I have a small hobby project that scrapes concerts on various venues websites.
Many of the websites don't write out which the year the concert takes place, so in python I will:
try the current year and see if the date has already passed, and in that case I try the next year.
Of course feb 29th is an issue in this case, so some of my scrapers modules crashed.
Apple too, for a long time now. I used to use my 2015 iPad WiFi edition for navigation despite it not having a GPS chip. It worked surprisingly well as long as buildings were around.
Well you need to install the appropriate texlive dependencies which can be somewhat complicated, but once that's done it's just writing inline Latex
$$\like{this}$$
into your Markdown files and then doing
pandoc -f markdown -t pdf -o output.pdf input.md
Haven't used this in a while and just tried it again, was just a matter of searching a few error messages, gleaning the missing texlive package names from the results, and installing them. Works like a charm now.
I also had this working for Markdown to HTML conversion back in the day when I needed it, but that requires the website using a JS library like Mathjax.
I am confused about the example with the 'Greeting' function breaking the test. Did the author see this as an issue with testing?
If the functionality is changed, the tests will have to be changed to reflect that. One feature of tests is that they are are documentation for the expected functionality of code, so naturally it needs to be updated when functionality changes. It is a feature in my opinion.
Yeah, the idea isn't that this type of code should never be tested but that it's a higher burden to test, and maybe less valuable to test, compared with other code. And that should be factored into the decision (and there should be a decision) on whether or not to test it
Theoretically the machine could perform social engineering to fool a sysadmin or developer to let it out, and then start cloning itself like a worm. Good luck getting rid of it from the world if that happens. An isolated network might also not be a huge challenge for a general AI, depending on what level of security and what precautions are taken to avoid it.
I don't know when you were born, but my relationship to the Internet started probably around the time I was 7 or 8. My school had computers with Internet, there were two computers at home. My parents could have limited my Internet use but they couldn't have stopped me. There is not a guard standing by every computer stopping me from being Online if I am under 18 years of age.
I still don't think Omegle is at fault, but we have to assume kids are on the Internet.
I've been on the internet since I was about 10 years old (I estimate). My parents knew (and understood) maybe 10% of what I did on there. As a minor, I did multiple criminal things online, some of them successful, others not so much. If I was a kid in 2023, I probably would've been arrested at some point in time.
Because of what I know about the internet and because I know what kids will do with unlimited access, I think much of this burden should be with the parents. For every successful Omegle taken down, 3 more unknown ones will pop up. But major platforms like TikTok are also massive sources of grooming and parents happily give their 10 year olds a smart phone.
As long as parents are never held accountable for their kids online behavior and the blame is put on service providers, this will only get worse. I know many examples of parents who track their kids' phones because they're scared something will happen to them in the real world. Meanwhile, these same parents pay no attention at all to where their kids venture in the online world, let alone with who. Parents need to be educated on this, fast.
I've been on the internet since I was a similar age. I even obeyed all my parents' instructions (e.g. no using Google, no social media), but it's really only me being a certain kind of person – and a little luck – that kept me in any way resembling safe. Those rules, as stated to me, were absolutely not sufficient (e.g. I used Bing, and joined forums, and booted into QuickWeb to play The Fancy Pants Adventures because that wasn't disabling the filter). No way were my parents capable of policing my activity.
I, uh, mostly kept my parents in the loop, I guess? But they had to intervene and fix my messes on more than one occasion, and those were all things I hadn't told them about (some of which I even realised were big deals before they blew up). I'm quite lucky that none of that stuff's come back to bite me yet. (I don't think any of it was criminal, but that's pure serendipity: I had zero idea what the laws surrounding internet activity were, and I could easily have made an enemy of multiple governments without even knowing I should probably ask my parents about this cool new programming idea I had.)
The places I frequent these days are all safe for the kind of child I was, but the internet is much, much bigger than that – and, I suspect, more hostile than it was. I have no illusions that I could provide good, useful guidelines to a ten-year-old today.
> But major platforms like TikTok are also massive sources of grooming and parents happily give their 10 year olds a smart phone.
I've never used TikTok, but I find myself scrolling through Instagram reels quite often. It's so addicting. Recently, I've been seeing some extreme gore: people being lit on fire, bones snapping, fatal car accidents, sexually explicit content (cheating, etc.), etc.
It's gotten to the point of me no longer wanting to watch those reels - they're very, very dark and depressing. If children are seeing this stuff as well, that's a major problem.
I volunteer in my local public school in the US. The sad fact is that stable family structure, by any definition, is collapsing and that kids are suffering. The percentage of kids in grade school who have an absent, incarcerated, addicted, mentally unhealthy, or generally dysfunctional parent is off the charts.
