#importance of open source software

[foxpunk]

"no brand is actually good--" true. "--or better." now hold on a minute.

[marigoos]

And I'm gonna tell you more - you can ditch Word for work and school too.

Unless you have very specific needs that require only the latest features of the most expensive software on the market, you probably only need functionalities that were released ages ago.

I've spent years with professors begging us to only use Word for assignments - they often couldn't open the files and grade them. I never even installed it on my PC. Got a bachelor's and half a master's, using only Apache OpenOffice (note: best to stick to LibreOffice nowadays, last time I checked Apache released updates so rarely it became and actual vulnerability) without a complaint. They literally cannot tell. There's just one thing you need to be mindful of, and it's the file format you choose - in my experience, .doc better than .docx, avoid .odt. Sometimes the software will also offer more of the same format according to the version of Word it's the most compatible with: I always used a very old one - like '98 - because I'm 99% sure the compatibility issues my professors had were due to them being old and not tech-savvy enough to, you know, update their stuff. In general, older more basic format = compatible with the most softwares

If you're still worried, you can try temporarily installing an old, free version of Word (iirc the 2012 release should be free now?) and see if your file opens correctly and doesn't mess up your layout. Or ask a friend/coworker with the latest version to check it for you. If something goes wrong, change format and try again. If it works, you don't have to repeat this step every time. If nothing works, you still won't have spent a cent and can go back to Word if you're really desperate. It's worth a try!

Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.How to Turn off Word’s AI Access To Your Content

I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”:

File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”

[frog707]

Skeletal animation

Today I'm writing code to import skeletal animations from Assimp to the JMonkeyEngine game engine. I'm using the OglDev tutorial as a guide and translating from C++ to Java as I go. My WIP is open-source and public at https://github.com/stephengold/MonkeyWrench .

I realize there's already a Java translation of the tutorial at https://github.com/jvm-graphics-labs/ogl-dev . However, that translation uses JOGL, which might be confusing since I'm using LWJGL.

[lowcodetechnology]

Node.Js Development: Important Facts And Features | Dew Studio

[jadeharleyinc]

the scale of AI's ecological footprint

standalone version of my response to the following:

"you need soulless art? [...] why should you get to use all that computing power and electricity to produce some shitty AI art? i don’t actually think you’re entitled to consume those resources." "i think we all deserve nice things. [...] AI art is not a nice thing. it doesn’t meaningfully contribute to us thriving and the cost in terms of energy use [...] is too fucking much. none of us can afford to foot the bill." "go watch some tv show or consume some art that already exists. […] you know what’s more environmentally and economically sustainable […]? museums. galleries. being in nature."

you can run free and open source AI art programs on your personal computer, with no internet connection. this doesn't require much more electricity than running a resource-intensive video game on that same computer. i think it's important to consume less. but if you make these arguments about AI, do you apply them to video games too? do you tell Fortnite players to play board games and go to museums instead?

speaking of museums: if you drive 3 miles total to a museum and back home, you have consumed more energy and created more pollution than generating AI images for 24 hours straight (this comes out to roughly 1400 AI images). "being in nature" also involves at least this much driving, usually. i don't think these are more environmentally-conscious alternatives.

obviously, an AI image model costs energy to train in the first place, but take Stable Diffusion v2 as an example: it took 40,000 to 60,000 kWh to train. let's go with the upper bound. if you assume ~125g of CO2 per kWh, that's ~7.5 tons of CO2. to put this into perspective, a single person driving a single car for 12 months emits 4.6 tons of CO2. meanwhile, for example, the creation of a high-budget movie emits 2840 tons of CO2.

is the carbon cost of a single car being driven for 20 months, or 1/378th of a Marvel movie, worth letting anyone with a mid-end computer, anywhere, run free offline software that consumes a gaming session's worth of electricity to produce hundreds of images? i would say yes. in a heartbeat.

even if you see creating AI images as "less soulful" than consuming Marvel/Fortnite content, it's undeniably "more useful" to humanity as a tool. not to mention this usefulness includes reducing the footprint of creating media. AI is more environment-friendly than human labor on digital creative tasks, since it can get a task done with much less computer usage, doesn't commute to work, and doesn't eat.

and speaking of eating, another comparison: if you made an AI image program generate images non-stop for every second of every day for an entire year, you could offset your carbon footprint by… eating 30% less beef and lamb. not pork. not even meat in general. just beef and lamb.

the tech industry is guilty of plenty of horrendous stuff. but when it comes to the individual impact of AI, saying "i don’t actually think you’re entitled to consume those resources. do you need this? is this making you thrive?" to an individual running an AI program for 45 minutes a day per month is equivalent to questioning whether that person is entitled to a single 3 mile car drive once per month or a single meatball's worth of beef once per month. because all of these have the same CO2 footprint.

so yeah. i agree, i think we should drive less, eat less beef, stream less video, consume less. but i don't think we should tell people "stop using AI programs, just watch a TV show, go to a museum, go hiking, etc", for the same reason i wouldn't tell someone "stop playing video games and play board games instead". i don't think this is a productive angle.

