Please see the disclaimer. Assumed Audience: Anyone with any opinion about “AI,” especially LLM’s. Discuss on Hacker News, but please don’t post on lobste.rs because I have been banned. Epistemic Status: Satisfied. So OpenAI recently revealed info about its spider. That information included its bot name (GPTBot) and its user agent string. But even more importantly, they revealed the IP address blocks that they would use. So I blocked them all....
Please see the disclaimer. Assumed Audience: Hackers and anyone interested in Yzena’s software. Epistemic Status: Confident because it’s my choice anyway. Introduction Yzena is my business. It’s a software business, obviously. I have long wondered what versioning system I should use for that software. SemVer (Semantic Versioning) is okay, but not great. It is standard, though. But there are other ways. There’s CalVer (Calendar Versioning), for example. This one is both new and familiar to me....
Please see the disclaimer. Assumed Audience: Hackers, Git users, code archeologists, and anyone who would need to do forensics on Yzena repositories. Epistemic Status: Not confident; I don’t have perfect memory of what I did, but this is the best I’ve got. Five months ago, I wrote about how I re-signed a few entire Git repos. One of the requirements for my process was this: It has to deal with a repo that is a bunch of combined repos....
Please see the disclaimer. Assumed Audience: Hackers, Git users, code archeologists, and anyone who would need to do forensics on Yzena repositories. Epistemic Status: Very sorry and repentant. Forgive me, for I have sinned. I had to create a new GPG key, separate from my personal one, and I had to re-sign every single commit in a few repos with the new key. This is rebase on a whole new level....
Please see the disclaimer. Introduction I don’t know how to introduce this post other than the question in the title: is it even worth working on Free and Open Source Software anymore? I have been asking myself this for the past week or two, and it’s uncomfortable for me; I believe in the power of Open Source to empower users and to give them control over their machines. Exploited FOSS But that belief of mine has been severely shaken by several things happened this week, things which also made me reconsider things that happened further in the past as well....
Please see the disclaimer. In July, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) put out a call for whitepapers about the “philosophical and legal questions” around GitHub’s Copilot. I wanted to write one, but decided not to until encouraged to do so by an employee of the FSF. By that time, I only had five days to write it, so the paper ended being subpar, but I got it in. As to be expected, my paper was not chosen for publication, and I don’t blame them....
Please see the disclaimer. Introduction I’ve mentioned before that I have ideas for an operating system. Well, beyond that, I have a few other things in the pipeline. These are listed in the order I plan to do them (right now). Yao Yao is my programming language. Plenty has been said about it already, but you can also peruse the documentation I already have for it. Name I have already written an explanation of Yao’s name....
Please see the disclaimer. Update, 08 July 2021: GitHub has confirmed that all public code that was on their servers was used to train Copilot. That means some of my code was used, though it was older versions. I suggest deleting all code off of GitHub if you can. GitHub has been on my radar before, and it wasn’t for a good reason. Well, it’s on my radar again, and it’s once again not for a good reason: Copilot....
Please see the disclaimer. As of today, I am moving all of my personal projects, including my Yzena projects, away from GitHub and onto a server that I administer. There are three reasons for this. First, GitHub will block access to projects because of trade sanctions. Second, GitHub will inexplicably block access to projects when an author calls someone a cruel, crude, and rude name. This is not sensitive; it is authoritarian....
Please see the disclaimer. I have mentioned the term “Yzena” a few times, so I should probably tell my readers what it is. As I said before, I have several ideas that I might turn into a business. When I first got those ideas, I came up with a name that I reserved so that I could use it. That name was Yzena. In other words, Yzena is the name of the business that I will use to commercialize my ideas....