Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)N

nonserf

@ nonserf @libretechni.ca

Posts
20
Comments
11
Joined
6 mo. ago

  • Why not repurpose obsolete smartphones as DAB metadata displays?

    Jump

  • It should only need an SDR and a USB-OTG cable.

    The SDR would be just software, so what would OTG cable lead to? Or if you mean it needs hardware to support the SDR, then that would defeat the purpose of recycling obsolete hardware. AFAICT, the only way to receive radio on a smartphone without buying hardware is if the phone comes with a radio from the factory. My phones have FM radio, which I think is a bit rare.

  • Why not repurpose obsolete smartphones as DAB metadata displays?

    Jump

  • If we throw away old smartphones and we also produce radios that will be wasted by consumers after realising their radio lacks some metadata like album art that can be upgraded with another radio purchase, there is an e-waste problem that SDR does not fully solve. You seem to imply that a typical smartphone that comes stock without radio hardware could run an SDR. Is that correct? Wouldn’t the phone at least need some hardware to use the headphone jack as antenna input? Looks like additional hardware is needed.

    If a radioless smartphone can do the job without additional hardware, then it would mostly render my idea useless; but we’d have to neglect the fact that radios also have speakers that are better than that of a smartphone.

  • 🥾 Microsoft boot lickers represent a majority of FOSS devs. FOSS principles solve many problems but not this one. 🌀 Debian gives some refuge.

    Jump

  • You've critically misunderstood my post, and a few seconds looking over my previous posts and comments would make it abundantly clear that I speak/write English.

    This is non-sequitur logic, thus baseless. My understanding your post is orthoganol to whether you can handle English.

    Almost all of your posts, especially the titles and the display name of the community you made, use emojis in ways very similar to output from LLMs. In ways that I honestly have never seen an actual human do, unless they were doing something fucky like trying to game youtube video titles for higher views.

    This explains your faulty conclusion. But it remains faulty nonetheless. Emoji is useful for searching and also for ESL readers. Speed-reading Debian fans would also likely miss thread without the Debian-like emoji.

    • They are very long winded

    Bullshit.

    "Mother tongue" is an immediately present one I can point to. It's not wrong, but quite less commonly used than "first language".

    The inverse is true outside the US. Try learning a 2nd language or stepping outside the US sometime.

    • They match up with a pattern seen in other posters that used to spam up other free software communities on the fediverse using LLMs and machine translation.

    This is a confirmation bias. You think you know what an LLM pattern is as it differs from your own, thus conclude other writing styles must be that of an LLM.

    • You have a ton of posts with very few comments, which also matches with spammers.

    I’ve seen more spam as a comment than as a post. Perhaps you are confused with Mastodon. In any case, I’m offline and only pop into a cafe to post what I wrote offline. I don’t have time to sit in the cafe and read a lot of other posts. If an app were good enough to harvest posts for offline reading, it would be different. But no such app exists.

    • I'd suggest that the large amount of downvotes this post received, as well as the upvotes my comment received, indicate that I'm not the only one who had this assumption about your post.

    That’s an absurd conclusion. I expected a lot of down votes. It supports my thesis that a majority FOSS devs are MS boot lickers. Of course that same majority is susceptible to being triggered by criticism leveled at them.

    BTW, I only saw 7 upvotes because I am on a downvote-disabled instance. I have to visit another node to see downvotes.

    I spoke of privacy because I assumed you had privacy concerns. This community is on the infosec.pub instance, and cybersecurity and digital privacy tend to be a focus of posters here.

    The failure of your assumption is that I /only/ have privacy concerns. There are so many ethical problems with Microsoft it’s bizarre that you would only think of personal privacy.

    Also, I didn't think that someone would refuse to use a bug tracker entirely as a boycott of the company hosting it. That's extreme. At that level of "acting purely on the principal of things" than you really should make peace with not being able to use or interact with projects hosted on github, instead of looking for some way to make an end-run around the dev's preferred bug tracking chanmel.

    There are practical problems with MS Github; not just ethical. They not only demand a non-disposable email address but they also use it for 2FA for Tor users, making logins painfully inconvenient.

    It’s not just an evil host, but an evil host that makes you dance for them. You’d be a pushover to an absurdity to be willing to bend over backwards to lick MS boots and ultimately support MS by feeding it data and engagement.

    Those were for your benefit. I'm not the one who clearly refuses to use github and has strong opinions about it.

    Workarounds to ultimately feed Microsoft misses the point. Why dance for Microsoft when Debian is both easier and non-evil?

    I'm not surprised by the fact that devs have different priorities. And they're allowed to.

