Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Browsing the Fediverse - Jon Udell
A month ago, when the Great Discontinuity happened, I started working on a Steampipe plugin to enable SQL queries against the Mastodon API, along with a companion Steampipe “mod” (suite of dashboards) to display and chart the results of those queries.
I expect these dashboards will soon be available in Steampipe Cloud, where it will take just a few seconds to pop in your Mastodon access token (from, e.g., https://mastodon.social/settings/applications/new) and begin using the dashboards.
Meanwhile, if you’re so inclined, you can find the plugin here and the dashboards here. If you’re reasonably technical you can pretty quickly and easily install Steampipe, clone these repos, build the plugin, and start using the dashboards.
Why would you want to? My own motivation, originally, was to do Mastodon analytics. I thought Steampipe’s SQLification of the API would be a handy way to discern and monitor activity trends during a period of extraordinary flux. And that’s proven to be true, to a limited extent. Here’s a snapshot of the dashboard that uses the instance activity API.
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Libre Arts - Weekly-ish recap — 11 December 2022
Earlier this week, I did a quick poll to ask readers what time of week is the most convenient one for them to read these recaps. The majority said “whenever”, with “weekend” taking the second place. Weekend it is then.
Highlights of the week: new releases of Blender, Inkscape, OpenShot, news from GIMP and Ardour.
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Will A.I. like ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot replace human programmers? [Ed: It is just plagiarism of stuff found online, even when it is copyrighted or copyleft-licensed]
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Evil A.I. made in evil ways: ChatGPT - GitHub Copilot
Examples of two, popular A.I. systems — OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft GitHub’s Copilot — and how they can negatively impact the world… plus the highly unethical (and illegal) ways that they are developed.