Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-48.

KDE’s 6th Megarelease - Beta 1 - KDE Community

Tags: tech, kde

The best time to test it and provide fixes is now!

https://kde.org/announcements/megarelease/6/beta1/

PeerTube v6 is out, and powered by your ideas! – Framablog

Tags: tech, video, self-hosting

Another great release. Definitely welcome features.

https://framablog.org/2023/11/28/peertube-v6-is-out-and-powered-by-your-ideas/

Where Is OpenCV 5? - OpenCV

Tags: tech, graphics, opencv, vision

This is an important project, they’re starting a crowdfunding. Time to give back!

https://opencv.org/blog/where-is-opencv-5/

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 plans for Wayland and Xorg server

Tags: tech, redhat, wayland

The beginning of the end for X11. The writing is now on the wall.

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/rhel-10-plans-wayland-and-xorg-server

New Outlook is good, both for yourself and 766 third parties

Tags: tech, microsoft, privacy

They respect privacy apparently… oh wait!

https://godforsaken.website/@Shrigglepuss/111482466182637440

Pluralistic: The real AI fight

Tags: tech, ai, ethics

Excellent piece from Cory Doctorow, it’s a good summary of where the real debates about AI should be… and it’s nowhere near the OpenAI soap opera.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

UK school pupils ‘using AI to create indecent imagery of other children’

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, criticism

School bullying has a new tool to its belt… and this one is rather creepy.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/nov/27/uk-school-pupils-using-ai-create-indecent-sexual-abuse-images-of-other-children

GAIA: A Benchmark for General AI Assistants

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, benchmarking

That’s the beginning of interesting benchmarks for AI assistants. Still a long way to go but this is a good start.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.12983.pdf

Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet - Cal Newport

Tags: tech, web, blog, social-media

Hopefully this becomes true. I wouldn’t mind a post-Social Media era of the Web.

https://calnewport.com/neil-gaimans-radical-vision-for-the-future-of-the-internet/

An ode to the neo-grotesque web | Redowan’s Reflections

Tags: tech, web, blog, history, ux

There was definitely something we lost from the early days of the web. It was not perfect, far from it, but some of that spark is missing.

https://rednafi.com/zephyr/an_ode_to_the_neo_grotesque_web/

cohost! - “Paper: You Want My Password or a Dead Patient?”

Tags: tech, medecine, usability, security, safety

How the medical sector is struggling with badly designed software. Also important to note how security is just getting in the way of nurses and doctors jobs.

https://cohost.org/mononcqc/post/3647311-paper-you-want-my-p

Secure DNS (DoT & DoH) is not enough

Tags: tech, browser, dns, privacy

Looking forward to Encrypted Client Hello to be widely available. This was no more clear text SNI, and privacy should be really ensured when browsing the web.

https://lu.sagebl.eu/notes/secure-dns-dot-doh-is-not-enough/

Beej’s Guide to Interprocess Communications

Tags: tech, unix, processes, communication

Looks like a good resource for someone who needs to get into IPC mechanisms on UNIX flavors.

https://beej.us/guide/bgipc/

Modern C++ Programming Course (C++11/14/17/20)

Tags: tech, c++, learning

Looks like a fairly comprehensive course to get started or refresh your Modern C++

https://github.com/federico-busato/Modern-CPP-Programming

On harmful overuse of std::move - The Old New Thing

Tags: tech, c++, performance

Seen this a bit too often indeed. When people learn about std::move they tend to sprinkle it too much preventing proper optimizations. Its use should be fairly limited usually.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20231124-00/?p=109059

Live and Let Die

Tags: tech, programming, c++, raii, resources

Interesting dive on the limits of destructors and when they’re called. This can have implications on how programs are stopped.

https://accu.org/journals/overload/31/177/janzen/

Brandt Bucher – A JIT Compiler for CPython

Tags: tech, python, compiler

If you wonder what’s happening on the JIT front in CPython land, here is a talk explaining what’s coming in 3.13.

