Notices by Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social), page 16

Could you train a ChatGPT-beating model for $85,000 and run it in a browser? - Simon Willison: http://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/17/beat-chatgpt-in-a-browser/#atom-everything

@scottjenson The tricky thing here is that bosses who believe this, plenty of whom are won over by flashy visuals as opposed to software which actually does its job, could do a lot of damage.

Just look at the struggle professional translators face given how many employers think machine translation is good enough! When it isn't.

And that should be enough support for the `color` property to run my slides...

If I can't get system fonts working tomorrow I'll hardcode a copy of Ubuntu font. And I'll put a bit more work into pagination.

Basic pagination is implemented!

I want to add another feature here so I can run my slides, but I think I'll wrap up tonight with some rudimentary text colour support...

Still struggling to query fontconfig, guess I'm working on this up until the wire...

But now I think I'll tackle aspects I'm more confident in: Get pagination working! And maybe font colours.

I'm already disabled with symptoms that are very similar to Long COVID (my hEDS includes POTS, MCAS, and CFS). I wouldn't wish this on any other person, and I don't want to get worse. I'm used to being the weirdo in the room, but the next person to be disabled by COVID is blithely chatting over a conference-provided lunch indoors.

I thought we'd spent the past few years digging into issues and looking for ways to use these systems on problems they can handle, like data and media conversion and modification.

But, no, we're going straight for the dystopian nightmare stuff:

* Knowledgebases that straight up lie.
* Creating an underclass that's only served by mediocre AIs instead of actual lawyers or doctors
* Summarisers that hallucinate _in their summaries_
* Decision-making systems rife with shortcuts and biases

Got it!

I had the length of all inlines hardcoded to 0 for some reason!

Breath, then debug why FontConfig is erroring out on me...

Nope, would've part of it though...

I believe I've located the last place I've dropped this ball, not much more that can go wrong! Committing CatTrap fixes & testing.

I was placeholder passing an empty array of callee-data instead of an infinite one. Really need to figure out how the flattening should impact border/background data...

#Haphaestus dev notes: More debugging into why I'm not seeing text... Seems the data's now being dropped upon iterating over the "fragments" within the inlines...

Docker apologizes for trying to pull a bait and switch that people pushed back against hard enough for them to reconsider:
https://www.docker.com/blog/we-apologize-we-did-a-terrible-job-announcing-the-end-of-docker-free-teams/

Fuck Docker.

Projects need to self-host their container registries. You can get a perfectly cromulent server for a container registry for the money Docker asks for Teams.

Also, I saw suggestions #FOSS projects move to GitHub Container Registry. "Hey, we just got bitten in the arse by centralization, let's move to another centralized service!" 🤦♀️

@janriemer I hear this from fellow devs... I'm kind of surprised my use of the term "bottleneck" doesn't get through to them...

The main thing that'd need to be designed is a filemanager, which may support organizing by more than folders. And a source/app selector.

Also there'd need to be settings, but if we're designing the platform ourselves (ideally based on FreeDesktop.Org specs) Bureaucromancy can handle most of this design-work.

Also it'd be worth looking into which protocols would be useful to provide media for this TV.

Anyone keen to design this? I've got a full plate...

2/2!

As I address my frustrations with TV web browsers, I inevitably consider my frustrations with Smart TV OSs: Their experiences are designed by marketers.

They really don't suit someone who enjoys collecting media they love! (Not that Hollywood wants to allow us, but there's other options).

What would it take to design a document-centric TV OS I'd enjoy running Haphaestus on?

There'd be very little visual design, focus on the media being enjoyed together & shunt most chrome to the remote.

1/2?

Best idea I’ve heard in a while: yearly company-wide reading week.

Everyone log off. Go read those things you’ve been meaning to read. Don’t feel obliged to produce anything. Hopefully we’ll all learn things, and what we make will be better for it.

Also, the BSL (Business Source License) for it feels more like a slap in the face than an actual license.

They reckon is not an open source license, but still.

Also, you need to sign a CLA (Contributor License Agreement) when you contribute.

Those two give the feeling that you give up all your intellectual property when contributing (i.e., you do not share the copyright, as in other licenses).

* Combined/optimized invert & multiply-call with fastpaths, to implement division.
* Fastpath for multiplying by powers-of-2.
* Multiplying numerators & denominators whilst dividing by GCD.

2.1/2.1! Fin for today! Tomorrow: MPZ!

Also I see utilities for:
* Initialize multiple MPQs, wrapping a utility to initialize one.
* Negate numerator, cloning where necessary.
* Test fields for equality.
* Compare against long pair (signed or not).
* Clear a variadic-list of MPQs.
* Clear a MPQ.
* Normalize, e.g. dividing by GCD.
* Make numerator positive, cloning where necessary.
* Add/subtract multiplies by denominator product whilst normalizing so the op can be applied to numerators.
* Cross-multiply & compare with fastpaths.

2/3

GNU Multiprecision has a LibMPQ sublibrary implementing fractions, consisting of several mostly-trivial utilities around a struct holding a numerator & denominator as MPN & MPZ numbers. These utilities include:

* Swapping fields between 2 `mpq_ptr`s.
* Accessors for the 2 fields.
* Conversion from/to long pair (signed or not), MPF, double, string, or file. Most complex part.
* Copy from one MPQ to another.
* Swap numerator & denominator.

0/d is normalized to 0/1.

1/2!