Chris Ellis @intrbiz@bergamot.social

When elephants meet. #postgres #mastodon #fosdem

@floord

@fosdem #FOSDEM main track again, bit of history (and future!) of systemd by @pid_eins, my visual summary:

We are save-the-dating for @pgdaylowlands, September 12, in Rotterdam

Calls for sponsors, sessions and shenanigans open soon!

✅

Paywalls on web pages linked to via the socials have to be one of the worst web UXs.

After nearly drowning in an alphabet soup of anti-spam acronyms whilst trying to explain to a customer why email forwarding doesn't work, Kelduum decided to let off steam on our blog. https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2025/01/29/the-death-of-email-forwarding/

weather report for FOSDEM weekend in Brussels: sunny and dry; high 6°C ; low -1°C

The PGEU Diversity Committee arrived on LinkedIn.
Feel free to follow https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/postgresql-europe-diversity-task-force
#PostgreSQL

I'm off to #FOSDEM2025 at the end of this week to join the #SocialWeb devroom, and talk about @manyfold on Saturday afternoon!

Looking forward to talking to folks about #ActivityPub federation, #3dPrinting, #WebGL... pretty much anything TBH! And looking forward to a trip on the Eurostar, too 🚅

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4181-manyfold-federating-3d-models/

What's interesting about algorithms?

The challenge of doing X with as few resources as possible (memory, etc).

What do OpenAI + friends do? The opposite.

"Lets assume we have unlimited resources & try to build a god."

No wonder they're losing their shit with the DeepSeek thing.

Addendum: whether DeepSeek or OpenAI, there's no such thing as AGI & attempting to build it results in harm: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636.

Don't make this into a "US vs China US has to win on AGI" thing please 🙄

and basically, what the #DeepSeek team did was, since the H800 chips didn’t have the power that the H100s, they had to optimize everything down to the assembled components of the chip.

back in the 1990s that’s how folks first using languages like Java had to code things ―the software language was far more powerful than the retail hardware. so coders like my ex- (who used Java to create abstract expressionist painting on the screen) was doing assembly level coding to achieve that in 1998.

🧵

During my academic career (I taught thousands of under-graduate students from a variety of backgrounds), I saw a lot of 'artificial intelligence' usually coming from the mouths of over privileged white men, who thought eloquence was a reasonable substitute for actual knowing or analysing things.

So, forgive me if I am sceptical that AI is the answer for anything; what we need is real intelligence fostered in real people about real things... only then will we solve the world's problems!

#AI

The correct response to realizing computers are fast is not to make your software slow, because:

a.) you won't benefit as much as you hope
b.) if you break pro-user norms, so will every other site/app/library, and your thing will feel slow even if it's "fine" in isolation
c.) HW bounty is not evenly distributed, so your product becomes less usable non-linearly below some resource floor

Pretending constraints don't exist is not engineering, it's bullshitting.

BambuLab basically locks down their entire 3D printer ecosystem with this ridiculous cloud authorization system.

You want to print locally via your LAN? Sorry, the cloud needs to authorize your g-code first.

Want to use another slicer to send your job to the printer? Sorry, no.

Would it really still surprise anyone if DRM'd filaments are next on their agenda? Their printers are good, their prices are cheap, but please, stop supporting this company.

https://blog.bambulab.com/firmware-update-introducing-new-authorization-control-system-2/

#3dprinting

He's not wrong.

Thinking of Aaron Swartz today & I’m stuck on this photo - he & OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (both circled) each scraped 1000s of docs but one did it to make the knowledge free for all while the other did it to make $$$$ through probabilistic plagiarism. The US DOJ only came after one of them & the other is feted by tech bros and executives.

Thank you Aaron for so much, for RSS, for Markdown, for Creative Commons and more. I’m sorry our society failed you.

This is the most delightfully nerdy thing I've ever seen: