today's leftovers
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Long Links
I was fascinated by The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time, in which no less than the New Yorker features NTP, the protocol and software by which any computer connected to the Internet knows the right time to within a tiny fraction of a second off what the best atomic clocks say. What’s interesting here isn’t NTP itself, but the people who’ve built and run it, and most of all, the way the world of geekery is presented in a prestigious publication addressed at intelligent non-technical people.
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Lunduke's Normal Computing News - Oct 19, 2022
A new website has launched to collect stories of people who believe their licenses and copyrights have been violated by Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot.
“We’re investigating a potential lawsuit against GitHub Copilot for violating its legal duties to open-source authors and end users.”
“Microsoft and OpenAI must be relying on a fair-use argument. In fact we know this is so, because former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman claimed during the Copilot technical preview that “training [machine-learning] systems on public data is fair use”.
Well—is it? The answer isn’t a matter of opinion; it’s a matter of law. Naturally, Microsoft, OpenAI, and other researchers have been promoting the fair-use argument. Nat Friedman further asserted that there is “jurisprudence” on fair use that is “broadly relied upon by the machine[-]learning community”. But Software Freedom Conservancy disagreed, and pressed Microsoft for evidence to support its position. According to SFC director Bradley Kuhn:”
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Plumbing valves make great heavy duty analog inputs | Arduino Blog
Most of your Arduino projects will require inputs and buttons are always the obvious choice. But most of the buttons and switches on the market meant for low-voltage DC projects are quite delicate. That makes them unsuitable for applications that need to withstand heavy-handed use. YouTuber Alistair Aitchison of Playful Technology designs interactive puzzles for escape rooms and knows a thing or two about building robust interfaces. He came up with an interesting technique that you can steal, which repurposes plumbing valves as analog inputs.
Plumbing valves like the kind shown in the video contain either knobs or levers that gradually open interior gates to increase water flow. Like a variable resistor, they allow for many “values” (water flow rates) between LOW and HIGH (closed and open). One could measure the water flow rate through a valve connected to the type to get a value, but that is complicated and messy. Alistair’s method is far more elegant: measure light intensity through the valve.
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First package for Calibre6 in my repository | Alien Pastures
Not so very long after I was finally able to produce my first packages for Calibre 5.x, Kovid Goyal ended that development cycle and bumped his e-book management application’s major version number to “6” in order to make a switch from Qt5 to Qt6 as its graphical engine.
The main hurdle for me when the upgrade from Calibre 4.x to 5.x happened was that internally, Calibre switched from Python2 to Python3. Essentially the whole of Calibre is written in Python and it uses PyQt to build the graphical interface using Qt widgets.
It took me a lot of work to re-write the calibre.SlackBuild to also make that Python switch. After all, my single calibre package is actually getting built from many sources (44 tarballs for Calibre 4, 55 tarballs for Calibre 5) and a lot of those had to be replaced to work with Python3. Moving my calibre.SlackBuild to Python3 took so much effort that I decided to apply some simplification as well: I removed the script’s ability to build its own Qt5 libraries from source, instead I let my calibre-5.x packages depend on the qt5 package which is already present in the Slackware OS since release 15.0. Naturally I was not looking forward to doing the same cumbersome and time-consuming exercise again, now having to figure out the intricacies of Qt6, a graphical toolkit I had never built or used before.
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Apple’s Industrial Design Chief Hankey to Leave Three Years After Ive
Apple Inc.’s head of hardware design, Evans Hankey, is leaving the iPhone maker three years after taking the job, creating a significant hole at the top of a company famous for its slick-looking products, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Hankey was named to the post in 2019 to replace Jony Ive, the company’s iconic design chief for two decades. Before taking her current role as vice president of industrial design, Hankey spent several years at Apple reporting to Ive. Since then, she has reported to Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams.
The departure was announced inside the Cupertino, California-based technology giant this week, with Hankey telling colleagues that she will remain at Apple for the next six months. Hankey oversees several dozen industrial designers, and the company hasn’t named a replacement.