(sources and number-crunching under the cut.)

good general resource: GiovanH's article "Is AI eating all the energy?", which highlights the negligible costs of running an AI program, the moderate costs of creating an AI model, and the actual indefensible energy waste coming from specific companies deploying AI irresponsibly.

CO2 emissions from running AI art programs: a) one AI image takes 3 Wh of electricity. b) one AI image takes 1mn in, for example, Midjourney. c) so if you create 1 AI image per minute for 24 hours straight, or for 45 minutes per day for a month, you've consumed 4.3 kWh. d) using the UK electric grid through 2024 as an example, the production of 1 kWh releases 124g of CO2. therefore the production of 4.3 kWh releases 533g (~0.5 kg) of CO2.

CO2 emissions from driving your car: cars in the EU emit 106.4g of CO2 per km. that's 171.19g for 1 mile, or 513g (~0.5 kg) for 3 miles.

costs of training the Stable Diffusion v2 model: quoting GiovanH's article linked in 1. "Generative models go through the same process of training. The Stable Diffusion v2 model was trained on A100 PCIe 40 GB cards running for a combined 200,000 hours, which is a specialized AI GPU that can pull a maximum of 300 W. 300 W for 200,000 hours gives a total energy consumption of 60,000 kWh. This is a high bound that assumes full usage of every chip for the entire period; SD2’s own carbon emission report indicates it likely used significantly less power than this, and other research has shown it can be done for less." at 124g of CO2 per kWh, this comes out to 7440 kg.

CO2 emissions from red meat: a) carbon footprint of eating plenty of red meat, some red meat, only white meat, no meat, and no animal products the difference between a beef/lamb diet and a no-beef-or-lamb diet comes down to 600 kg of CO2 per year. b) Americans consume 42g of beef per day. this doesn't really account for lamb (egads! my math is ruined!) but that's about 1.2 kg per month or 15 kg per year. that single piece of 42g has a 1.65kg CO2 footprint. so our 3 mile drive/4.3 kWh of AI usage have the same carbon footprint as a 12g piece of beef. roughly the size of a meatball [citation needed].

[ikiprian]

Barbara Gordon's Coding & Computer Cram School is a popular YouTube series. Tucker Foley is a star student.

Barbara Gordon's Cram School posts free online courses for both coding and computer engineering. Think Crash Course in terms of entertainment, but college lecture in terms of depth. Hundreds of thousands of viewers flock to it— students who missed a class, people looking to add new skills to a resume, even simple hobbyists. It’s a project Barbara’s proud of.

Sometimes, when she wants to relax, she’ll even hop in the comments and spend an afternoon troubleshooting a viewer’s project with them.

User “Fryer-Tuck” has especially interesting ones. Barbara finds herself seeking out his comments, checking in on whatever this crazy kid is making next. An app for collecting GPS pings and assembling them on a map in real-time, an algorithm that connects geographic points to predict something’s movement taking a hundred other variables into account, simplified versions of incredibly complex homemade programs so they can run on incredibly limited CPU’s.

(Barbara wants to buy the kid a PC. It seems he’s got natural talent, but he keeps making reference to a PDA. Talk about 90’s! This guy’s hardware probably predates his birth.)

She chats with him more and more, switching to less public PM threads, and eventually, he opens up. His latest project, though, is not something Barbara has personal experience with.

FT: so if you found, hypothetically, a mysterious glowing substance that affects tech in weird and wacky ways that could totally have potential but might be vaguely sentient/otherworldly…. what would you do and how would you experiment with it. safely, of course. and hypothetically

BG: I’d make sure all my tests were in disposable devices and quarantined programs to keep it from infecting my important stuff. Dare I ask… how weird and wacky is it?

FT: uhhh. theoretically, a person composed of this substance once used it to enter a video game. like physical body, into the computer, onto the screen? moving around and talking and fighting enemies within the game?

FT: its been experimented with before, but not on any tech with a brain. just basic shields and blasters and stuff, its an energy source. also was put in a car once

FT: i wanna see how it affects software, yk? bc i already know it can. mess around and see how far i can push it

BG: […]

FT: … barbara?

BG: Sorry, thinking. Would you mind sharing more details? You said “blasters?”

Honestly. Kid genius with access to some truly wacky materials and even wackier weapons, she needs to start a file on him before he full sends to either hero or villain.

[OR: Tucker is a self-taught hacker, but if he were to credit a teacher, he'd name Barbara Gordon's Coding & Computer Cram School! He's even caught the attention of Dr. Gordon herself. She's full of sage advice, and with how she preaches the value of a good VPN, he's sure she's not pro-government. Maybe she'll help him as he studies the many applications of ecto-tech!]

