Threads for fcbsd
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I’m racing the UK round of the Red Bull Pump Track World Championships in Hawick, Scotland on Sunday, hoping I won’t be the slowest on the track - but probably the oldest :~)
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While I agree with the sentiment, many academic papers do not provide the added context, such as the code they used to generate their results / illustrate the ideas, so there is little opportunity to verify the ideas, which would make the process far more valuable, and fun.
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arxiv.org has a feature at the bottom called “labs” and there is a tab “code, data, media” See this article as an example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.00029 (I just picked this article at random)
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fcbsd
28 days ago
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Slitherbot: A Snake robot with 3D printed skin actuated by micro-servos
The link to structured sheet materials for the skin was really interesting.
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It’s a fad. Tesla started this, going to the max, and as Tesla was (is?) hyped and sold lots of cars, others followed. Like all fads, it will regress to the sane. At least that’s what I will hope will happen, just for my own safety as mostly cyclist. As driver, I don’t care, as my own car is 20 years old, hardly gets used outside of vacation and will probably not be replaced once it dies…
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I was thinking yesterday morning on my cycle that the derailleur click is one of the nicest interfaces I have with a machine in my daily life. Entirely eyes on the road to anticipate the shifts I’ll need.
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A bit of a Gamble / stretch for here but I thought lets try and see if we get an interesting discussion going, since it is s tech related, although you have to look far… The guy normally does nice Linux reviews, then this hit my feed reader.
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It’s an interesting article, and it raises the issue of good design, which Dieter Rams Ten principles of good design and worthing looking at. In addition Dieter Rams has also esposed the philosophy of “Less is better” is definately a principle that is often missing in software design…
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Less is better is so easy to misinterpret. Less of what? Same goes for most of Rams’ principles.
Let’s compare BMW M4 (pictured in the OP) and any Tesla. Tesla definitely has fewer (less?) physical controls. Tesla’s design is relatively easy to classify as innovative (Rams’ principle #1). Tesla’s minimalism surely looks nice to many (principle #3, even if highly subjective, maybe principle #5, too?, and with so few things to design—principle #10). Tesla’s cockpit is simpler to manufacture (principle #9, I guess). Tesla tick a lot of boxes here.
One thing forgotten though is that there are other requirements for cars than for most of our technology. Specifically, rule number 1: is eyes on the road. In the main use mode a car needs to be operated completely without looking at the controls. By touch, so to say. However, the touch here is used to find controls, “navigate the UI” if you will. And further physical manipulation actually activates the function. It is impossible to navigate Tesla UI by touch alone. More so since things move around with OTA updates.
It seems designers collectively forgot what ergonomics is. Or someone’s optimising for other things. Surely, Tesla looks nice on the marketing materials. It might even feel cool when you’re sitting in one before buying it. But doesn’t it become obvious in the first 30 minutes on the road that only basic functions are safe to use?
I’m still at loss how phones are banned in cars in so many countries but huge touchscreens right smack in the middle of dashboard are legal.
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Well, it touches (haha) on a general thing that all tech seems to suffer from and that is the inability to accept that something is sort of “done” and does not need any radical new approach to solve the same problem. That improvements can be made to keep up with the changing environment, but that they can be small, incremental and most importantly: unremarkable.
These days it seems something is either an exciting new way of doing things totally different, or it is old, boring and thus on the brink of being obsolete.
Cars “worked”. But then we got the cars with touch screens and lots of people bought them. Because remarkable wins over unremarkable. And we, people, me included, just keep on falling for that.
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FeepingCreature
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2 months ago
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Catch-23: The New C Standard Sets the World on Fire
As C89 was taking shape, the neurodivergent notion of a “zero-length object” was making the rounds:
… excuse you?
Did somebody put
s/mad/neurodivergent/in their webserver config? I know euphemisms are a treadmill, but this is unwarranted, no?PS: also, what the fuck C23.
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as an ACM member I was disappointed to see that in an ACM article, so I called it out, and they have now updated the article. Thanks @Gaelan and @FeepingCreature for highlighting this unacceptable language, hopefully the ACM will learn and improve.