https://piped.video/watch?v=HxSHIpEQRjs

Oatmeal

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, vim, command-line, self-hosting, foss

Interesting terminal oriented tool to interacting with LLM. Let you choose to self-host or run locally.

https://dustinblackman.com/posts/oatmeal/

Distribute and run LLMs with a single file

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, foss, portability

Interesting experiment. It makes for a very large file but there are a few clever tricks in there.

https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile

Using Polars in a Pandas world

Tags: tech, data, pandas, polars

Good things to keep in mind if you’re pondering between pandas or polars for your data processing.

https://pythonspeed.com/articles/polars-pandas-interopability/

Ray Marching Fog With Blue Noise « The blog at the bottom of the sea

Tags: tech, graphics, 3d, noise

I keep being baffled at how the right type of noise can really make a difference in the rendering of some effects.

https://blog.demofox.org/2020/05/10/ray-marching-fog-with-blue-noise/

Animotion — a visual CSS animation app

Tags: tech, web, css, animation, tools

Nice little editor for CSS animations. Should definitely help building those.

https://cssanimotion.pages.dev/

The Weirdest Bug I’ve Seen Yet

Tags: tech, debugging

Definitely a weird one… still a mystery and unfortunately will probably stay this way. Having the code source could have helped nail it down, could have been interesting.

https://engineering.gusto.com/the-weirdest-bug-ive-seen-yet/

CUPID—for joyful coding - Dan North & Associates Limited

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, design, programming, quality

This is a good set of properties to strive for. Since the SOLID principles start to show their age this might be a worthwhile alternative.

https://dannorth.net/cupid-for-joyful-coding/

Code is run more than read

Tags: tech, business, craftsmanship, foss

Interesting food for thought. The later point about the tension between business and users lately is also a good one and should be kept in mind. That’s an ethical concern you find most in companies publishing Free Software though. It’s not the full packaged solution but a good starting point.

https://olano.dev/2023-11-30-code-is-run-more-than-read/

Supporting Sustainability

Tags: tech, project-management, communication, sustainability

Interesting set of advices for better communication and more sustainable production of software.

https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2022/01/30/supporting-sustainability/

Be Indirect in Your Research Questionnaire to Gain More Honesty

Tags: sociology, polling

Definitely this. When polling the questions shouldn’t be too obvious, otherwise people will tell you what you want to hear.

https://www.yegor256.com/2023/11/28/research-questionnaire.html

Bye for now!

MauiKit: A Toolkit for Multi Adaptable User Interfaces.

Today, we bring you a report on the brand-new release of the Maui Project.

MauiKit3 & 4

While documenting the source code – for the ported MauiKit4 frameworks – a lot of the implementation details of the visual controls have been reviewed and refined, this has resulted in a more curated set of UI elements, performance boost, cleaner code an early addition of new features.

Controls

All of the frameworks have a new information header, with information about the module, such as version number, build version, and all of the open-source tools that are part of it.

A quick overview of the changes made include:

• Startup optimizations for the ApplicationWindow
• The SettingsDialog layout is now cleaner when using the accompanying SectionGroup and SectionItem controls
• Fix regressions introduced with the dialogs now based on QQC2 Dialog component
• The TabView overview preview thumbnails are now correctly scaled and more tab information, such as the custom color and tooltip text – are now used.
• Lazy loading elements until they are needed resulting in small performance boost
• The AboutDialog links are clearer without using any special styling, and some parts have been refactored for a cleaner source code
• Fixes to the GridBrowserDelegate and ListBrowserDelegate checkable state

Terminal, TextEditor & FileBrowsing

The FileDialog issues on mobile devices with the single click preference have been solved. Another bunch of small fixes include fixes to the dialog buttons, the FileBrowser action dialogs, information about tag locations, and the addition of more methods to the file management classes.

MauiKitTerminal now exposes more interface properties for handling processes that have gone silent, and functions to correctly change the current working directory.

