Wednesday, December 21, 2022

What Is Nostr and How Do I Use It? - The BTC Times


How do I start using Nostr?

If you have an iPhone, join the Damus App beta on TestFlight (built by @jb55 and coming soon for Android)

  1. Generate a public key and private key (npub, nsec)
  2. Save them in a password manager or somewhere safe.
  3. Add a few relays (you can find the complete list at https://nostr.watch/)
  4. Find and follow friends from Twitter using https://www.nostr.directory/ 
  5. Start posting notes and liking/boosting posts.

Monday, December 19, 2022

Straight talk about epigenetics



Our genetic code remains that tower of universal IKEA instructions, faithfully copied, plonked down and consulted anew at each cell replication. And we are lucky to have epigenetics' confetti of handwritten Post-Its interleaved among its thousands of pages; they guide and customize our development as incredibly complex organisms. But hopeful rumors that these little marks, these bits of marginalia, these ephemeral scraps of advice, are running the show, as heritable as the tome they annotate, are at best a motivated fantasy. Transgenerational trauma may well meaningfully exist, but pinning its validity on a system of Post-It notes that flutter away at the slightest breeze (or at each meiotic event) is a non-starter. And all to the good. Ultimately, epigenetics is a case where you can't take it with you.  

Thursday, December 15, 2022

The rise and fall of peer review - by Adam Mastroianni


https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review


Maybe nobody objected [to Peer Review] because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don't pass muster. They called it "peer review."

This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church. Scientific journals appeared in the 1600s, but they operated more like magazines or newsletters, and their processes of picking articles ranged from "we print whatever we get" to "the editor asks his friend what he thinks" to "the whole society votes." Sometimes journals couldn't get enough papers to publish, so editors had to go around begging their friends to submit manuscripts, or fill the space themselves. Scientific publishing remained a hodgepodge for centuries.

(Only one of Einstein's papers was ever peer-reviewed, by the way, and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.)

Approximately 39 percent of all Americans are convinced that we are living in the “end times” right now…

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/we-are-about-witness-major-move-toward-cashless-society


Needless to say, a lot of people out there are quite wary of any moves toward a cashless society because they believe that it is part of the "end times" scenario described in the Bible.  According to one recent survey, approximately 39 percent of all Americans are convinced that we are living in the "end times" right now

Nearly two in five Americans, including half of self-identified Christians and a quarter of the religiously unaffiliated, agree "we are living in the End Times," a new study has found.

That's about 39% of Americans who believe we are living in the End Times, according to Pew Research, highlighted by Lifeway Research.

Other surveys have come up with similar results.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to any of us, because global events have definitely started to spin out of control in recent years.  At this point, even secular websites are publishing articles about the surging popularity of "apocalyptic scenarios"


Wednesday, December 14, 2022

How much decentralisation is too much?


  • A nation-state will insist that every citizen and resident must have an account on the national Mastodon. Perhaps in order to listen to the thoughts of Dear Leader™. Perhaps for some sinister monitoring purpose. If you want to talk to your buddies in that region, your server may have to Federate with something running old, outdated, or hostile software.
  • Geeks like me will rage that this all could been avoided if everyone bought their own Raspberry Pi and learned half-a-dozen simple Linux commands.

Monday, December 12, 2022

Globalization Is Dead and No One Is Listening

Amidst all the pomp and circumstance was a short, but powerful and sobering speech by Morris Chang, the now-91-years-old founder of TSMC. He shared his dream of building a fab in the US, the hard-earned lessons from TSMC's first time building a fab in America 25 years ago, his perspective that globalization and free trade is almost dead, and why this event is just the "end of the beginning".

It was the only speech that gave a real sense of what America's semiconductor future would reallylook like. Yet no one listened. No American, or any Western media outlet for that matter, bothered to cover this speech. Only Nikkei and a handful of Taiwanese outlets wrote about it. Not even C-Span c

Here are some of my top takeaways from this speech.