[writeblrcafe]

A Comprehensive Guide for Writing Advice

Sometimes, despite enjoying writing so much, something is not working for you. Maybe your well of ideas has run dry. Or your WIP has hit a corner and you can't find your way out to the end of the story. Or you need to go back to your finished draft and see if there are any kinks to clear up.

Fortunately, everyone at Writeblrcafé has experienced such, and to help you out, we have a bunch of links to helpful posts by fellow writers to help you along on your writing journey as well as some helpful links to other websites, resources and software.

General:

WHY IS WRITING IS SO FUCKING HARD? (@writers-hq)

Writer Block First Aid Kit (@isabellestone)

Websites for writers (masterpost @2soulscollide)

Writing advice (masterpost @theliteraryarchitect)

Writing resources (masterpost @stinastar)

One look thesaurus (a reverse dictionary where you can enter words or concepts)

Coming Up with Ideas:

97 Character Motivations (@theplottery)

Character Flaws (@fantasyfillsmysoul)

Character Profile (@mistblossomdesigns)

Characters Unflawed (@emptymanuscript)

Why Theme is More Important than Plot (@theplottery)

Weekly writing prompts on Reedsy

Drafting:

3 of the worst story beginnings (and how to fix them) (@theplottery)

Cheat Sheet for Writing Emotion (@myhoniahaka)

Creative Writing for Writers (@writerscreed)

Describing Physical Things (@wordsnstuff)

How to Craft a Natural Plot (@theplottery)

How to Write a Story? (masterpost @creativepromptsforwriting)

How to write: ethnicity & skin colour (@youneedsomeprompts)

What the F is Show Not Tell (@theplottery)

Writing advice from my uni teachers (@thewritingumbrellas)

First Draft: story outlining template meant to help with planning your next big writing project (@fauxriot)

The wonder/ discovery arc (@evelynmlewis)

How to structure a chapter (@theplottery)

How to pace your storytelling (@charlesoberonn)

How to write and research mental illness (@hayatheauthor)

Seven Blogs You Need To Read As An Author (@hayatheauthor)

Editing/Revising:

Eight steps in making the editing process of your book easier (@joaneunknown)

Kill Your Darlings (@tibodine)

Self editing tips (first pass) (@projecttreehouse)

Publishing:

Chill Subs: biggest database for literary magazines and small presses; track your submissions and get your writing published!

5 steps to get your novel ready to self-publish (by @nanowrimo)

Resources for finishing and publishing your novel (masterpost by @nanowrimo)

For self-publishing: this page gives you the exact pixel count of a book spine based on its page count, and/or a template you can use for the correct width/height ratio.

Software:

Scrivener: one time payment of $60 or 70€ (macOS/windows), $24 (iOS; no Euro listed for iOS); used by professionals, many tools to write and organize your novel

Bibisco: free and "pay what you want" version; multilingual, world building, character profiles, writing goals, story timeline, mind maps, notes and more templates to write a novel.

Manuskript: free open source-tool; outliner, novel assistant, distraction-free mode

Ghostwriter: a free and open alternative which has a decent interface with some interesting features, like Hemingway Mode, which disables one's backspace and delete keys, emulating a typewriter.

NaNoWriMo: an international contest to encourage writers to finish writing their novel with many events, groups for exchange with fellow writers, helpful writing advice and help for self-publishing and publishing traditionally.

Campfire Writing: website, desktop app, and mobile app, with tools built in to help manage characters, magic systems, research, etc. It has a great free option, plus monthly, annual, and lifetime purchase options. It also has built-in NaNoWriMo compatibility and a catalogue of tutorials and writing advice videos (suggestion by @harfblarf)

Websites And Writing Apps Every Author Needs In 2023 (@hayatheauthor)

Let us know in the comments if there are any links we could add to it! Reblog this post to help a fellow writer.

Support our work by buying a cup of coffee on KoFi.

[autolenaphilia]

Why enshittification happens and how to stop it.

The enshittification of the internet and increasingly the software we use to access it is driven by profit. It happens because corporations are machines for making profits from end users, the users and customers are only seen as sources of profits. Their interests are only considered if it can help the bottom line. It's capitalism.

For social media it's users are mainly seen by the companies that run the sites as a way for getting advertisers to pay money that can profit the shareholders. And social media is in a bit of death spiral right now, since they have seldom or never been profitable and investor money is drying up as they realize this.

So the social media companies. are getting more and more desperate for money. That's why they are getting more aggressive with getting you to watch ads or pay for the privilege of not watching ads. It won't work and tumblr and all the other sites will die eventually.

But it's not just social media companies, it's everything tech-related. It gets worse the more monopolistic a tech giant is. Google is abusing its chrome-based near monopoly over the web, nerfing adblockers, trying to drm the web, you name it. And Microsoft is famously a terrible company, spying on Windows users and selling their data. Again, there is so much money being poured into advertising, at least 493 billion globally, the tech giants want a slice of that massive pie. It's all about making profits for shareholders, people be damned.

And the only insurance against this death spiral is not being run by a corporation. If the software is being developed by a non-profit entity, and it's open source, there is no incentive for the developers to fuck over the users for the sake of profits for shareholders, because there aren't any profits, and no shareholders.

Free and Open source software is an important part of why such software development can stay non-corporate. It allows for volunteers to contribute to the code and makes it harder for users to be secretly be fucked over by hidden code.

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are good examples of this. There is a Mozilla corporation, but it exists only for legal reasons and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla foundation. There are no shareholders. That means the Mozilla corporation is not really a corporation in the sense that Google is, and as an organization has entirely different incentives. If someone tells you that Mozilla is just another corporation, (which people have said in the notes of posts about firefox on this very site) they are spreading misinformation.

That's why Firefox has resisted the enshittification of the internet so well, it's not profit driven. And people who develop useful plugins that deshitify the web like Ublock origin and Xkit are as a rule not profit-driven corporations.

And you can go on with other examples of non-profit software like Libreoffice and VLC media player, both of which you should use.

And you can go further, use Linux as your computer's operating system.. It's the only way to resist the enshitification that the corporate duopoly of Microsoft and Apple has brought to their operating system. The plethora of community-run non-profit Linux distributions like Debian, Mint and Arch are the way to counteract that, and they will stay resistant to the same forces (creating profit for shareholders) that drove Microsoft to create Windows 11.

Of course not all Linux distributions are non-profits. There are corporate created distros like Red Hat's various distros, Canonical's Ubuntu and Suse's Opensuse, and they prove the point I'm making. There has some degree of enshittification going on with those, red hat going closed source and Canonical with the snap store for example. Mint is by now a succesful community-driven response to deshitify Ubuntu by removing snaps for example, and even they have a back-up plan to use Debian as a base in case Canonical makes Ubuntu unuseable.

As for social media, which I started with, I'm going to stay on tumblr for now, but it will definitely die. The closest thing to a community run non-profit replacement I can see is Mastodon, which I'm on as @autolenaphilia@chaosfem.tw.

You don't have to keep using corporate software, and have it inevitably decline because the corporations that develop it cares more about its profits than you as an end user.

The process of enshittification proves that corporations being profit-driven don't mean they will create a better product, and in fact may cause them to do the opposite. And the existence of great free and open source software, created entirely without the motivation of corporate profits, proves that people don't need to profit in order to help their fellow human beings. It kinda makes you question capitalism.

[sinsinewave]

tech enthusiasts, even when often working towards good and respectable goals, just keep forgetting the non-tech aspects of things --- like, yes, i'd love to get a repairable ethical smartphone, but no i cannot afford to throw 600€+ at one; especially when i can get an used pixel or oneplus for like 100€ or less and use it for 5-10 years, and part availability is about the same since i'd need to get the stuff from ebay/aliexpress anyways yes, i'd love to switch to matrix, but nobody else is willing to use it because the UX is atrocious and it keeps imploding in on itself yes, it would be lovely if i could switch my grandparents over to Linux and open source software, but no, they will not be able to use even the easiest of DEs, so macOS it is yes, i'd absolutely find it great if i could use Inkscape on Linux instead of Affinity on Windows as my vector graphics tool; but that is in fact not the case because Inkscape's UX is too horrible for me to figure out (tried several times) --- especially FOSS circles need to learn that there is more to tech than just the pure technical aspects, and that the technical aspects are actually one of the least important things to most people because most people aren't nerds willing to spend 2 days installing a custom OS on their phone while losing the ability to use banking apps they're just your average jane who wants a device that they take out of the box and have work and that average jane is also not particularly concerned with repairability, because the average jane will at best attempt to replace a removable battery on a laptop; so unless you can make repairs as seamless as that then the audience for repairability is tiny in consumer electronics

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Microsoft pinky swears that THIS TIME they’ll make security a priority

One June 20, I'm live onstage in LOS ANGELES for a recording of the GO FACT YOURSELF podcast. On June 21, I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On June 22, I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.

As the old saying goes, "When someone tells you who they are and you get fooled again, shame on you." That goes double for Microsoft, especially when it comes to security promises.

Microsoft is, was, always has been, and always will be a rotten company. At every turn, throughout their history, they have learned the wrong lessons, over and over again.

That starts from the very earliest days, when the company was still called "Micro-Soft." Young Bill Gates was given a sweetheart deal to supply the operating system for IBM's PC, thanks to his mother's connection. The nepo-baby enlisted his pal, Paul Allen (whom he'd later rip off for billions) and together, they bought someone else's OS (and took credit for creating it – AKA, the "Musk gambit").

