Programming Leftovers
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Rlang ☛ The m=√p rule for random forests
A couple of days ago, in our lab session, we discussed random forrests, and, since it was based on the example in ISLR, we had a quick discussion about the random choice of features, and the “” rule Interestingly, on that one, we can play a bit, and try all choices [...]
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Nolan Lawson ☛ Why I’m skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in “faster” languages
I’ve written a lot of JavaScript. I like JavaScript. And more importantly, I’ve built up a set of skills in understanding, optimizing, and debugging JavaScript that I’m reluctant to give up on.
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Terraform: Making Use of Precondition Checks
Now you only have to be aware that GitHub is GitHub and the TF provider has open bugs, but is not supported by GitHub and you will encounter inconsistent results. But it works, even if your terraform apply failed that way.
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Python
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Open Source Security (Audio Show) ☛ Episode 451 – Python security with Seth Larson
Josh and Kurt talk to Seth Larson from the Python Software Foundation about security the Python ecosystem. Seth is an employee of the PSF and is doing some amazing work. Seth is showing what can be accomplished when we pay open source developers to do some of the tasks a volunteer might consider boring, but is super important work.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GSoC'24 Okular | Coming to a Close
Hey folks! Apologies for the long gap since my last post. A lot has happened both personally and professionally—I got a new job and relocated, which led to me extending my GSoC deadline to wrap up the remaining tasks. I’m happy to share that I’ve now completed everything, and all the pending MRs related to my GSoC work have been merged. Here’s a quick overview: [...]
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Mozilla
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Francesco Lodolo: The (pre)history of Mozilla’s localization repository infrastructure
With many new faces joining Mozilla, as either staff or volunteer localizers, most are only familiar with the current, more streamlined localization infrastructure.
I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at the technical evolution of Mozilla’s localization systems. Having personally navigated every version — first as a community localizer from 2004 to 2013, and later as staff — I’ll share my perspective. That said, I might not have all the details exactly right (or I may have removed some for the sake of my sanity), so feel free to point out any inaccuracies.
Early days: Centralized version control
Back in the early 2000s, smartphones weren’t a thing, backdoored Windows XP was an acceptable operating system — especially in comparison to backdoored Windows Me — and distributed version controls weren’t as common. Let’s be honest, centralized version controls were not fun: every commit meant interacting directly with the server. You had to remember to update your local copy, commit your changes, and then hope no one else had committed in the meantime — otherwise, you were stuck resolving conflicts.
Given the high technical barriers, localizers at that time were primarily technical users, not discouraged by crappy text editors — encoding issues, BOMs, and other amenities — and command line tools.
To make things more complicated, localizers had to deal with 2 different systems: [...]
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