today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 22, 2024

• Rob Knight ☛ Using Eleventy to Gobble Up Everything I Do Online

  Echo started life as a cross-posting tool to post from an RSS feed to Micro.blog. Since then I've added support for webhooks, Mastodon, LinkAce, Omnivore, and GitHub. If we take Letterboxd as an example. I post a review on there that gets added to the RSS feed. Echo will fetch that new review and create a new post in the git repository on GitHub, the site rebuilds, and the review now exists as a post. I then use Echo again to read the RSS feed of my movie reviews and post that to Mastodon.

• India Times ☛ open-source AI regulations: BigTech lobbying to derail open source GenAI: DeepLearning AI's Andrew Ng

  “If the attempts to squash open-source software succeed, almost all nations will simply be losers…the United States as well,” Andrew Ng, founder of DeepLearning AI, told delegates Wednesday at the Nasscom Technology and Leadership Summit in Mumbai.

• Hardware/Laptops

  • Niko Kultalahti ☛ Tech ecosystem dilemma

    As a result, I’ve noticed there might be other options as well in for my hardware and software needs. That being said, I’d be really interested in trying the following setup:

    • Framework laptop with Linux

    • Pixel phone flashed with GrapheneOS

    • Managed Nextcloud hosting or Synology at home for storing and syncing data (files, contacts, calendar, tasks, notes etc.)

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ System76 are giving their Linux laptops a big refresh

    System76 makers of Pop!_OS, various laptops and the stylish Thelio desktop line have announced a big refresh for their line of laptops. Featuring newer 14th Gen Intel CPUs, this is coming as part of their new "Ambition Unfolds" campaign.

• Events

  • Unicorn Media ☛ Israel’s War With Hamas Moves Debian’s DebConf24 to Busan, South Korea

    Everything seems to be set in stone now as far as this year’s DebConf is concerned. Well, kinda sorta. We know where it’s going to be and we know when it’s going to be. We also have it’s logo, which was designed by a Deb-person who lives in the host city.

    What we don’t yet know is who’s going to be there. We apparently also don’t know the venue yet, although certainly that’s nailed down (with maybe some details yet to be ironed out). There’s also no information available on accommodations and such.

    Those things too will come to pass. We’re told to keep our eye on the conference’s website.

• Search Cargo Cults

  • Garbage Day ☛ AI search is a doomsday cult

    Generative AI, where it is right now, is not totally dissimilar from what happened during the cryptocurrency bubble during the height of the pandemic: Hundreds of startups, flush with cash from a bull market, started trying to build crypto-backed consumer products after they had already decided the technology was the future — not the other way around.

• Standards/Consortia

  • The Atlantic ☛ Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders Are Teaming Up to Save AM Radio

    In recent years, a number of carmakers—BMW, Volvo, Tesla—have stopped offering AM radio in at least some models, especially electric cars. The problem is that their motors cause electromagnetic interference on the same frequency bands in which AM radio operates, in some cases making the already fuzzy medium inaudible. Carmakers do have ways to filter out the interference, but they are costly and imperfect—all to maintain a format that is in decline anyway. AM radio was eclipsed by the superior-sounding FM in the late ’70s, and the century-old technology can seem akin to floppy disks in the age of Spotify and podcasts. According to Ford’s internal data gathered from some of its newer vehicles, less than 5 percent of all in-car listening is to AM radio. Which is perhaps why Ford decided last year to drop AM from all of its vehicles, not just EVs.