US Teases 'Major' Science News Amid Fusion Energy Reports

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-teases-major-science-news-amid-fusion-energy-reports/6872244.html

The Financial Times reported Sunday that scientists in the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) had achieved a "net energy gain" from an experimental fusion reactor.

That would represent the first time that researchers have successfully produced more energy in a fusion reaction — the same type that powers the Sun — than was consumed during the process, a potentially major step in the pursuit of zero-carbon power.

Tuesday, December 06, 2022

Summarize web pages using OpenAI ChatGPT


The cloudy layers of modern-day programming



https://vickiboykis.com/2022/12/05/the-cloudy-layers-of-modern-day-programming/

It's VendorOps. You are hired to tend the vendor's stuff.

Instead of working on the core of the code and focusing on the performance of a self-contained application, developers are now forced to act as some kind of monstrous manual management layer between hundreds of various APIs, puzzling together whether Flark 2.3.5 on a T5.enormous instance will work with a Kappa function that sends data from ElephantStore in the us-polar-north-1 region to the APIFunctionFactoryTerminal in us-polar-south-2.

Saturday, December 03, 2022

Discovering Wikipedia edits made by institutions, companies and government agencies – AILEF



A couple of months ago, an idea came to mind of analyzing Wikipedia edits to discover which public institutions, companies or government agencies were contributing to Wikipedia, and what they were editing.

After a quick Google search I realized that it had been done before, but the service, called WikiScanner, had been discontinued in 2007. After WikiScanner, the idea surfaced again several years later: in 2014 the @congressedits Twitter account was created, which automatically tweeted any Wikipedia edit made by IP addresses belonging to the U.S. Congress. The account was eventually suspended by Twitter (read why here). The code for this bot was released under a CC0 license on Github, and several other bots were created, looking for edits from different organizations.

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Protect me from what I want




With the advent of the Fediverse generally and Mastodon specifically, for the first time we have a large-scale opportunity to experiment with algorithms who are written for people by people just because they're cool, or because they produce feeds that the programmer likes for herself, or that her Dad likes, or that she notices causes her kids to be less obsessive about screen time.

So let's stop saying "No algorithms!" because that's just wrong, and figure out how to get nice algorithms built, ones that primarily are there to serve humanity's best interests.

Sunday, November 27, 2022

Cryptboard.io – Anonymous encrypted web clipboard and chat



Why would I need it?

  • To copy and paste text/files between Host and Virtual machine where clipboard not supported
  • To copy and paste text/files into Remote Desktop, such as VMWare Horizon, RDP, and others where clipboard doesn't work or disabled
  • To send valuable data such as passwords or some security keys and tokens without danger of it being intercepted
  • To exchange information in a hostile environment where the server could be evil and yet not giving it a chance to decrypt messages
  • Doing all this stuff without the need for registration

Thursday, November 24, 2022

The Art of Command Line




Fluency on the command line is a skill often neglected or considered arcane, but it improves your flexibility and productivity as an engineer in both obvious and subtle ways. This is a selection of notes and tips on using the command-line that we've found useful when working on Linux. Some tips are elementary, and some are fairly specific, sophisticated, or obscure. This page is not long, but if you can use and recall all the items here, you know a lot.

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Bullshit Software Projects


https://earthly.dev/blog/bullshit-software-projects/

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by David Graeber investigating the strange phenomenon of pointless jobs. Graeber's book even features interviews with some software developers. Once I started reading it, I felt compelled to test out his theory of BS jobs by asking around1: Did any software developers I knew, or on Lobsters, or Hacker News, have bullshit jobs?

And sure enough, it didn't take me long to hear from people who found their jobs to be pointless, and for the majority of them, it wasn't a specific task, like mopping an already mopped floor, that was useless but an entire software development project. The world is apparently rife with pointless programming projects.

UV Devices Could Keep Indoor Air Free of Viruses


https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03360-w

Far UV is an emerging form of germicidal UV (GUV) irradiation, a well-established disinfection technology and growing resource in the battle against the virus SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens that can spread easily through the air in enclosed spaces.

How not to think about cells

https://www.subanima.org/veritasium/

Monday, November 21, 2022

Computer Latency: 1977-2017


https://danluu.com/input-lag/


Almost every computer and mobile device that people buy today is slower than common models of computers from the 70s and 80s. Low-latency gaming desktops and the ipad pro can get into the same range as quick machines from thirty to forty years ago, but most off-the-shelf devices aren't even close.

If we had to pick one root cause of latency bloat, we might say that it's because of "complexity".


Saturday, November 19, 2022

The Mythical Man-Month - Wikipedia


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

The Mythical Man-Month 
Mythical man-month (book cover).jpg
First edition
AuthorFred Brooks
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
SubjectSoftware project management
PublisherAddison-Wesley
Publication date
1975
ISBN978-0-201-00650-6 (1975 ed.), 978-0-201-83595-3 (1995 ed.)
001.6/425
LC ClassQA76.6 .B75

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995. Its central theme is that adding manpower to software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer. This idea is known as Brooks's law, and is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping.

Thursday, November 17, 2022

Entropy of Big Distributed Systems


https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/11/16/entropy-of-big-distributed-systems/


Joshua Koudys:

Leave something poorly architected, and it can give you a hundred easy-to-fix issues a month. You fix those, you have great velocity, everyone celebrates the 10x engineer. Fix the fundamental problem, you get 1 ticket closed, they fire the low-velocity engineer.


Thursday, November 10, 2022

The Email Caste's Last Stand


https://compactmag.com/article/the-email-caste-s-last-stand


Now that times are turning bad, tech companies can no longer afford to sustain a massive "court" of professional-class nobility, paying sinecures to sons and daughters of the good and the great who don't know how to code or crunch numbers, but know how to write emails, hold useless meetings, and talk about diversity and inclusion.

Saturday, November 05, 2022

Thursday, November 03, 2022

I Wish I Discovered RSS Sooner...

> https://stacker.news/items/88706


Er staan wat handige tips over hoe je RSS feeds voor Medium en YouTube kunt gebruiken in de commentaren hier.

Tuesday, November 01, 2022

Free PDF, Video, Image & Other Online Tools - TinyWow


This site has free tools for pretty much anything you need to do online. tinywow.com

https://tinywow.com/


Open Source Alternatives to Proprietary Software

https://www.opensourcealternative.to/

Monday, October 24, 2022

Being overstaffed hurts a team in counterintuitive ways.



It feels like throwing more engineers at a project ought to make the work go faster. But it doesn't, past a certain point. Fred Brooks published The Mythical Man-Month in 1975, wherein he coined Brooks's Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." To my knowledge, there are no known exceptions to this axiom. It is always true.

Friday, October 14, 2022

Notenik


Introducing Notenik

If you're looking for a note-taking app that does more than just record your notes, then you might want to consider some of Notenik's key attributes.

• Proudly Made for the Mac

Just in time for the modern resurgence of Apple's premier platform, and M1-ready, Notenik runs with ease on all reasonably modern Macs.

• 100% Free and Open-Source

No upfront cost, no in-app purchases, no subscriptions, no advertising, no interest in your personal data – just download from the Mac App Store and start running, with all features enabled. Source code published under the MIT license, and available on GitHub.

• Text Files Are Forever

Notenik stores all of your notes in plain text files that can be opened, viewed and edited using any text editor, or your favorite Markdown editor. Notes are collected into folders, and you can store a Notenik folder anywhere you like. Sync to the cloud and to other devices and platforms using your favorite service.

• Markdown and Then Some

You can format your notes using Markdown, with support for footnotes, citations, definition lists and MathJax. Use wiki-style double bracket notation to link from one note to another. Automatically generate a Table of Contents for a single long note, or for an entire collection of notes.

• Plays Well With Others

Import, Export, Publish, Share, Edit. Access via a custom URL scheme. Generate HTML in a variety of predetermined formats, or in custom page designs. Use scripts and templates to sort, filter, and even generate an entire website. Your notes will never be held hostage when they're stored using Notenik.