Microsoft then proceeded to make a fortune by monopolizing the OS market through illegal, collusive arrangements with the PC clone industry – an industry that only existed because they could source third-party PC ROMs from Phoenix:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/ibm-pc-compatible-how-adversarial-interoperability-saved-pcs-monopolization

Bill Gates didn't become one of the richest people on earth simply by emerging from a lucky orifice; he also owed his success to vigorous antitrust enforcement. The IBM PC was the company's first major initiative after it was targeted by the DOJ for a 12-year antitrust enforcement action. IBM tapped its vast monopoly profits to fight the DOJ, spending more on outside counsel to fight the DOJ antitrust division than the DOJ spent on all its antitrust lawyers, every year, for 12 years.

IBM's delaying tactic paid off. When Reagan took the White House, he let IBM off the hook. But the company was still seriously scarred by its ordeal, and when the PC project kicked off, the company kept the OS separate from the hardware (one of the DOJ's major issues with IBM's previous behavior was its vertical monopoly on hardware and software). IBM didn't hire Gates and Allen to provide it with DOS because it was incapable of writing a PC operating system: they did it to keep the DOJ from kicking down their door again.

The post-antitrust, gunshy IBM kept delivering dividends for Microsoft. When IBM turned a blind eye to the cloned PC-ROM and allowed companies like Compaq, Dell and Gateway to compete directly with Big Blue, this produced a whole cohort of customers for Microsoft – customers Microsoft could play off on each other, ensuring that every PC sold generated income for Microsoft, creating a wide moat around the OS business that kept other OS vendors out of the market. Why invest in making an OS when every hardware company already had an exclusive arrangement with Microsoft?

The IBM PC story teaches us two things: stronger antitrust enforcement spurs innovation and opens markets for scrappy startups to grow to big, important firms; as do weaker IP protections.

Microsoft learned the opposite: monopolies are wildly profitable; expansive IP protects monopolies; you can violate antitrust laws so long as you have enough monopoly profits rolling in to outspend the government until a Republican bootlicker takes the White House (Microsoft's antitrust ordeal ended after GW Bush stole the 2000 election and dropped the charges against them). Microsoft embodies the idea that you either die a rebel hero or live long enough to become the evil emperor you dethroned.

From the first, Microsoft has pursued three goals:

Get too big to fail;

Get too big to jail;

Get too big to care.

It has succeeded on all three counts. Much of Microsoft's enduring power comes from succeeded IBM as the company that mediocre IT managers can safely buy from without being blamed for the poor quality of Microsoft's products: "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" is 2024's answer to "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

Microsoft's secret sauce is impunity. The PC companies that bundle Windows with their hardware are held blameless for the glaring defects in Windows. The IT managers who buy company-wide Windows licenses are likewise insulated from the rage of the workers who have to use Windows and other Microsoft products.

Microsoft doesn't have to care if you hate it because, for the most part, it's not selling to you. It's selling to a few decision-makers who can be wined and dined and flattered. And since we all have to use its products, developers have to target its platform if they want to sell us their software.

This rarified position has afforded Microsoft enormous freedom to roll out harebrained "features" that made things briefly attractive for some group of developers it was hoping to tempt into its sticky-trap. Remember when it put a Turing-complete scripting environment into Microsoft Office and unleashed a plague of macro viruses that wiped out years worth of work for entire businesses?

https://web.archive.org/web/20060325224147/http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/newsinfo/collateral.aspx?cid=33338

It wasn't just Office; Microsoft's operating systems have harbored festering swamps of godawful defects that were weaponized by trolls, script kiddies, and nation-states:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalBlue

Microsoft blamed everyone except themselves for these defects, claiming that their poor code quality was no worse than others, insisting that the bulging arsenal of Windows-specific malware was the result of being the juiciest target and thus the subject of the most malicious attention.

Even if you take them at their word here, that's still no excuse. Microsoft didn't slip and accidentally become an operating system monopolist. They relentlessly, deliberately, illegally pursued the goal of extinguishing every OS except their own. It's completely foreseeable that this dominance would make their products the subject of continuous attacks.

There's an implicit bargain that every monopolist makes: allow me to dominate my market and I will be a benevolent dictator who spends his windfall profits on maintaining product quality and security. Indeed, if we permit "wasteful competition" to erode the margins of operating system vendors, who will have a surplus sufficient to meet the security investment demands of the digital world?