Documents, Accounts, Calendar &ImageTools

Added the header with module information, and started the porting work.

And, as for MauiKit4:

• The Holder control can now have an image source as the emoji
• Many corrections in the QML syntax for the definition of catching signals.
• The SettingsDialog is now a detached window on desktop environments
• Added a new control DialogWindow and BaseWindow, from which ApplicationWindow now inherits. The new DialogWindow is correctly set as a dialog window and it’s modal.
• Simplify the implementation of controls, such as the InputDialog
• Fixes to CSD buttons controls, and now respects hints of no resizable windows or windows that should not be minimized.
• Added a build flag `-DBUILD_DEMO=ON` for building or skipping the MauiKit4 demo app.
• Added documentation to the sources and example files for all the visual controls
• The SectionItem has been changed into two different variants: SectionItem and FlexSectionItem, more information about their use cases is in the documentation linked in the section below
• Some of the previously public types that were only part of the implementation have now become private, such as the SideBar for the SideBarView

MauiKit4 Documentation

Documentation has been published for the ported MauiKit4 frameworks, as part of the migration plan. As new frameworks get ported, the accompanying documentation will be published. You can find the documentation online at https://api.kde.org/mauikit/index.html

At the time of this release, the following frameworks have now been fully documented, and have a comprehensive list of example source files:

• MauiMan
• MauiKit4
• MauiKitFileBrowsing4

The documentation effort also resulted in a complete set of example source files, which can be used for interested users to quickly hack and learn about MauiKit4, and for testers – and unit tests, to monitor all parts are functional.

If you are interested in contributing to the project, or in developing a MauiKit-based application, and you find any issues, bugs about the documentation text readability, or any other comments, please feel free to open a bug report on the corresponding repository issues page, and/or joining us at our telegram public chat group, where any concerns or questions will be answered promptly.

MauiKit3 Apps

Among specific new features and updates listed below, all of the Maui apps have been updated to the latest MauiKit3 changes, which also include fixes to some regressions introduced in the porting to MauiKit4 – and have also received an initial set of tweaks to get ready for their migration to MauiKit4.

Fix regression to the new dialogs versus the previous implementation.

Updated translations to multiple languages, thanks to the KDE community.

Index, Vvave & Shelf

Index now allows previewing files by default instead of opening them in an external application, and the dialog can be detached on desktop environments. Some UI elements have been improved to be loaded only when needed.

In Index, the previewer model is now independent of the current directory model, and the previews of videos and audios now have a playback button for pausing and resuming.

The albums and artist view in Vvave, now display a quick play button on hovering over the cover, to quickly start playing a full album or artist collection.

Shelf correct browsing by categories.

Clip, Nota & Station

The alerts on Station, for inactive or silent processes are now optional and exposed in the settings dialog. Now the last session can be restored if preferred.

For Nota, the crashing issues on Android have been addressed. Menus and other elements are now being lazy-loaded, making the app quicker. Also, menus have been revised and the mobile contextual menu is now correctly working.

Fiery, Buho & More

Fiery now has detachable tabs.

Maui Shell

Cask, Maui Settings & More

The session startup manager now has been fully ported to Qt6 and it’s working correctly.

Many fixes were done to the Cask panels and dock, fixing regressions introduced in the migration to MauiKit4. This is still a work in progress and more development will go into this for the upcoming release of the Shell in February.

2024 Roadmap

For the upcoming release scheduled for February, most of the work will go into the Shell and its sub-projects, as decided in the release chronogram, however, this will also be the time when the remaining MauiKit frameworks will be ported from Qt5 to Qt6, those include Documents, Terminal,ImageTools, TextEditor, Accounts.

It is expected that most of the Maui Applications will be ported to MauiKit4 Frameworks and Qt6, for their new release around May 2024. And by August release it is expected that all of the Maui Project has been successfully migrated to Qt6.

To follow the Maui Project’s development or say hi, you can join us on Telegram: https://t.me/mauiproject.