• And Then There Are Fields

Every Notenik note consists of multiple fields. Of course there's always a Title and a Body, but you needn't stop there. Add a Tags field and see your notes organized by tag. Add a Link field to store a URL. Add a Date field to track a due date or a publication date. Add a Seq field to add an arbitrary sequence number. Add an Author field to maintain a list of your favorite quotations. Sort your collection of notes using any of these fields. Each Notenik collection (aka folder) can use a different set of fields. Fields can be of different types. The possibilities, if not exactly endless, are at least quite numerous.

• Thoroughly Documented

The Notenik Knowledge Base contains everything you might ever want to know about Notenik – stored in its own Notenik collection of notes! Open from within Notenik (look beneath the Help menu), or access on the Web. Or for a brief introduction, with screen shots, see the Notenik Intro. Or see a more detailed list of features to help you compare Notenik to other similar apps.

• Actively Supported, Maintained and Enhanced

I'm Herb Bowie, the developer. I respond to all emails, and am generally happy to accommodate requests for fixes and further enhancements. I try to publish one or two significant updates each month. If you have a missing feature or software quirk that's bothering you, then let me know, and I'll see what I can do. 

Wednesday, September 07, 2022

Het is hoog tijd dat we stoppen GMAIL te gebruiken...


Pluralistic: 22 Aug 2022 Gmail will call the cops on you based on the content of your emails – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
`

Friday, August 26, 2022

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Je eigen GPT-3 voor $3,99 p/m: Elephas - Personal AI Writing Assistant for Mac


Ik heb geen idee hoe goed deze app werkt.

Maar als ik een "content creator" was zou ik nu toch een beetje mijn billen samen knijpen denk ik 🤔 

Sunday, May 29, 2022

Apple M1 hardware acceleration of H.264 and H.265 encoding



I have a video file that I want to share with some friends. The file is 413,5 MB and contains 29 minutes of video and audio in 1920x1080 resolution in H.264 video codec. The audio is mono, AAC at 32K Hz sample rate.




Like I said, this file is now 413,5 MB, and it could be quite a lot smaller, if only I compressed it a bit, maybe halved the resolution as well 🤔 


I’ve in the past done a lot of video compressions already (wrote about if before as well, even made it to Hacker News by accident). It just never occurred to me that my beloved FFMPEG tool might not be using the best settings out-of-the-box.  


FFMPEG is an incredibly powerful tool, a real “power tool” and it is really easy to “shoot yourself in the foot” with it.


The thing is, you have to specify EVERYTHING. So you are using a new Apple workstation with the very powerful M1 processor, which contains a built-in H.264 and H.265 dedicated encoder/decoder? Good for you, but FFMPEG will not, I repeat, NOT, use it, unless you ask it, kindly, in the command line, every time you do a conversion.


Having said that… the standard settings kind of do make a lot of sense for most situations…


Using M1 dedicated encoder/decoder


For everyone who found this page by just Ducking and wants to know the magical incantations required to make the M1 tango with FFMPEG, here it is:


h264_videotoolbox


or, in context:


ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v h264_videotoolbox output_h264_VT.mp4


 


The conversion is happening at a staggering 7.56x, so a 29 minutes file only takes 3:50 to re-encode! 






Unfortunately, I immediately notice that the video now has visible artifacts… it really looks a lot worse 😢 





We do get a very small file though, it’s only 90,8 MB for half an hour of full-HD video. But like I said, it’s no fun to watch a horrible mangled video like this.

 
H.265 to the rescue?


Maybe using the newer H.265/HEVC codec will make the video look better?


The full command now reads:


ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v hevc_videotoolbox -tag:v hvc1 output_h265_VT.mp4


  • The option -tag:v hvc1” is added to make sure QuickTime will still recognize the file format… again, don’t ask me why this is necessary. 



Okay… We get a similar compression time of 3:46 minutes. The output file is now 203,5 MB, which is still a 50% reduction from the original. 






