Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Everyone is on Mastodon now, but why?
Millions of people and organisations are flocking to Mastodon in the wake of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. EDRi is among those who recently started using the decentralised and free social network. What does Mastodon do better, and why does it get digital rights groups all excited?
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mjg59 | Off Twitter for a bit
Turns out that linking to several days old public data in order to demonstrate that Elon's jet was broadcasting its tail number in the clear is apparently "posting private information" so for anyone looking for me there I'm actually here
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The Fall of Freenode
History rhymes. Federation, identity issues, and a hostile takeover.
IRC was the communication platform of choice from the 90s until around 2000 when AIM took over. Around 2010, Freenode emerged as the go-to for the open-source crowd and then grew over the next decade to become the home for many software developers, DevOps professionals, and hobbyists. I’m thankful for the graduate math students that took the time to help me with my high school calculus on ##math.
The events leading to the fall of Freenode are eerily similar to the ones happening to Twitter today. A look at the fall of Freenode.
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A Bloomberg terminal for Mastodon
As I mentioned last time, the Steampipe dashboard for Mastodon has evolved in unexpected ways. I imagined that the components — a plugin that maps Mastodon APIs to Postgres foreign tables, and a suite of views that query the APIs — would combine to enable a broad overview of activity in the Fediverse. That didn’t pan out for two reasons.
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Owkin open sources biotech AI bundle | TechTarget
France/US-headquartered AI biotech company Owkin is open sourcing the Artificial Intelligence (AI) software behind Melloddy and Substra.
Big fans of ‘open science’, Owkin hopes to help universities, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies to benefit from its privacy-preserving, secure and collaborative AI technologies.
Owkin is open sourcing Substra, its Federated Learning (FL) software, to allow researchers and developers to collaboratively train ML models without the data leaving its source.
The team has set its sights on overcoming data privacy and security barriers.
The move will enable users to use an AI technology that has already proven its ability to improve the performance of ML models.
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Closed as duplicate considered harmful
Closing duplicates seems like a good idea: having a single, canonical, question on a given topic with a single, canonical, answer seems like a good thing. It’s not.
The reason it’s not is that it makes two false assumptions:
that a given question has a single best answer;
that this answer does not change over time.
Neither of these assumptions is true for a large number of interesting questions.