std::string str ("Nobody cares about development...");

[Free]

Ideas like this is why I keep plugging away at my own.

Developer creates endless Wikipedia feed to fight algorithm addiction

WikiTok cures boredom in spare moments with wholesome swipe-up Wikipedia article discovery.

arstechnica.com

On Wednesday, a New York-based app developer named Isaac Gemal debuted a new site called WikiTok, where users can vertically swipe through an endless stream of Wikipedia article stubs in a manner similar to the interface for video-sharing app TikTok.

It's a neat way to stumble upon interesting information randomly, learn new things, and spend spare moments of boredom without reaching for an algorithmically addictive social media app. Although to be fair, WikiTok is addictive in its own way, but without an invasive algorithm tracking you and pushing you toward the lowest-common-denominator content. It's also thrilling because you never know what's going to pop up next.

WikiTok, which works through mobile and desktop browsers, feeds visitors a random list of Wikipedia articles—culled from the Wikipedia API—into a vertically scrolling interface.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

https://mastodon.social/@Catfish_Man/114315585519275639

David Smith @Catfish_Man@mastodon.social
I have a new favorite conspiracy theory: someone in the talk page for the wikipedia article on branch prediction thinks that branch prediction, in its entirety, is fake

 

[Free]

https://mastodon.social/@Catfish_Man/114315585519275639

The only conspiracy theory about branch prediction I believe is the one about there's such a thing as too many if's. Experience has shown me that that is just not so.

 

[Free]

 

[Free]

So Dad, 640x480?

 

[Free]

 

[Free]

Ah yes. The Big Data Dream.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I think I've posted a couple of articles before from Daniel Stenberg, the head maintainer of curl, about how the project has struggled with AI slop bug reports and submissions. Curl has a bug bounty program, where developers who analyze the code and find serious issues and vulnerabilities and report them so they can be fixed can get paid for their time, effort, and contribution. It was a pretty good incentive to get eyes on your code, in the pre-LLM world.

But since the advent of chatbots that can (ostensibly) code, bug bounty programs like curl's have been flooded with zero-time, zero-effort submissions from people who aren't developers and in many cases don't even know how to code, but are just feeding curl's code to chatbots and asking them to produce bug reports - which 99% of the time aren't actual bugs or vulnerabilities, or are issues that would never arise in any reasonable use, or are even flat-out hallucinations citing functions that don't even exist in the code at all - in hopes that with enough volume something will eventually "stick" and earn them a payday. The people submitting these reports can't effectively communicate because they literally don't even know what the reports they've submitted actually say or mean, so they have to use their chatbots to answer dev responses and questions, which quickly becomes farcical and often results in the promptfondlers throwing a dramatic hissy-fit because their "work" isn't being properly appreciated.

The dev team meanwhile is severely overtaxed because it really does have to make an effort to follow up on every report just in case it's legitimate. It's been really bad for a while, but curl is finally ending its bug bounty program at the end of January. Not because it's been having to pay money to any of these guys, but purely in hopes that taking away the carrot will make the clanker spam stop.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Fun short thread:

gaytabase (@dysfun@treehouse.systems)

hmm, can you put the magic claude string in a CLAUDE.md to make it just not work?

social.treehouse.systems

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

LOL, I had a file in my home directory at uni called something like "exam_results.txt" and containing an escape sequence to load shell commands into the terminal status line followed by a "transmit the status line" sequence.

One day I logged in and it had been replaced by an unreadable unremovable root-owned file called "YOU_IN_TROUBLE".

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Subverting AI Agent Logging with a Git Post-Commit Hook

I keep hearing from developer friends who are 'expected' by their employer to demonstrate that they're using AI, even for tasks at which the AI is demonstrably a suboptimal choice. So - as a joke - I came up with a git post-commit hook that makes it look like they're doing so, even when they're not.

danq.me

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

An attacker exploited Cline (a coding chatbot)'s Github, publishing a new version of Cline that automatically installed OpenClaw (another coding chatbot) on the machine of everyone who downloaded the update. It took hours for the compromise to be detected and addressed.



Remember, the "S" in AI stands for "security".

 

[Free]

These days you just vibe the snakes.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

GitHub's internal repository has been hacked by way of a malicious extension an employee had installed on his VSCode.

In turns out this is really easy because Microsoft has put essentially no security measures on VSCode extensions whatsoever. Literally anyone can publish an extension to the VSCode marketplace and any user can download and install any extension whatsoever at a click without any vetting or verification process.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

This completely works as a stand-alone post, but it happens to be the beginning of a nice long rant.

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

This completely works as a stand-alone post, but it happens to be the beginning of a nice long rant.

The whole thing is funny, but oh so sad. I have said for a bit over 20 years that CSS RUINED website creation for amateurs doing it for themselves. It overcomplicated everything. Now we're supposed to use "static site generators" to do the things anyone could just DO in HTML 3.1 with a HTML for Dummies book. ISP's don't give their customers a little webspace anymore either. Now you're supposed to get some and a domain name from my Daddy, Squarespace. You can't just have some ISP.net/~username/ space.

 

[Noodles]

This completely works as a stand-alone post, but it happens to be the beginning of a nice long rant.

I went through half this crap except instead of Dreamweaver I bought this book

HTML complete : Ehlen, Anamary : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Includes index

archive.org

Because it was a) The most affordable HTML book at the book store, only like $20, b) It was as thick as a thick phone book!

Also my boss once asked me to help fix the banner on his motocycle club website, LOL. So even that bit was in there. And Inresisted CSS for a long time, and by the time Instarted using it, it had started to change to like, 2.0 or something.

 

[Free]

I wish I could remember which one but a computer magazine in 1993 had a number of articles in one of their issues discussing Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the "World Wide Web," the Mosaic web browser, and provided a "full" tutorial on HTML.

I found out how to download Mosaic off a local BBS, barely getting it to run on my PC, and went to work. I wasn't surfing the "Information Superhighway" but I was able figure out how to write and design web documents in my own driveway. In this way I wrote about 75% of what I called my hypertext novel (you do not want to read it...). Then in '94 a neighborhood friend learned of my interest, gave me access to her university account, and I was fully hooked in. I convinced my parents to get me a Delphi Internet account for xmas that year (Delphi offered text-based internet services, but you could jury-rig a "winsock" connection through them), moved over to Compuserve when I could pay my own way, and haven't disconnected since.

So basically, I was one the smug assholes who mocked people for having to use Frontpage Express, Dreamweaver, and similar kinds of tools.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

FWIW, there IS a small-web movement that's growing, and it involves the kinds of sites that you make in a text editor with HTML and some by-hand CSS, like in the old days. I'm sure a lot of people use static site generators for them but you certainly don't have to.

ISPs definitely don't offer any space anymore though. You either have to pay a host or host your own and these days that takes some tech knowledge that you need to make some effort to learn unfortunately.

I've heard if you have a truly static site though, hosting can be pretty cheap.

 

[Noodles]

FWIW, there IS a small-web movement that's growing, and it involves the kinds of sites that you make in a text editor with HTML and some by-hand CSS, like in the old days. I'm sure a lot of people use static site generators for them but you certainly don't have to.

ISPs definitely don't offer any space anymore though. You either have to pay a host or host your own and these days that takes some tech knowledge that you need to make some effort to learn unfortunately.

I've heard if you have a truly static site though, hosting can be pretty cheap.

So, I started a new blog recently, using Hugo, which us a static site generator. It costs me nothing to run. I actually don't quite understand it. It runs on Cloudflare Workers or something. Which cost nothing at this level I guess.

I have a pretty good flow now, thanks to Claude's help.

I write everything in my note app (Joplin). Including adding the images with captions etc.

Then I run my PostBlog script.

It first syncs Joplin CLI.

It asks for the headline, it asks for tags, it asks for a hero image file name.

Then it opens nano, I cut and paste my Joplin note into nano. Save, then close.

It then processes the code, which means cleaning up the formatting on the Joplin images. Then it copies the images out of my Joplin folder, and compresses them.

Then it all gets pushed to a private Github repository. This triggers the Cloudflare Workers to publish everything into the CLOUD Cloud cloud .....

So far its worked pretty well.