We are present on Twitter and Mastodon:

• https://twitter.com/maui_project.
• https://mastodon.technology/@mauiproject.

New release schedule

The post Maui Release Briefing # 4 appeared first on MauiKit — #UIFramework.

KDiagram is two powerful libraries (KChart, KGantt) for creating business diagrams.

Version 3.0.0 is now available for packaging.

It moves KDiagram to use Qt 6. It is co-installable with previous Qt 5 versions and distros may want to package both alongside each other for app compatibility.

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/kdiagram/3.0.0/
SHA256: 6d5f53dfdd019018151c0193a01eed36df10111a92c7c06ed7d631535e943c21

Signed by E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell jr@jriddell.org
https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg

KWeatherCore is a library to facilitate retrieval of weather information including forecasts and alerts.

0.8.0 is available for packaging now

URL: https://download.kde.org/stable/kweathercore/0.8.0/
SHA256: 9bcac13daf98705e2f0d5b06b21a1a8694962078fce1bf620dbbc364873a0efeS
Signed by E0A3EB202F8E57528E13E72FD7574483BB57B18D Jonathan Esk-Riddell <jr@jriddell.org>
https://jriddell.org/esk-riddell.gpg

This release moves the library to use Qt 6. It is not compatible with older Qt 5 versions of the library so should only be packaged when KWeather is released or in testing archives.

We're happy to announce the new release 5.12.0 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management program!

20 years KPhotoAlbum

This is some kind of "special" release, as exactly 20 years ago, on 2003-11-27, version 1.0 was tagged (we tagged this release already on saturday, so that it will hit the mirrors and we can publish this release announcement at this very date though ;-).

20 years is quite a long time for such a "small" FLOSS project. Enough times, nice programs die from bit rot, because the only dev or too many of the few lose interest in it, don't need it anymore and/or nobody wants to take over maintainership. Happily, this is not the case for KPA! After all these years, the project is still alive and kicking, and – when the family, the job and everything else allow it (after all, we're all not fulltime KPA devs), we work on it to make it better.

Just speaking of me, I joined the project back in 2014, almost ten years ago now (which is arguably also quite a long period of time). And I'm really proud to still be a part of this great project :-)

So, I think it's time to especially thank Jesper Pedersen for initiating the project back then, and Johannes Zarl-Zierl for taking over the maintainership and being the project leader since 2019! Joyfully, Jesper never really stopped contributing to KPA and still works on it until now.

After all, we're still – without too much self-laudation – a small but excellent crew of FLOSS enthusiasts ;-)

But about the release itself:

What's new?

Bugfixes

Most notably, we could fix a really big amount of crashes and unexpected behavior. The following bug reports could be closed as "fixed": #472427, #472523, #473231, #473324, #473587, #473762, #474151, #474392, #475387, #475388, #475529, #475585, #476131, #476561, #476651, #476862 and #477195. That's quite an impressive list, isn't it?!

Kudos to our new super-diligent beta tester Victor Lobo for filing 17 of those bug reports alone, always providing meaningful information about how to reproduce the issue and tirelessly testing the fixes. Thank you! As a dev, you really appreciate this! Apart from that, also big thanks to Pierre Etchemaïté and Andreas Schleth for providing equivalently excellent bug reports!

Thanks to you all for helping making KPhotoAlbum better!

New features and changes

Apart from that, there are also some new interesting features:

• Support annotating images from the viewer by using letters to assign tags. Use the context menu and select "Annotate | Assign Tags" to enable. More information is available in the KPhotoAlbum handbook.
• Add option to sort category page by natural order (feature #475339). Natural sort order takes the locale into account and sorts numeric values properly (e.g. sort "9" before "10").
• Allow selecting a date range in the DateBar via keyboard (Use "Shift + Left|Right")
• Allow closing the annotation dialog's fullscreen preview using the Escape key.

