Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Reason ☛ California's Hey Hi (AI) Bill Threatens To Derail Open-Source Innovation
The bill’s sweeping regulations could leave developers navigating a legal minefield and potentially halt progress in its tracks.
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Adam Newbold ☛ Fedicache
There’s a well-known design flaw in Mastodon where links included in posts are “unfurled”—that is, Mastodon will visit the link and fetch the page metadata (title, description, a preview image, etc.). That’s fine, but the flawed part is that despite posts being federated, the fetched link metadata is not, which means that every server that receives a copy of a post with a link is going to make its own individual request for that same metadata.
A post from someone with a lot of followers, or one that’s boosted quite a bit, can result in thousands of separate requests for the same data from different Mastodon servers. And these requests are all placed within seconds of one another (because federation is very efficient). The phenomenon is called the Mastodon Stampede, which is cute, but it doesn’t feel very cute when your site gets knocked down by a thousand servers that are banging away on it for no other reason than to grab a little optional information about a link.
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Zola ☛ Overview | Zola
Zola is a static site generator (SSG), similar to Hugo, Pelican, and Jekyll (for a comprehensive list of SSGs, please see Jamstack). It is written in Rust and uses the Tera template engine, which is similar to Jinja2, Django templates, Liquid, and Twig.