Free Software and Web Leftovers
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Pierre Equoy ☛ Helix, a great alternative to vim
Then, last year, I heard about Helix. It uses metaphors similar to Kakoune to handle text selection, but it also comes "batteries included", which means you don't have to spend a lot of time customizing it to squeeze a lot out of it.
An important feature of Helix is its support of the Language Server Protocol, which means that, much like VS Code, you can navigate code bases pretty easily without having to do much apart from installing the support library for the programming languages of your choice. In my case, as a Python developer, it means installing the python3-pylsp package and I'm good to go. To check what capabilities Helix has activated, you can run hx --health which displays a health report containing, among other things, the current level of support for many programming languages.
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Bokwoon ☛ An Ode To Vim
I remember thinking it was archaic. You could only move around with arrow keys because the mouse didn’t work. There were a million commands to learn each which did their own little thing. I remember learning that "dd" deleted the current line. This software was obviously something that people only used in the past back when everything was more primitive.
Imagine my shock when, after class, I Googled about this outdated text editor and saw nothing but universal acclaim for Vim. Stack Overflow, blog posts, everything. It shifted my perspective 180° on this editor. I was delighted to find I could run it locally and quickly learnt that you could apply basic customizations to it so that it didn't look like a text editor from the 1990s.
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Events
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Linux App Summit 2024
As we have been doing yearly, a few weeks ago we had the 2024 edition of Linux App Summit (LAS). For those of you who don’t know, the GNU/Linux App Summit is a conference co-organised between KDE and GNOME among others where to bring together the different stakeholders of the linux ecosystem to make sure we have all the collaboration tools in place to have a great state of the art platform for the uses the world needs from us.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Silicon Angle ☛ Google reportedly developing new AI that can automate web browsing tasks in Chrome
Project Jarvis is reportedly powered by Google’s Gemini 2.0 large language model, which promises substantial improvements in understanding and generating humanlike text. Sources told The Information the AI is specifically engineered for Google Chrome and includes capabilities to interpret screenshots, click buttons and input text, simulating user interactions within the browser to complete various web-based actions.
However, the AI takes “a few seconds” between actions, according to sources. Whether the final release would have similar delays remains to be seen.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Google creating an Hey Hi (AI) agent to use your PC on your behalf, says report
Google is reportedly working on an Hey Hi (AI) tool that will interact with your browser as another user.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Building an album releases calendar subscription
As part of tracking the music I listen to I also keep track of upcoming albums. When I add an album, I also have fields for release dates and links.
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Education
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Blake Watson ☛ The making of HTML for People
Illustration of a computer desk. There is a lot of space decor. The computer monitor shows a cartoon space probe zooming past a logo that reads 'HTML for people,' stylized as an HTML comment.
On Thursday, October 10, I released HTML for People into the wild. I emailed the 300-ish people who had signed up to be notified and then posted on Mastodon. The response blew me away. In a couple of days, my post got boosted over 2,000 times. The URL made it to the front page of Hacker News. Analytics shows tens of thousands of visits to the site.
Moreover, I started getting messages, not only from tech-savvy developers who already know how to make websites but from people just getting started. I was ecstatic to see those because I feared I would write this web book (as I call it), and it wouldn’t reach beyond my circle of developers.
It has been a few weeks, so it’s time to formally introduce it on my blog and provide a little bit of director’s commentary.
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Licensing / Legal
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Codeberg ☛ #1654 - [RfC] Reconsidering OSI license approval in Terms of Use
The OSI is currently working on a new definition of open source to be applied to "artificial intelligence" systems, which the OSI calls the "Open Source AI Definition" (OSAID) and intends to announce in late October. However, the OSAID appears to differ significantly in spirit from the OSI's original Open Source Definition (OSD), allowing for the dataset used to train a system (and thus generally necessary to replicate it) to be proprietary, as the checklist attached to the latest OSAID draft permits instead publishing a research paper, a technical report, or a draft card.
The OSI is explicit in its intention of not requiring training datasets to be open, having stated that (bolding mine)
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