… as well as sone changes:

• In the viewer window, using the letters A-Z to assign tokens now needs to be explicitly enabled. You can do this by opening the context menu and selecting "Annotate | Assign Tokens".
• When KPhotoAlbum is started in demo mode and a previously saved demo database exists, the old demo database is no longer overwritten.
• The ui.rc file (kphotoalbumui.rc) is now deployed as a Qt resource instead of an on-disk file.
• Improved usability of "Invoke external program" menu (#474819)
• No longer set the default shortcut for "Use current video frame in thumbnail view" to Ctrl+S and avoid shortcut conflict.
• Restrict context menu entries for fullscreen preview of annotation dialog to a sane set of actions.
• It is no longer possible to annotate images from the viewer by pressing "/" and typing tag names.
• It is no longer possible to change an image through the annotation dialog's fullscreen image preview.

Thanks to everybody involved!

According to git, the following individuals pushed commits:

• Yuri Chornoivan
• Friedrich W. H. Kossebau
• Nicholas Leggiero
• Tobias Leupold
• Alexander Lohnau
• Scarlett Moore
• Jesper K. Pedersen
• Johannes Zarl-Zierl

Thanks for spending your time with coding on KPA and for contributing your work!

Have a lot of fun with the new release, and keep KPA the best photo management program out there, also for the 20 years to come :-)

— Tobias

We’re already in November, but I managed to do a lot of work this month which I’m really happy about.

Quickly something that’s not strictly programming: I was accepted as a member of KDE e.V. early this month, thank you all very much! I was also given moderation powers on Discuss so maybe it will stop rate limiting me when moving posts around.

I also went on a crusade of merging and triaging merge requests on Invent, which some of you might’ve seen. Notably I was able to take care one or two pages worth of open MRs, which I’m really happy about.

Without further ado, let’s begin.

Plasma

[Feature] Merged the Game Controller KCM into Plasma, starting with a simple rewrite in QML. I’m aiming to add back the visual representation in 6.1 (which still exists in the standalone repository if you want to take a shot at it.) At least for right now the code is much better and it supports more devices than the 5.X Joystick KCM ever could. [6.0]

My hope is that since it’s much cleaner and easier to work with, it would invite more contributors… and it’s already doing that as we speak! :-)

NeoChat

[Feature] Blockquotes now look more like quotes, and no longer just somewhat indented blocks of text. [24.02]

[Bugfix] You can now right-click (or long tap) on rooms to access the context menu without switching to it. I gave the treatment for spaces a while back. [24.02]

[Feature] Added UnifiedPush support! It’s functional already and I have used it to receive push notifications even when NeoChat is closed. [24.02]

Tokodon

[Feature] I merged the post redesign I was teasing on Mastodon, which includes better margins and standalone tags. [24.02]

[Feature] The language selector is now a regular dialog and not the buggy custom combo box we had before. It now displays the native language name, if available. [24.02]

[Feature] Muting and blocking users has been accessible through profile pages, and now those actions are present in the post menu like on Mastodon Web. Useful for taking action against harmful users without navigating to a cesspool of a profile too. [24.02]

[Feature] Added a report dialog. It’s a little basic right now, which I want to improve before release. [24.02]

[Feature] Rebased and merged Rishi’s Moderation Tool, which works fantastic and I used this to test my reporting feature! [24.02]

[Feature] Added a way to filter out boosts and replies from timeline pages. [24.02]

[Feature] Added supports for lists. You can’t add people to lists (you must use another client to do that) but you can at least view and manage them. [24.02]

Kiten

[Bugfix] Marked the X11 socket as fallback. This removes a warning on the Flathub page about the deprecated windowing system. [23.08]

[Bugfix] Numerous UI improvements, such as improving the margins of configuration dialogs. I also redid the toolbar layout. [24.02]

[Feature] Added a search function to the Kanji browser. [24.02]

Kirigami

[Bugfix] Fixed an edge cases of ToolBar incubation, which liked to spam logs. I squashed some other log spam, so Kirigami applications should be less noisy. [6.0]

[Feature] Added a property to FlexColumn that allows you to read the inner column’s width. We use this in Tokodon to set the width of the separator between posts. [6.0]