But monopolists always violate this bargain. When faced with the decision to either invest in quality and security, or hand billions of dollars to their shareholders, they'll always take the latter. Why wouldn't they? Once they have a monopoly, they don't have to worry about losing customers to a competitor, so why invest in customer satisfaction? That's how Google can piss away $80b on a stock buyback and fire 12,000 technical employees at the same time as its flagship search product (with a 90% market-share) is turning into an unusable pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Microsoft reneged on this bargain from day one, and they never stopped. When the company moved Office to the cloud, it added an "analytics" suite that lets bosses spy on and stack-rank their employees ("Sorry, fella, Office365 says you're the slowest typist in the company, so you're fired"). Microsoft will also sell you internal data on the Office365 usage of your industry competitors (they'll sell your data to your competitors, too, natch). But most of all, Microsoft harvest, analyzes and sells this data for its own purposes:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

Leave aside how creepy, gross and exploitative this is – it's also incredibly reckless. Microsoft is creating a two-way conduit into the majority of the world's businesses that insider threats, security services and hackers can exploit to spy on and wreck Microsoft's customers' business. You don't get more "too big to care" than this.

Or at least, not until now. Microsoft recently announced a product called "Recall" that would record every keystroke, click and screen element, nominally in the name of helping you figure out what you've done and either do it again, or go back and fix it. The problem here is that anyone who gains access to your system – your boss, a spy, a cop, a Microsoft insider, a stalker, an abusive partner or a hacker – now has access to everything, on a platter. Naturally, this system – which Microsoft billed as ultra-secure – was wildly insecure and after a series of blockbuster exploits, the company was forced to hit pause on the rollout:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/microsoft-delays-data-scraping-recall-feature-again-commits-to-public-beta-test/

For years, Microsoft waged a war on the single most important security practice in software development: transparency. This is the company that branded the GPL Free Software license a "virus" and called open source "a cancer." The company argued that allowing public scrutiny of code would be a disaster because bad guys would spot and weaponize defects.

This is "security through obscurity" and it's an idea that was discredited nearly 500 years ago with the advent of the scientific method. The crux of that method: we are so good at bullshiting ourselves into thinking that our experiment was successful that the only way to make sure we know anything is to tell our enemies what we think we've proved so they can try to tear us down.

Or, as Bruce Schneier puts it: "Anyone can design a security system that you yourself can't think of a way of breaking. That doesn't mean it works, it just means that it works against people stupider than you."

And yet, Microsoft – whose made more widely and consequentially exploited software than anyone else in the history of the human race – claimed that free and open code was insecure, and spent millions on deceptive PR campaigns intended to discredit the scientific method in favor of a kind of software alchemy, in which every coder toils in secret, assuring themselves that drinking mercury is the secret to eternal life.

Access to source code isn't sufficient to make software secure – nothing about access to code guarantees that anyone will review that code and repair its defects. Indeed, there've been some high profile examples of "supply chain attacks" in the free/open source software world:

https://www.securityweek.com/supply-chain-attack-major-linux-distributions-impacted-by-xz-utils-backdoor/

But there's no good argument that this code would have been more secure if it had been harder for the good guys to spot its bugs. When it comes to secure code, transparency is an essential, but it's not a sufficency.

The architects of that campaign are genuinely awful people, and yet they're revered as heroes by Microsoft's current leadership. There's Steve "Linux Is Cancer" Ballmer, star of Propublica's IRS Files, where he is shown to be the king of "tax loss harvesting":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/#mego

And also the most prominent example of the disgusting tax cheats practiced by rich sports-team owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#economic-substance-doctrine

Microsoft may give lip service to open source these days (mostly through buying, stripmining and enclosing Github) but Ballmer's legacy lives on within the company, through its wildly illegal tax-evasion tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/13/pour-encoragez-les-autres/#micros-tilde-one

But Ballmer is an angel compared to his boss, Bill Gates, last seen some paragraphs above, stealing the credit for MS DOS from Tim Paterson and billions of dollars from his co-founder Paul Allen. Gates is an odious creep who made billions through corrupt tech industry practices, then used them to wield influence over the world's politics and policy. The Gates Foundation (and Gates personally) invented vaccine apartheid, helped kill access to AIDS vaccines in Sub-Saharan Africa, then repeated the trick to keep covid vaccines out of reach of the Global South:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

The Gates Foundation wants us to think of it as malaria-fighting heroes, but they're also the leaders of the war against public education, and have been key to the replacement of public schools with charter schools, where the poorest kids in America serve as experimental subjects for the failed pet theories of billionaire dilettantes:

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/millionaire-driven-education-reform-has-failed-heres-what-works

(On a personal level, Gates is also a serial sexual abuser who harassed multiple subordinates into having sexual affairs with him:)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/technology/microsoft-sexual-harassment-policy-review.html

The management culture of Microsoft started rotten and never improved. It's a company with corruption and monopoly in its blood, a firm that would always rather build market power to insulate itself from the consequences of making defective products than actually make good products. This is true of every division, from cloud computing:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/28/other-peoples-computers/#clouded-over

To gaming:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/27/convicted-monopolist/#microsquish

No one should ever trust Microsoft to do anything that benefits anyone except Microsoft. One of the low points in the otherwise wonderful surge of tech worker labor organizing was when the Communications Workers of America endorsed Microsoft's acquisition of Activision because Microsoft promised not to union-bust Activision employees. They lied:

https://80.lv/articles/qa-workers-contracted-by-microsoft-say-they-were-fired-for-trying-to-unionize/

Repeatedly:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/activision-fired-staff-using-strong-language-about-remote-work-policy-union-2023-03-01/

Why wouldn't they lie? They've never faced any consequences for lying in the past. Remember: the secret to Microsoft's billions is impunity.