There are still artifacts visible in the resulting video file. 🤔 


Now, if we instead use the old-fashioned and laptop boiling method of running the compression over the CPU instead of the dedicated circuitry, maybe the file will be higher quality?


ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx265 -tag:v hvc1 output_libx_h265.mp         


40 minutes and a burnt lap later…


Yes, we do have an even smaller file (just 184.6MB now), which also has a better looking video quality 😊 


Conclusions

Hevc_videotoolbox gives you a very fast compression but with an abysmal video quality.
Libx265 will make you wait, for a much better looking and smaller video.







Monday, April 18, 2022

Your internet might be slower than expected, except when you test the speed.


Ask HN: Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest? | Hacker News

Yes, and, the joke in the industry is that network speed tests are to network performance what the Volkswagen Diesel was to emission tests :).

All carriers implement various types of throttling or rate limiting, for a lot of reasons (anti-ddos, cost control, etc.)

But; universally, they bypass these rate controls such as Cisco PGW ADC (Application Detection and Control) and LTE eNB ABR for wireless as examples, and many others similar features that limit the rate the user actually gets. And in almost all cases, these systems are designed to allow speed tests to bypass the rate limiting.

Commercial Speed tests are in no way a valid or reliable way of understanding the quality of a network service. I am a little surprised that this is breaking news on HN however. I would think this would be pretty well understood by this community?

BTW. Fast.com does is not always immune to this "Volkswagen diesel" effect. The only way to know for sure is to have a VM or bare metal server someplace and do an iperf to it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31062799


Friday, April 01, 2022

Hoe kan ik de JW Library app op mijn MacBook Air or Pro of iMac installeren?



Tegenwoordig is het mogelijk om apps die voor de iPhone of iPad gemaakt zijn te gebruiken op je MacBook Air/Pro en iMac, als het tenminste een model van 2020 of later is waar een M1 processor (of nieuwere "ARM" chip) in zit.

Dat klinkt moeilijk, hoe kan ik zien of mijn Mac een M1 chip of nieuwer heeft?


  1. Start je Mac op, en wanneer je bent ingelogd, klik links boven in de hoek op het appel🍏 logo en klik op dan op [Over deze Mac]
  1. Het venster dat nu in beeld komt geef aan wat voor chip er in je pc zit. In mijn geval zien we "Apple M1", maar als een nieuwere Mac hebt kan daar "M1 Pro" of "M3" of iets dergelijks staan… Deze zijn allemaal goed voor ons doel: een iPhone/iPad app installeren en draaien op de Mac. 
  1. Nu we weten dat onze Mac het aankan, gaan de app opzoeken in de App Store. In de App Store typ je de naam van de iPad app die je zoekt. Het kan goed zijn dat je eerste zoekresultaten niet zijn wat je zocht: 
  1. Om iPhone of iPad apps te vinden moet je in de App Store nog klikken op de knop…. [IPhone en iPad-apps]: 
  1. Als laatste stap zoek je nu de app die je wilt installeren en klik op het wolkje-met-de-pijl-naar-beneden symbool, Apples manier om te zeggen "download uit de cloud": 

Wacht een paar seconden… en nu is je app geïnstalleerd 😃 


Friday, March 18, 2022

Preventing burn-out by changing your work ethics.

After reading this article in the Baffler and after reading these HN comments I came up with my own set of rules to prevent burn-out:

I've long suspected that my work ethics shield me from getting a burn-out. These ethics are:
  • work is a way, a tool, a means to an end: to make money. 
  • If work becomes more (a way to meet people, a way to have a higher status, a way to fill time) then it should be culled, cut off, put back in its proper corner.
  • work should not be enjoyed too much. Lest you come into temptation to do more of it than necessary.
  • work should also not be too boring. A little challenge now and again is fine.
  • work should be done diligently (you should do the required tasks, and recommend improvements). Any time your suggestions for improvements are sworded down, you should NOT worry. After all, you only work for money, not for your ego.
  • work should be done honestly (no lying, stealing or cheating).
  • Do not take shit from colleagues. Talk to them about their behavior. No change? Talk to the manager. Still no change? Transfer or quit this job.
  • Do not take shit from managers or your boss. Be open about this and direct: the buck stops here. Period.
  • It helps to have F-you money. I suggest 2-3 years salary is a nice stash. 
  • work should not be done too much (working 2 to 4 days per week seems ideal. I've worked for 3 days a week for years and can highly recommend it).
  • You do not work overtime, not even when paid, unless there is an emergency. If there are more than 1 emergencies per year, then the company's definition of an emergency is wrong. Look for a less toxic company.
  • You do not do any unpaid overtime. Work is for money. No money means no working. It's really that simple. But would you really want to abandon your colleagues/coworkers? No, but it's the task of the shareholders or company owners to chip in, not yours.
  • When fired, give yourself a year sabbatical.
  • In case of being fired, do not take it personally. Were you really under-performing, or was your new manager just not able to appreciate your work? Hint: he was too short-sighted to see your work's true value. 
  • But what if the manager was right? Maybe you do suck at this. It is better to think about such soul-searching things after the sabbatical. When you still agree: look for a whole new kind of work. A different position with fresh perspectives.

Saturday, March 12, 2022

Why Modern Movies Suck - They Teach Us Awful Lessons


Een interessant filmpje over de "levenslessen" die je vroeger leerde uit films, vergeleken met wat je er nu uit leert.

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

10GB data per maand, wat is het goedkoopste mobiele abonnement?


Eens in de zoveel tijd ben ik benieuwd wat je nu eigenlijk betaald voor een sim-only abonnement of prepaid pakket, waarbij ik maar 100 minuten of sms'jes per maand nodig heb, maar wel 10GB data per maand wil kunnen verstoken.

De snelheid van die dataverbinding maakt me niets uit. De prijsvechters bieden in nederland allemaal 4G (en dus nog niet 5G aan) maar gelukkig ondersteunen alle telefoons in 2022 nog steeds óók 4G dus geen reden om 5G te willen.

Wie is nu de goedkoopste aanbieder met deze eisen? YOUPHONE, met een pakket dat net geen €10 per maand kost.

Het complete overzicht van februari 2022:











Goedkoopste data en belminuten per maand?
data
10








minuten
100








sms
100


















Aanbieder
Netwerk
prijs per maand
aansluitkosten
maanden contract
bedrag per maand
GB
minuten
sms
URL
Youphone
KPN
€ 10,00
€ 9,99
24
€ 9,17
10
200/200
200/200
https://www.youfone.nl/?ref=YOUPHONE
Simpel
T-Mobile
€ 10,00
€ 20,00
24
€ 9,58
10
onbeperkt
500
https://bestel.simpel.nl/sim-only
Simyo
KPN
€ 14,00
gratis op moment van schrijven
12
€ 12,00
10
200/200
200/200
https://www.simyo.nl/sim-only/bestellen
LycaMobile
???
12
€ 10,00
12
€ 12,83
10
onbeperkt
onbeperkt
https://www.lycamobile.nl/nl/bundle/holland-bundle-s-plus/
Ben
T-Mobile
€ 13,00
gratis op moment van schrijven
24
€ 13,00
10
200/200
200/200
https://ben.nl/sim-only
Tele2
T-Mobile
€ 13,00
gratis op moment van schrijven
24
€ 13,00
10
200/200
200/200
https://www.tele2.nl/mobiel/sim-only?shop=product&ch=es&cc=con&sc=acq&dr=24&pr=T2C01,T2A04&lp=1
Lebara
???
€ 15,00
gratis op moment van schrijven
24
€ 15,00
10
150
150
https://mobile.lebara.com/nl/nl/sim-only?duration=24&internetLimit=5
BudgetThuis
KPN
€ 20,00
€ 0,00
24
€ 20,00
7
onbeperkt
onbeperkt
https://www.budgetthuis.nl/mobiel/pakketten
Bliep
KPN
Niet van toepassing, er is geen databundel van 10GB per maand
https://bliep.nl/