Craft

I’m getting addicted to fixing Craft recipes, and there’s a lot to fix in the upcoming 6.0 megarelease:

• Preparing Tokodon for Qt6
• Preparing MPV for an eventual Windows build by only requiring Linux-specific video APIs on Linux
• Added a blueprint for MpvQt for future use in Tokodon and PlasmaTube
• Added a KUnifiedPush blueprint for future use in Tokodon and NeoChat
• Preparing KWeatherCore for Qt6
• Preparing KWeather for Qt6

KUnifiedPush

[Feature] Improved the look of it’s KCM. Not only does it look nice, and it’s design is more in line with other list based ones.

PlasmaTube

[Feature] Added better hover effects for video items. I did a bunch of refactoring to unify the two types (list and grid) so they work better in general (especially for keyboard-only navigation.) [24.02]

[Feature] Added a video queue system, which is exactly what you think it is. You can queue up an entire playlist, or add videos manually like on YouTube. [24.02]

[Feature] Different types of search results is supported now, so you can find channels and playlists. [24.02]

[Feature] Public Piped instances are now fetched and displayed on initial setup. [24.02]

[Feature] Features of PlasmaTube that are unsupported by the current video source are now disabled or hidden. This should result in less buggy and broken looking behavior depending on which video source you use. [24.02]

[Feature] Added support for MPRIS, which is used by the Media Player applet, the lockscreen and KDE Connect. [24.02]

Accessibility

[Bugfix] Fixed our spinboxes not being read correctly by screen readers, since they were editable by default. Now the accessible descriptions and other data is passed down to the text field. Fixed in QQC2 Desktop Style (used on Plasma Desktop) and QQC2 Breeze Style (Plasma Mobile and Android.) [6.0]

Documentation

Found lots more missing Bugzilla links in Invent, and did some more README updating!

• Added missing Bugzilla link for Ruqola
• Updated README for Kiten, adding a screenshot
• Added Snap store links for NeoChat and Tokodon
• Added missing Bugzilla product for kdesrc-build
• Expanded plasma-integration’s README
• Wrote the README for our new Accessibility Inspector
• Expanded the README for qqc2-desktop-style, and now contains usage information and why it’s different than qqc2-breeze-style. Did the same for qqc2-breeze-style too

KWeather

[Bugfix] Fixed the setup wizard. [24.02]

Upcoming

[Feature] Not merged yet, but I’m adding a pen calibration tool to the Tablet KCM. If you have the required equipment and can test, please help out! It’s cutting it close to the feature freeze, so this will most likely be pushed off until 6.1.

See you in December!

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-47.

What OpenAI shares with Scientology

Tags: tech, ai, criticism

Ironically, I think this is one of the best analysis I’ve seen regarding OpenAI and the recent turmoil around of one of its founders.

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/look-at-scientology-to-understand

Oops! We Automated Bullshit. | Department of Computer Science and Technology

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, criticism

Excellent piece about everything which is wrong in the current industrialization moment of generative AI.

https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/blog/afb21/oops-we-automated-bullshit

Pluralistic: Tesla’s Dieselgate (28 July 2023)

Tags: tech, automotive, DRM

Don’t you love DRMs in cars? Especially when the business people at the helm are pathological liars?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/

Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox

Tags: tech, google, attention-economy

I guess it’s a strategy to move more people over to Chrome. Shameful.

https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/

Cryptographers Solve Decades-Old Privacy Problem - Nautilus

Tags: tech, cryptography, privacy

Cool results, let’s see what the future brings. This could be exciting.

https://nautil.us/cryptographers-solve-decades-old-privacy-problem-444899/

Streamlined interface for generating images with AI in Krita

Tags: tech, graphics, ai, machine-learning

I guess this will end up being a popular plugin for Krita.

https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion

Audio Samples from StyleTTS 2

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, speech

The newer text to speech models are really good now.

https://styletts2.github.io/

Making an E-Paper Picture Frame

Tags: tech, raspberry-pi, e-ink

This is a cool project, not too expensive as well.

https://wolfgang-ziegler.com/blog/ink-display

Email obfuscation: What still works in 2023?