Which brings me to Solarwinds. Solarwinds is an enterprise management tool that allows IT managers to see, patch and control the computers they oversee. Foreign spies hacked Solarwinds and accessed a variety of US federal agencies, including National Nuclear Security Administration (who oversee nuclear weapons stockpiles), the NIH, and the Treasury Department.

When the Solarwinds story broke, Microsoft strenuously denied that the Solarwinds hack relied on exploiting defects in Microsoft software. They said this to everyone: the press, the Pentagon, and Congress.

This was a lie. As Renee Dudley and Doris Burke reported for Propublica, the Solarwinds attack relied on defects in the SAML authentication system that Microsoft's own senior security staff had identified and repeatedly warned management about. Microsoft's leadership ignored these warnings, buried the research, prohibited anyone from warning Microsoft customers, and sidelined Andrew Harris, the researcher who discovered the defect:

https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-golden-saml-data-breach-russian-hackers

The single most consequential cyberattack on the US government was only possible because Microsoft decided not to fix a profound and dangerous bug in its code, and declined to warn anyone who relied on this defective software.

Yesterday, Microsoft president Brad Smith testified about this to Congress, and promised that the company would henceforth prioritize security over gimmicks like AI:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/microsoft-in-damage-control-mode-says-it-will-prioritize-security-over-ai/

Despite all the reasons to mistrust this promise, the company is hoping Congress will believe it. More importantly, it's hoping that the Pentagon will believe it, because the Pentagon is about to award billions in free no-bid military contract profits to Microsoft:

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/17/pentagon-weighs-microsoft-licensing-upgrades

You know what? I bet they'll sell this lie. It won't be the first time they've convinced Serious People in charge of billions of dollars and/or lives to ignore that all-important maxim, "When someone tells you who they are and you get fooled again, shame on you."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/14/patch-tuesday/#fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again

[triviallytrue]

It's important to be obnoxious about the free open source software you use because large tech companies have advertising budgets and the random devs who make cool shit don't

Basically this but for FOSS

[frog707]

Open Asset Importer

There are a couple JVM versions of the Open Asset Importer (Assimp) library:

+ https://github.com/kotlin-graphics/assimp, a direct Kotlin port (last released in November 2020)

+ lwjgl-assimp, which provides access to native Assimp v5.2.5 (from September 2022) using JNI

I plan to explore both versions, with the goal of building a single open-source JVM library to import 3-D models (in glTF, OBJ, Blender, Ogre, and FBX formats) into JMonkeyEngine.

The engine includes custom importers for all 5 formats, but they haven't been well maintained. I hope the new library can replace one or more of the custom importers while requiring less maintenance.

I plan to rely on my usual development tools: Java, Apache NetBeans, GitKraken, and Gradle.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Free software is an example of a Luddite technology: an innovation in the interest of the preservation of practitioners’ autonomy against the imposition of control over the labor process by capitalists. By “breaking” software copyright and challenging closed and proprietary business models connected to it, free and open-source software has helped preserve independent and craft-like working conditions for programmers for decades. In addition to launching important software projects, like the operating system Linux, the free software movement was instrumental in establishing nonproprietary coding languages as standard in the industry, which meant that skill development, rather than being controlled exclusively by large corporations, could be done through open community involvement.

Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work

[qqueenofhades]

I’m in undergrad but I keep hearing and seeing people talking about using chatgpt for their schoolwork and it makes me want to rip my hair out lol. Like even the “radical” anti-chatgpt ones are like “Oh yea it’s only good for outlines I’d never use it for my actual essay.” You’re using it for OUTLINES????? That’s the easy part!! I can’t wait to get to grad school and hopefully be surrounded by people who actually want to be there 😭😭😭

Not to sound COMPLETELY like a grumpy old codger (although lbr, I am), but I think this whole AI craze is the obvious result of an education system that prizes "teaching for the test" as the most important thing, wherein there are Obvious Correct Answers that if you select them, pass the standardized test and etc etc mean you are now Educated. So if there's a machine that can theoretically pick the correct answers for you by recombining existing data without the hard part of going through and individually assessing and compiling it yourself, Win!

