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Recommend me a LaTeX/TeX live equivalent app for Android
  • The github page for overleaf seems to indicate the community edition is AGPL.

  • Mozilla is eliminating its advocacy division, which fought for a free and open web
  • Google is still appealing it, so at best that will happen next year. But yeah, they're probably adjusting their budget in anticipation.

  • Mozilla is eliminating its advocacy division, which fought for a free and open web
  • Mozilla is set up as a non-profit with a for profit company as a subsidiary. The corporate Mozilla handles working on Firefox, mostly using money from Google for setting it as the default search engine. Because of that separation I don't think they can easily mix those two piles of money together.

    There's this section from their FAQ:

    Don’t Mozilla products, like Firefox, earn income?

    Firefox is maintained by the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.

  • What type of game do you want to see?
  • There's Mines3D on android, although the graphics are still 2d and it's a pain to play.

  • How can I migrate my lemmy account to another lemmy instance?
  • Some other fediverse software like hubzilla and sharkey let you migrate posts, so I wouldn't say it'll never happen. I don't think anyone is working on it though, so probably not anytime soon.

  • FSF is working on freedom in machine learning applications
  • I feel like it's really far from being open. Besides the training data not being open, the more popular ones like llama and stable diffusion have these weird source available licenses with anti-competitive clauses, user count limits, or arbitrary morality clauses.

  • The FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Program Has a New Target: Animal Rights Activists
  • They probably argue that rescuing or even interacting with sick animals can spread disease and is therefore bioterrorism. If you stretch the definition enough almost anything can count.

  • Google now requires JavaScript
  • I think they switched to usually using bing results last year. Their support site mentions they use both backends. I'd guess which one you get depends on which API is cheaper for each country.

  • 17 subtitle languages, none of them the one I'm looking for
  • I think that's still closed, just poorly done in a way that isn't very accessible.

  • 17 subtitle languages, none of them the one I'm looking for
  • That's what burned in means.

    I added an extra line break, but it already looked fine in the default webview and in Jerboa. Normally lists don't need line breaks around them.

  • 17 subtitle languages, none of them the one I'm looking for
  • For anyone who wants to know the difference between these terms:

    • subtitles - just includes the dialogue
    • captions - also includes description of other sounds
    • closed - text is stored separately from the video, and can turn on and off while watching
    • open - text is part of the video image itself
  • Proposal to create a collective to own the topic-based Lemmy instances
  • Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.

    For people who've used lemmy or the rest of the fediverse yes, but most people don't know that yet. If someone shares a post from your site with their friends or a facebook group, they're not going to look into how lemmy works to sign up elsewhere.

    1. people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
    2. people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.

    The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.

    I'd prefer it if topic specific instances were more popular too. I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.

    I feel a technical solution like federation pulling in lists of communities with would help more with discoverability.

    Not my experience. A few examples:

    • No one complained about the mods from !linux@lemmy.ml, yet I've witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.

    I'm not sure how that goes against what I said. That's mostly people disliking the admins.

    • Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to "choose" between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.

    Similar issues could happen even if users are separate from the communities. Beehaw could defederate your instances, and lemmy world could defederate programming dev or something, and people would need other accounts if they want to see everything.

    • Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.

    Me too. I usually avoid lemmy world communities unless there isn't an active community elsewhere.

  • Proposal to create a collective to own the topic-based Lemmy instances
  • New users to lemmy usually aren't going to join communities if they can't register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You're cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.

    I don't mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you're going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren't that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

    Also the idea that communities can be 'neutral ground' doesn't make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it's caused by how you're running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.

  • Why am I writing a Rust compiler in C?
  • It makes sense that if you're designing a language, you'd like the language you made and would want to use it. It's fine for compilers like that to exist, and even be the main one used, but ideally it shouldn't be the only compiler.

    But there are technically ways to bootstrap a language without writing it in another language (other than a small core in assembly or something). You could design a tiny compiler that only handles a small subset of your language, then write a better compiler using only the features available in that subset. You can do this for several layers of compilers until you have the full language.

  • Why am I writing a Rust compiler in C?
  • That's already how it is now, we just don't usually think of it that way. You can't compile rust unless you already have a rust compiler. The current version was compiled in a previous version, which was compiled in a previous version, going through a chain of older versions and other languages. Anything along that chain could've theoretically had an influence on the current compiler.

    It's not about the code itself being more trustworthy. The point is that when you bootstrap, you don't have to blindly trust any of the binaries, since it's source code the whole way down. Someone could bootstrap rustc like this, compare it to the binaries that already exist, and ideally they would be identical.

  • Why am I writing a Rust compiler in C?
  • A lot of this bootstrapping stuff comes back to the 'trusting trust' attack. You could write a compiler that adds some malicious code to programs it compiles. But the thing is, it could also insert it's own malicious code when compiling a compiler. So you look at your code, and the code of your compiler, and everything looks fine, but the exploit is still there. Someone wrote an example in rust.

    Theoretically there could also be bugs that propagate this way. So to fully trust your code is doing what you think it is, you'd need a chain of compilers back to hand coded assembly.

  • Why am I writing a Rust compiler in C?
  • Yeah, I wrote the wrong language. I tend to lump those together in my head as 'big multi-paradigm languages I haven't bothered to learn yet.'

  • Why am I writing a Rust compiler in C?
  • You can technically do it, but it's a convoluted path. The article talks about it. Basically to bootstrap that way you need to go through a lot of versions of rust, compile rust 0.7 in ocaml, compile ocaml in scheme, and compile scheme in C using gcc. For gcc you need to compile a chain of versions back to when it was written in C instead of C++, plus the whole TinyCC bootstrapping path.

    edit: had listed scala instead of ocaml

  • Why am I writing a Rust compiler in C?
  • The main thing is that TinyCC has already been bootstrapped.

    Check out this page on bootstrappable.org. Basically they start with a 200 something byte binary (hex0) that can act as an assembler, then using a bunch of layers of tools and compilers you can bootstrap a whole system. I think they use stage0 to build M2-Planet, use that to build GNU Mes, and use that to build TinyCC.

    So a project like this fits neatly into that bootstrapping path. It could be done other ways, but starting from a fairly complete C compiler makes it a lot easier than building an entire path from scratch.

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