Tags: tech, web, email, spam

Good list of techniques. Some of them aren’t fully evaluated yet. Definitely worth considering.

https://spencermortensen.com/articles/email-obfuscation/

Ethernet is Still Going Strong After 50 Years - IEEE Spectrum

Tags: tech, networking, history

A bit of history behind what’s probably the most widespread local network technology.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ethernet-ieee-milestone

RFC 9498: The GNU Name System

Tags: tech, dns, privacy, censorship

Interesting a new name system being standardized. It’s supposed to protect privacy and be censorship resistant. We’ll see how it gets adopted.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnunet/2023-11/msg00000.html

How many floating-point numbers are in the interval [0,1]? – Daniel Lemire’s blog

Tags: tech, floats

Floating-point numbers are really a complicated species. This is an interesting deep dive in some of their representation.

https://lemire.me/blog/2017/02/28/how-many-floating-point-numbers-are-in-the-interval-01/

Herbie: Automatically Improving Floating Point Accuracy

Tags: tech, floats, tools

Interesting tool. Hopefully will help us manipulate floating point expressions better.

https://herbie.uwplse.org/

A close encounter with false sharing | More Stina Blog!

Tags: tech, multithreading, performance

Good reminder that false sharing is a real thing. It’s easier to encounter than you think when you start to dabble into multi-threading.

https://morestina.net/blog/1976/a-close-encounter-with-false-sharing

GWP-ASan: Sampling-Based Detection of Memory-Safety Bugs in Production - 2311.09394.pdf

Tags: tech, memory, safety, security

Nice approach to also hunt for memory safety issues while software is in production.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.09394.pdf

Retries – An interactive study of common retry methods – Encore Blog

Tags: tech, networking, programming

Nice little article with simulations demonstrating why you want exponential backoff and how jitter is an extra layer of protection for the server.

https://encore.dev/blog/retries

Create RSS Feeds in Java using ROME

Tags: tech, java, rss

Yes, I have a thing for bringing RSS back. This time it’s a library enabling the feature for Java projects. Looks easy to use.

https://www.blackslate.io/articles/create-rss-feeds-in-java-using-rome

Explicit Resource Management: Exploring JavaScript’s and TypeScript’s new feature | iliazeus

Tags: tech, javascript, resources

Looks like RAII is finally making its way in Javascript. This looks like a good thing, it’s still rough around the edges though.

https://iliazeus.github.io/articles/js-explicit-resource-management-en/

The Changing “Guarantees” Given by Python’s Global Interpreter Lock · Stefan-Marr.de

Tags: tech, python, multithreading

Won’t be easy to get rid of the GIL in the Python ecosystem. There are notable differences of behavior between implementations and even versions of the same implementation… Lots of user code will unwillingly depend on a specific set of guarantees.

https://stefan-marr.de/2023/11/python-global-interpreter-lock/

It’s Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated - miguelgrinberg.com

Tags: tech, python, api

Since quite a lot of Python code will be impacted by this, better get ready.

https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/it-s-time-for-a-change-datetime-utcnow-is-now-deprecated

Exploring a Postgres query plan | notes.eatonphil.com

Tags: tech, postgresql, databases

Ever wondered how to programmatically introspect query plans? This is a long article but good starting point on how it’s represented under the hood.

https://notes.eatonphil.com/2023-11-19-exploring-a-postgres-query-plan.html

garnix | Contextual CLIs

Tags: tech, command-line

Good food for thought to design CLI interfaces.

https://garnix.io/blog/contextual-cli

An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid

Tags: tech, frontend, browser, css

Nice guide, the interactive parts definitely help. Good way to improve CSS Grid use. It’s much more powerful than I suspected.