... but of course, that's not the way it works at all, because AI is shown to create misleading, nonsensical, or flat-out dangerously incorrect information in every field it's applied to, and the errors are spotted as soon as an actual human subject expert takes the time to read it closely. Not to go completely KIDS THESE DAYS ARE JUST LAZY AND DONT WANT TO WORK, since finding a clever way to cheat on your schoolwork is one of those human instincts likewise old as time and has evolved according to tools, technology, and educational philosophy just like everything else, but I think there's an especial fear of Being Wrong that drives the recourse to AI (and this is likewise a result of an educational system that only prioritizes passing standardized tests as the sole measure of competence). It's hard to sort through competing sources and form a judgment and write it up in a comprehensive way, and if you do it wrong, you might get a Bad Grade! (The irony being, of course, that AI will *not* get you a good grade and will be marked even lower if your teachers catch it, which they will, whether by recognizing that it's nonsense or running it through a software platform like Turnitin, which is adding AI detection tools to its usual plagiarism checkers.)

We obviously see this mindset on social media, where Being Wrong can get you dogpiled and/or excluded from your peer groups, so it's even more important in the minds of anxious undergrads that they aren't Wrong. But yeah, AI produces nonsense, it is an open waste of your tuition dollars that are supposed to help you develop these independent college-level analytical and critical thinking skills that are very different from just checking exam boxes, and relying on it is not going to help anyone build those skills in the long term (and is frankly a big reason that we're in this mess with an entire generation being raised with zero critical thinking skills at the exact moment it's more crucial than ever that they have them). I am mildly hopeful that the AI craze will go bust just like crypto as soon as the main platforms either run out of startup funding or get sued into oblivion for plagiarism, but frankly, not soon enough, there will be some replacement for it, and that doesn't mean we will stop having to deal with fake news and fake information generated by a machine and/or people who can't be arsed to actually learn the skills and abilities they are paying good money to acquire. Which doesn't make sense to me, but hey.

So: Yes. This. I feel you and you have my deepest sympathies. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to sit on the porch in my quilt-draped rocking chair and shout at kids to get off my lawn.

[sexhaver]

The fact that about 90% of the comments and tags defending GIMP or recommending other open source alternatives talk about these programs exclusively in their use for digital drawing really kind of says it all. Just not a single thought that some people might need Photoshop for photos.

i think there are also a lot of people under the impression that Adobe software is the industry standard in a lot of fields because something something capitalism something monopoly, which, sure, that's kind of a factor, but it's also important to note that their software is really fucking good. the main downsides to Adobe are 1. their predatory pricing models (SaaS can die in a hole) and 2. technical support teams that try to gaslight you into thinking software glitches are either your fault or straight up aren't happening, but that's why you 1. pirate + crack CS5/CS6 and 2. go to reddit for support.

[machine-saint]

i think one of the fundamental problems with the word "techbro" is that it has multiple meanings, some of which contradict each other.

the original term brogrammer referred to programmers who act in a very stereotypical masculine way, as a pejorative. the word "techbro" was sometimes used as a synonym for this. this is why the word "bro" is there, because it's a comparison to frat bros. this is also the only sense mentioned on the wikipedia page. this is also the sense i see the least usage of on tumblr; it was really more of a thing back in 2012-2013 or so.

people also use it to refer to people who are pushing the latest fad; web 3.0, blockchain shit, NFTs, LLMs, whatever. this usage does not require that the person actually knows anything about programming. some of these people genuinely believe in what they're advocating for, some of them are just hopping onto the latest money-making thing. this is the y combinator set.

a third usage is to refer to people who are very into self-hosting, and "own your hardware" type stuff and don't understand that computing is a compromise and not everyone wants to spend all their effort getting stuff to work. this is the rms type. unlike the second definition, this one requires the person to have fairly deep technical knowledge. theoretically you could have someone who doesn't know a lot about computers but is real big into this kind of stuff, but in practice that never happens.

(i'm broadly sympathetic to this type; i avoid music streaming and sync all my music using open-source software, that sort of thing. the "techbro" part, in theory, comes when they look down on others for not making the same choices. of course, the line between "you're looking down on me" and "you're arrogant for simply believing that you're right" is thin.)

in particular, sense-2 and sense-3 "techbros" have very opposite beliefs! one wants to run everything "in the cloud", the other wants to run everything locally. one wants to let chatgpt run your life, the other hates the idea of something they can't audit be that important. both tend to be very "technology will save us" types, but the way they go about that is very different. one makes very sleek-looking but extremely limited UI, the other will make ultra-customizable, ultra-functional UI that's the most hideous and hard-to-use thing you've seen in your life.

and so you can see here the problem: what can we actually say about "techbros" that's meaningful, other than "techbro is when i don't like someone who likes technology"? if a word isn't used as a self-descriptor, but only as an insult, what stops it from becoming broader and broader until it loses all usefulness?