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That’s how every slur was originally born
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As an autistic person, I can confirm that zero-length objects are always on my mind. /s
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The link is now broken - but it can be found on archive.org
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jxy
2 months ago
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On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? (2021)
So many refer LLM as “Stochastic Parrots”. It’s an insult to parrots. It is known that parrots are very intelligent. And Bing agrees,
Parrots are very intelligent animals. They can perform some cognitive tasks at levels beyond that of 5-year-old humans [1]. They can count objects, identify colors and shapes, understand probabilities, mimic sounds and languages, solve puzzles, show emotions, and adapt to new social settings [2,3]. Parrots have a unique brain structure that regulates language, memory, and spatial awareness [3]. Their intelligence is an evolutionary byproduct of their survival tactics [3]. Learn more:
- news.harvard.edu
- birdsnews.com
- allaboutparrots.com
- petkeen.com
- kelleysislandnature.com
I understand some researchers want to feel superior in their “human level intelligence” compared with what an LLM exhibits. But I’m very confused as what “Stochastic Parrots” even mean here. Surely they don’t mean real parrots that speak as well as an LLM, do they? If so, I would call it an AGI. If not, please stop using this phrase. I don’t care what an LLM is, but Parrots are intelligent.
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I’d take off yegor256. Every time an article of his lands here, people find a bunch of fundamental errors.
I’d also add teachtogether.tech, a fantastic book on teaching everybody based on a lot of empirical research.
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Just reading the first page of teachtogether.tech it looks like a great resource, thanks for pointing it out.
Two teaching books that I have read recently that have been inspiring and instructional on good teaching are John Tomsett’s This Much I Know about Love Over Fear… and bell hooks’ Teaching to Trangress. These books are not a practical approach to teaching, like Frederick Reif’s Applying Cognitive Science to Education, but do provide a good insight into what makes a great teacher.
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Reif’s work would definitely help improve online teaching, the other two books are much more about the empathy and vulnerability that good teachers have to improve students learning, or challenge their ideas to improve understanding, which is hard to achieve in online learning…
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Is it just me, or should public key authentication and disabling password logins be near the the top of that list, rather than an “advanced topic” that will be covered in future?
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Author here. You are right. I figured it would be too much content to add it there, so I’ve created a separate blog post for it. You can find it here.
Thank you for your feedback!
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Important trick:
- open two xterms
- ssh in from both of them
- in terminal 1, turn on ssh keys (if they aren’t already)
- disconnect and log back in in terminal 1 using the key instead of the password
- in terminal 1, turn off password login
- disconnect and log back in in terminal 1 again to verify that you still can
- only now may you disconnect terminal 2
This way if you mess up the changes you’re making in terminal 1, the other one is still there.
Also, SIGHUP sshd, or tell it to reload its config. Don’t stop it.
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If you have session-multiplexing configured in your ssh-client, this will still let you in, even if new logins would no longer work, as it’s re-using your existing session to spawn a new one. To check this safely, either first disable session-multiplexing, or delete the session-multiplexing socket file, or login from a different system
But I agree, the first thing to do is only allow logins with public-keys, disable passwords, and mostly ignore the other recommendations, as they don’t add anything useful and mostly just add frustration and problems.
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I’ve been carrying my PinePhone as a second phone. I’ve been using postmarketOS and switching SD cards with Phosh(GUI interface) and SXMO(CLI interface). It’s not stable enough currently to be my only phone but it’s improving with each release, and I need to step up and file issues as I find them.
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I have a Toshiba Libretto 70CT which is still running, but with 120 Mhz CPU and 16 Mb of RAM I don’t use it much, and would love a modern version - the form factor was small, but the keyboard was still big enough to touch type on.
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Oh, nice! Yeah would be great if you could get on the net with that bad boy. So slick.
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OBS?
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I think OBS is the Open Broadcaster Software
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I have a keybow, and it is a great little 12 key board, but I’m not convinced it would be comfortable to type on for long, although chording might improve the matter. However, the fact that it is three rows of four keys, means that the thumb is redundant which is a waste of a useful typing digit.
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Weekend in Glasgow celebrating qualifying as RYA Day Skipper. I foresee beer, poutine and whisky in my future.
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One of the features of this webserver is that chroots to a directory. Meaning that, to the web server, anything before the given directory (
/var/wwwby default), does not exist. So if a vulnerability is found, the attacker can’t do much things, as the attacker can’t go beyond/var/www.Apparently, chroot is not a security feature on Linux. Is that true on *BSD?
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Attempting to make toad-in-the-hole/Yorkshire pudding.
Catching up on some recreational coding (text editor, compiler work).
Might go see a movie. What’s good right now?
the fun you can have with flour, eggs and milk - the secret with Yorkshire puddings is a hot oven :~)
So the bread didn’t floof up like I think it was supposed to. It was kinda custardy. It was good, we ate it, but I think I need to put more fat in the pan next time or something.