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/interactive-guide-to-grid/

How large pull requests slow down development

Tags: tech, git, version-control, complexity, risk, quality

Interesting statistics, this show how important it is to have well structured and focused change sets as much as possible.

https://graphite.dev/blog/how-large-prs-slow-down-development

Software Development and Postmortems

Tags: tech, project-management, failure, postmortem

Very good piece. Explains why postmortems are important. It also explains how to prepare your organization to conduct them and how to do them properly. This is important since a lot of pressure will happen in case of a failure.

https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/dealing-with-failures-and-postmortems/

75% of Software Engineers Faced Retaliation Last Time They Reported Wrongdoing - Engprax

Tags: tech, politics, law, work

This is really bad… Now, this is investigation is UK centric though. I wonder how other countries would fare.

https://www.engprax.com/post/75-of-software-engineers-faced-retaliation-last-time-they-report-wrongdoing

Performance Is Contextual - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: management, productivity

Definitely this, the context matters a lot. Sometimes I’ve seen people too quick to blame the skillset of underperforming colleagues. But the same person in a different context could probably do much better.

https://jacobian.org/2023/nov/20/performance-is-contextual/

14 Signs of a GOOD Manager. Navigating leadership excellence.

Tags: tech, management

This is a good list. I guess some of it feels obvious… at the same time it’s indeed something you don’t see every day. More awareness from managers is needed.

https://medium.com/blob-streaming/14-signs-of-a-good-manager-ea7879f8d894

Bye for now!

For some time now, Qt has been internally utilizing RHI (Rendering Hardware Interface), a new cross-platform technology for graphic rendering. Since Qt 6.6, this API has been semi-public, meaning that the API is mature for practical use but may still be subject to potential changes between major Qt versions.

In this blog post, we demonstrate how to to get started with RHI.

Continue reading Hello, RHI – How to get started with Qt RHI at basysKom GmbH.

Update: We’ve merged KDE 6 / Plasma 6 packages to Rawhide so Kinoite Nightly builds will be paused again. You can follow the progress in Kinoite via the Rawhide container images or the classic ostree refs.

How to switch back to Rawhide:

# Reabse to the experimental container version:
$ sudo rpm-ostree rebase --reboot \
    ostree-unverified-registry:quay.io/fedora-ostree-desktops/kinoite:rawhide

# Rebase to the classic ostree ref:
$ sudo rpm-ostree rebase --reboot \
    fedora:fedora/rawhide/x86_64/kinoite

Thanks to the packaging efforts of the members of the KDE SIG (especially Alessandro Astone, Justin Zobel and Steve Cossette), we now have enough updated packages in Fedora to create Fedora Kinoite nightly images with KDE Plasma 6.

Pre-release software notice

KDE Plasma 6 is currently in Alpha and those images are based on Fedora Rawhide, which is the development stream of Fedora and may include bugs or breaking changes at any time.

So this should be obvious but in case it needs to be said: This is pre-release software that may include major bugs. Only use this on systems where you are confident you will be able to rollback and have backups of your collection of favorite cat pictures. You’ve been warned!

If you find bugs, you are welcomed to report them to KDE developers on bugs.kde.org or to the KDE SIG tracker. See also the upstream known issues page.

How to try it out

We currently do not have installation ISOs or pre-installed images available. To try it, you can follow those steps:

 1. Install Fedora Kinoite 39.

 2. Update to the latest version and reboot:

$ sudo rpm-ostree update --reboot

 3. Pin your current deployment to make sure that you will be able to rollback if something fails:

$ sudo ostree admin pin 0

 4. Switch to the Fedora Kinoite Nightly Plasma 6 image:

$ sudo rpm-ostree rebase --reboot \
    ostree-unverified-registry:quay.io/fedora-ostree-desktops/kinoite-nightly:rawhide

 5. Test and report bugs!

How do I test for regressions / bisect?

You can find all tags for those images at quay.io/fedora-ostree-desktops/kinoite-nightly.

Feel free to drop by the Fedora KDE Matrix room.