Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
-
Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Dynamic pages with 11ty and Cloudflare workers
I was rendering about 3300 pages every time my 11ty site built — probably overkill. About 615 artist pages, 1200+ movie pages, 500 show pages, 500 for books and ~35 for genres. Whew. Build times hovered at about a minute (still very impressive!) but would only ever increase.
-
Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Thinking inside the box
A new minor release of the drat package arrived on CRAN today, which is just over a year since the previous release. drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code.
-
Medevel ☛ MediaMTX: Free Open-Source Media Server for Real-Time Video Streaming and RTSP Cameras - Take your Surveillance to Next Level
MediaMTX is a free, open-source media server supporting real-time video streaming, RTSP, RTMP, HLS, and WebRTC. It enables the management and streaming of video from various sources, including RTSP cameras, with low-latency performance.
It is a lightweight solution that is written using Go language.
-
Web Browsers/Web Servers
-
The Register UK ☛ Both uBlock Origin and Lite face browser problems
That's because, as The Register warned back in August, Google's new Manifest V3 extensions system means the removal of Manifest V2 – upon which uBlock Origin depends. For now, it still works – this vulture is running Chrome version 130 and uBO is still functioning. It's still available on Google's web extensions store, with a slightly misleading warning: [...]
-
Mozilla
-
Thunderbird ☛ Mozilla Thunderbird: Maximize Your Day: Focus Your Inbox with ‘Grouped by Sort’
For me, staying on top of my inbox has always seemed like an unattainable goal. I’m not an organized person by nature. Periodic and severe email anxiety (thanks, grad school!) often meant my inbox was in the quadruple digits (!).
Lately, something’s shifted. Maybe it’s working here, where people care a lot about making email work for you. These past few months, my inbox has stayed if not manageable, then pretty close to it. I’ve only been here a year, which has made this an easier goal to reach. Treating my email like laundry is definitely helping!
But how do you get a handle on your inbox when it feels out of control? R.L. Dane, one of our fans on Mastodon, reminded us Thunderbird has a powerful, built-in tool than can help: the ‘Grouped by Sort’ feature!
Email Management for All Brains
For those of us who are neurodiverse, email management can be a challenge. Each message that arrives in your inbox, even without a notification ding or popup, is a potential distraction. An email can contain a new task for your already busy to-do list. Or one email can lead you down a rabbit hole while other emails pile up around it. Eventually, those emails we haven’t archived, replied to, or otherwise processed take on a life of their own.
-
-
-
Education
-
Rlang ☛ Understanding Difference-in-Differences: Basics and Beyond with Applications in R workshop
Description: This workshop provides a solid introduction to Difference-in-Differences (DiD), covering both the foundational concepts and more advanced techniques needed to address common challenges in applied research. We begin by exploring canonical DiD and two-way fixed effects (TWFE) as a starting point. We then move on to more complex scenarios like staggered adoption and multiple treatments. We discuss the limitations of traditional DiD, particularly the issue of forbidden comparisons, and introduce the Goodman-Bacon (2021) decomposition to break down treatment effects. Dynamic settings are then covered through event studies, allowing us to examine how effects evolve over time. Finally, we discuss modern remedies such as the Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) approach to better handle heterogeneous treatment timings. Throughout, participants will follow detailed R examples to apply these methods hands-on, gaining practical experience alongside the theoretical insights.
-
-
Licensing / Legal
-
Silicon Angle ☛ IBM releases new Granite foundation models under 'permissive' [sic] Apache license
Furthering its drive to build a distinctive position in enterprise artificial intelligence, IBM Corp. today is rolling out a series of new language models and tools to ensure their responsible use.
The company is also unveiling a new generation of its watsonx Code Assistant for application development and modernization. All of these new capabilities are being bundled together in a multimodel platform for use by the company’s 160,000 consultants.
-
Masayuki Hatta ☛ "Copyleft" in the context of GenAI
These four freedoms must be guaranteed in practice. In the past, they were ensured as long as the source code was freely available (except in exceptional cases, such as when there are software patents, etc.). This is not the case with current generative AI. In so-called open-weight, commercial use and customization are sometimes permitted to a certain extent, but this is a licensing format similar to freeware in the past, and cannot be said to be truly FLOSS — Free/Libre and Open Source Software.
Ultimately, what copyleft was trying to guarantee was the equivalence of the source code and object code. The essence of copyleft is that, while the object code we run may be opaque to humans, the availability of source code that is highly human-readable and corresponds one-to-one with the object code is guaranteed.
-