Shell, and the dev is so quick at updating that extension that even when I immediately update to a beta release it's already marked as compatible, but here it is:
gsettings set org.gnome.shell disable-extension-version-validation true
And if you want to revert back to normal and have extensions be validated again:
The researchers found sweeping changes in overall brain neuroanatomy which unfolded week by week during the pregnancy.
Inside Chrastil's brain, grey matter volume, cortical thickness, white matter microstructure, and ventricle volume all changed.
The changes were all over the brain too â "over 80% of my brain regions showed reductions in grey matter volume," Chrastil said.
Neuroanatomical changes observed over the course of a human pregnancy. Published by Pritschet, L., Taylor, C.M., Cossio, D. et al. in Nature Neuroscience (September 2024). doi.org/10.1038/s41593-024-017âŠ
At this point, I wish there was a wiki for things that can rewire oneâs brain. Ya know, beyond everyday experiences. This is hardly the only experience which does, and a database should be created of what can, how, why, etc.
I've used this term before in a different context: It's what happens when someone is about to do something that both scares and excites them at the same time. Like when a person suddenly finds themselves extremely attracted to someone and they want to make a good impression. That's when their brain seems to be both there and not there at the same time.
When observing someone in this sort of situation you quickly come to the conclusion that the brain has gone but then later--upon reflection--it may seem like it may have actually been present. The only way to know for sure is to find out how the events eventually concluded; opening the box as it were.
That's when you find out whether or not the person was a pussy.
just having to go into an MRI tube every couple weeks without it turned on would probably rewire your brain a little bit. that's not a comfortable place to be mentally.
this is the first study to consistently map brain changes during pregnancy, write the study authors in their paper.
"It's 2024 and this is the first glimpse we have of this fascinating neurological transition. There is so much about the neurobiology of pregnancy we don't understand yet. It's a biproduct of the fact that biosciences have historically ignored women's health," said Jacobs.
I knew that there were fundamental neurological changes that occurred during pregnancy, but had no idea that there hadn't been a comprehensive brain mapping study done yet. There is a surprising amount of sexism in academia.
The changes were all over the brain too â "over 80% of my brain regions showed reductions in grey matter volume," Chrastil said.
Grey matter is brain tissue with high concentrations of neuron cell bodies, where information is processed. Reductions in grey matter volume are sometimes associated with reduced memory and cognitive function.
However, the study authors say a reduction in grey matter during pregnancy isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's more like a wave of brain refinement as the brain prepares for motherhood â like the process of chiseling a block of marble into a sculpture.
Seems like an overly positive framing of the effect.
De exploderande personsökare som Israel har anvÀnt vid sin terrorattack i Libanon var av en modell, AR-924, som tagit fram av det taiwanesiska företaget Gold Apollo har inte tillverkats i Taiwan. Enligt företaget ska tillverkningen ha lagts ut pÄ det ungerska företaget BAC Consulting KFT.
lascapi
in reply to Avid Amoeba • • •floofloof
in reply to Avid Amoeba • • •Some people love a challenge I guess. No disrespect to Haiku.
like this
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cygnus
in reply to floofloof • • •woelkchen
in reply to Avid Amoeba • • •Interesting how the numbers between "computer pros" and hobbyists (Steam Survey) diverge. Unsurprisingly for Steam gamers the Windows numbers are way higher but for Linux specifically Ubuntu is crashing hard since a few years from absolute domination to all Ubuntu versions + derivatives (Mint + pop_OS) combined barely making up 20% of the Linux user base whereas at Stack Overflow there's a clear lead of Ubuntu over the rest.
Edit:
store.steampowered.com/hwsurveâŠ
like this
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Avid Amoeba
in reply to woelkchen • • •like this
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woelkchen
in reply to Avid Amoeba • • •ffhein
in reply to woelkchen • • •woelkchen
in reply to ffhein • • •Had you looked up the current stats, you would have known that this is completely false. SteamOS is in massive lead and I used the phrase "general purpose distribution" for a reason.
ffhein
in reply to woelkchen • • •woelkchen
in reply to ffhein • • •store.steampowered.com/hwsurveâŠ
ffhein
in reply to woelkchen • • •Ah, I didn't expect the results to be different when looking at the overview, this is what I saw..
Any way to break down that "Other" and see what it contains? If it counts Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS as different operating systems there might be some more Ubuntu versions hiding in there.
woelkchen
in reply to ffhein • • •No, not without lobbying Valve.
Certainly because non-LTS versions are not in the main table as well but neither are Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, NixOS, etc.
FrostyPolicy
in reply to Avid Amoeba • • •Sanctus
in reply to FrostyPolicy • • •FrostyPolicy
in reply to Sanctus • • •theshatterstone54
in reply to Avid Amoeba • • •JubilantJaguar
in reply to theshatterstone54 • • •Can confirm. I have used one or the other exclusively for 20 years. Mostly on laptops. And these days with just a tiling window manager and terminal.
It just works.
theshatterstone54
in reply to JubilantJaguar • • •Auli
in reply to theshatterstone54 • • •theshatterstone54
in reply to Auli • • •jlow (he/him)
in reply to Avid Amoeba • • •data1701d (He/Him)
in reply to jlow (he/him) • • •thingsiplay
in reply to Avid Amoeba • • •Top paying technologies interestingly has Go, Rust and Zig almost same medium salary, and very close (in that order). Immadiately followed by "Bash/Shell"? Yet, the most used languages such as Python and JavaScript are way down. Funny how Bash and Shell scripting is more used than Java, C#, C++ and C, while on the same time earns more money than those languages.
Can you make a living as a "Bash"/"Shell" programmer? :D
Avid Amoeba
in reply to thingsiplay • • •eldavi
in reply to Avid Amoeba • • •Avid Amoeba
in reply to eldavi • • •