Parents who are unable to give their kids the tools they need to avoid getting shunted into special education on account of their behavior are in no position to supervise their online activity.
I make a habit of looking up kids parents on FB - it generally tracks that the worse the kids behavior and educational outlook, the greater the parent’s (singular in most cases) social media presence. I’m no longer surprised when I find a mother’s Onlyfans link, FFS.
Where I live a full 1/3 of 1st graders are in a special education track. All the research points to the impact of the home and family on these outcomes.
Tl;dr many parents are incapable of the rational parenting you suggest.
There is no _one_ reason, and I don't present that particular phenomenon as a causal factor but as a symptom of the greater problem - which certainly includes poverty but is even more closely aligned to the opioid epidemic.
All this is in the context of asking parents to provide their children the guidance required to avoid child-inappropriate content.
My point stands: a large and growing contingent of parents lack the stability/ability/support required to even keep their children's behavior within acceptable boundaries. It's a fool's errand to think keeping kids away from bad actors on the internet can be added to their plate.
you'll grant however that when we were young, it was more of an unknown wild west. Parents didn't know what to make of it or fear, there was generally more freedom afforded. We were the first generation with stupid-easy access to pirated pornography. No one had any idea of health concerns, at best you heard a blanket moral stance that didn't convince anyone.
I think today parents have access to far better means of regulating access, should they so choose, and they're more conscious of it. I'm not saying it's fool-proof, but the overhead is enough to dissuade kids from spending too much time and getting into trouble.
While I can speak in Portuguese without much issues (except being hard for them to stick to European Portuguese), I've nooticed that sometimes it uses a clear translation of an English expression that does not feel natural in Portuguese at all.
Does he really turn against SaaS/Cloud? Software that doesn't run on your computer doesn't necessarily need to be in your control, right? As long as the clients are free.
It's gotten to the point where most cloud services are no longer managed instances of open source or even compatible software.
You could take a managed cloud PostgreSQL instance and migrate to something self-hosted if the prices were to hike up or something else happened that would necessitate it.
But how many of the cloud services in your stack does that apply to? Geocoding or routing? Push notifications and messaging? Payment gateways? Authentication and authorization solutions? File storage solutions? Web Application Firewalls?
Thank you, that was an enlightening text, made me understand better GNUs view of SaaS.
There are many cases where running a self hosted version is not feasible, which are also mentioned in the text. Social media and other services where the information is an important part of the service or software that can not be run on my own machine due to limits in my hardware. But outsourcing simple calculations that can be done locally is a bad thing I agree.
> Social media and other services where the information is an important part of the service or software that can not be run on my own machine due to limits in my hardware.
I mean, fediverse sites like Mastodon or Lemmy, or even something like PeerTube show that it's possible to at least run instances of a larger federated service, albeit the user experience could be better (the average person asking "What do you mean, I have to pick a server to join?").
Admittedly, video hosting is the hardest due to space and bandwidth requirements, though perhaps the real reason why none of these platforms see real widespread success is the network effect - most people already are pretty comfortably in popular walled gardens and don't feel like they want to switch to anything else.
The FSF has created the AGPL 16 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_Lice...), so it's not like they didn't see the turn that software was going into. But it was already a losing battle, because every developer wants to think they might become millionaire and won't use it.
Whether the software runs on my computer or not, if I am the user, I must be in control.
Whether the meal is prepared in my kitchen or not, if I am going to eat it, I must be in control.
AGPL is also the license you should use if you don't want big corporations to use your software. Big Tech even avoids GPL-3 and stick to GPL-2 from what I have noticed.
Note that AGPL does not actually protect your software from big companies (or small companies) running your software as a service. It requires them to contribute back or make source available when they make changes, and IIRC thats to the user (who could be an enterprise customer under some other agreement even, but none of this is tested in court).
If you want that sort of protection, BSL, SSPL, Elastic license, etc are what you want.
If you want to make Free Software, make it. Know that people you don’t like may use your software, even criminals may. That is what Free Software is. OSS is slightly different but similar.
If you want to make shareware, make shareware — no judgements on people who want to make money with their software and believe thats the best path.
I'm fine with big corporations use my software: the deal is that whatever they do with it, they must give it back to the users with the same license. Make it live beyond the company's existence and control. It's still better than my software being non-copyleft and being used by a company.
I wish they would give back all the profit as well but that's another topic and the AGPL doesn't touch that.
Just like you aren't in control of your software if you didn't write your compiler yourself, if you didn't build your compiler yourself, all the way down to the minerals.
You're never 100% in control, but that doesn't mean you should try and maximize it.
Many of the websites don't write out which the year the concert takes place, so in python I will: try the current year and see if the date has already passed, and in that case I try the next year.
Of course feb 29th is an issue in this case, so some of my scrapers modules crashed.