    You missed “Of course devs rightfully get to choose the venue for their work.” The idea is for testers to find refuge away from devs shitty choices moreso than twisting dev’s arms.

    whether it was a brain malfunction or technical.

    That sort of attitude, as well as the one demonstrated up and down your comment, are a big part of why people find people who treat FOSS as a religion objectionable.

    It’s not an “attitude”. It’s science. Knowing what motivates people who make detrimental decisions is paramount to addressing the problem. My research yielded some of both reasons:

    • Brain malfunction: some devs admit to choosing Github “because that’s where the people are”, as they make themselves part of the network effect problem (the social problem).
    • Technical: some devs choose Github for specific features that free world tools do not offer. These cases are more easily corrected. Writing code is easier than improving personalities.

    That is not the “best” you can do. It’s the least you can do.

    My point was that, as you seem to be aware through experience, you can't make other devs abide by your own principles.

    That doesn’t follow. You are not /only/ in control of where you host a project. You are also in control of where you participate on projects controlled by others. You can post your bug reports to a distro bug tracker instead of pawning yourself to MS.

    Go do it the right way yourself, demonstrate it works better. Keep doing that. The more projects doing things the right way, the more momentum will shift away from github being seen as the easy standard.

    Testers write bug reports. They do not create projects of their own and write software, unless they also serve as a dev. But that’s in the developer capacity and limited to those who also write code. Telling testers to become devs and found projects is a futile plan for turning things around.

    Anyway, especially with this response, it seems clear that you weren't posting looking for any options,

    I was not looking for other ways to lick Microsoft’s boots. The 3rd question was not rhetorical. And you neglected to answer it.

    you were posting to complain about other people "doing it wrong". You already know there's no way to force devs off Github, by your own admission.

    That’s not exactly true. I’m done trying to inspire devs to move their project off MS Github. But that doesn’t mean GH devs would not step outside of GH to view bug reports elsewhere such as the corresponding Debian bug DB.

  • 🥾 Microsoft boot lickers represent a majority of FOSS devs. FOSS principles solve many problems but not this one. 🌀 Debian gives some refuge.

    Jump

  • Using an LLM to slop out your post in a FOSS community is a bold choice.

    Are you using an LLM to translate my English into your mother tongue?

    Can you quote an example of what you’re struggling with?

    I’m only aware of chatGPT, and boycott Microsoft and Google and the like so I’ve never tried it. I will only use Argos Translate, which is useless for generative AI. I wrote that post in my mother tongue.

    Beyond that, there are plenty of ways to engage with github while protecting your personal privacy.

    Bullshit.

    And why are you talking about privacy? I said nothing about privacy. I suggest trying a different machine translator than whatever you used.

    If you engage with MS Github, you are supporting Microsoft.

    You can use a throwaway email address to make an issue on github asking them to migrate to a better alternative.

    Did that for years on dozens of projects. It gets old. These people are not interested. But feel free to knock yourself out trying your own futile advice if that’s your thing. If you find a disposable address that MS accepts, you will quickly find out that these devs have priorities that they have placed above anything you can think of.

    WTF are you thinking -- that you can say “hey MS is not good for privacy…” and they will move their project for you? Did a chatbot tell you this would work?

    My own attempts were symbolic, experimental, and more than anything a mere survey to find out what malfunction brings them there; whether it was a brain malfunction or technical.

    You could email them directly by grabbing their email from the merge logs (if I recall right, I haven’t worked with github in a while).

    Sure, then after doing a possibly large fetch (a deep github clone of all historic objects) you have a huge pile of commits to pick through & try to work out which is most relevant, and where you then find countless addresses that go to MS or Google anyway. If that suits you, knock yourself out. Not worth my time.

    You could contact them on other socials they list. Usually those also aren’t privacy respecting or FOSS, but it’s something.

    Same problem. You cannot reach people on those shitty platforms without being there yourself. And if you are there, you’re part of the problem.

    The best any of us can do is to not use github ourselves for our own projects.

    That is not the “best” you can do. It’s the least you can do.

  • Software Quality Assurance (FOSS and non-FOSS) 🛡✓ @infosec.pub
    nonserf @libretechni.ca

    🪲🧾 Demoralisation of users/testers filing bug reports is a notable culprit for bad quality FOSS

  • Free OpenSource Software @infosec.pub
    nonserf @libretechni.ca

    🥾 Microsoft boot lickers represent a majority of FOSS devs. FOSS principles solve many problems but not this one. 🌀 Debian gives some refuge.

  • Software Quality Assurance (FOSS and non-FOSS) 🛡✓ @infosec.pub
    nonserf @libretechni.ca

    Bug reporting is a global shit-show. It needs federation. And a bug report aggregator with local data store.

  • Software Quality Assurance (FOSS and non-FOSS) 🛡✓ @infosec.pub
    nonserf @libretechni.ca

    Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

    www.theregister.com /2025/12/23/memory_software_opinion/

  • 🇫🇷↔🇬🇧↔🇳🇱 Language tool needed to find true friends - similar words that exist in 2 languages, and machine translation that expoits this

    Jump

  • people are brainwashed to believe you should forget the existence of your 1st language when learning a new one.

    Citation very much needed

    No it’s not. Just take some language classes and take your own survey. It’s trivially verified.

    It’s quite rare for a language class to use one language to learn another. Every single person I have surveyed believes (without evidence) that it’s better to learn a language without exploiting your mother tongue to learn a new language. Many language teachers are themselves instructed to avoid using the student’s mother tongue.

    This guy’s full of shit. 6000 words is what, ~B1-B2 level of fluency?

    zaphod answered this well but I should add that 6k words are my count (from a dictionary), not the person who gave the tip. No one claimed that 6000 nouns results in “fluency”. (I scare-quoted fluency because B1 is where I’m at in French and I am nowhere near fluent; and I doubt B2 would get me there).

    IIRC, “this guy” is Thomas Michael, a brit who produced audio tapes that teach French to English speakers. So there’s your source if you want to chase it up.

    Does anyone else think Thomas Michael is full of shit?

    While it’s a neat idea, there are a lot of words in French that resemble English words but don’t mean exactly the same.

    Of course the AI bot would have to work that out and avoid such cases.

  • How's your language learning going this week? - Weekly thread

    Jump

  • There’s some kind of tech defect going on here. When I posted my comment, this thread and all others w/the same title had zero comments. Now I see many comments in here, some of which are older than my own. So in my view of this community, it appeared like a ghost town with a bot making a bunch of empty threads. Apparently posting in this thread triggered the node I am on to fetch the comments.

  • How's your language learning going this week? - Weekly thread

    Jump

  • I don’t get what’s going on with all these threads. You seem to be spamming your own community. All these threads with this same title do not link anywhere or have any content. It’s drowning out meaningful threads.

  • I spent 4 days making an Anki deck

    Jump

  • I was able to find an existing deck for the language I was learning. But then I still spent some time on additions and mods to add words from my textbook brought up.

  • Language Learning @sopuli.xyz
    nonserf @libretechni.ca

    🇫🇷↔🇬🇧↔🇳🇱 Language tool needed to find true friends - similar words that exist in 2 languages, and machine translation that expoits this

  • We need a MythRadio (MythTV DVR, but for radio)

    Jump

  • Those are probably things I should look into. Considering those free-to-air networks are TV networks, MythTV would likely work for them. But then I have no idea the absence of video would cause any issues, considering a Satellite tuner device for a PC might just receive TV signals.

  • We need a MythRadio (MythTV DVR, but for radio)

    Jump

  • I have no Internet. I want to hear the local broadcasts when I am at home.

    At home, I have ~75—100 local broadcast stations which cover local news and events. I also figure that of the thousands of Internet stations, very few would likely be specific to my region. I think only a small fraction of broadcast radio stations have an Internet stream.

    (edit)

    When I am in a cafe or library getting Internet, I use that opportunity to listen to distant stations.

    Note as well that a strong DAB signal is better than any Internet signal. There are many more points of failure with Internet, such as network congestion.

    You do give me an idea though. I have some shell accounts. I could perhaps setup a timed recording of something I want to hear from Internet radio. Then I could fetch it whenever I get online. But I guess a MythRadio would still be useful.. something to show me the schedules centrally. I think at the moment we are stuck with going to the website of each station and navigating their UI one station at a time. Fuck that.

  • DAB Radio @feddit.uk
    nonserf @libretechni.ca

    We need a MythRadio (MythTV DVR, but for radio)

  • TeX typesetting @lemmy.sdf.org
    nonserf @libretechni.ca

    LaTeX has a substantial quality control problem -- a bug tracking shitshow & lack of bug tracking

  • Free OpenSource Software @infosec.pub
    nonserf @libretechni.ca

    MitM s/w needed to crowdsource travel ticket info from protectionist websites 🚌🚆✈

  • Open Data 📖📡 @lemmy.sdf.org
    nonserf @libretechni.ca

    MitM software needed to crowdsource travel ticket info from protectionist websites 🚌🚆✈