news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software or Sharing Leftovers
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Jamie Tanna ☛ Minifying JSON with `jq`
As an improvement to my version with Python or with Ruby, with tools like jq now being widely used, how do we minify a JSON string?
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Dan Cohen ☛ The Slow Formation of Durable Software
On this 20th anniversary of Zotero’s launch on October 5, 2006, I will do my best to recount Zotero’s pre-history, what it took to conceive, design, and build the 1.0 release. It’s a story about a bunch of historians who were knowledgeable about emerging technologies and knew how to code — as a secondary rather than primary skill — and who spent a lot of time, some of it wasted time, at a big table chatting. That conversation eventually coalesced into ideas about the future of scholarly research.
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It's FOSS ☛ FOSS Weekly #26.41: Open Source Trouble, More Rust in Ubuntu, Adobe Photoshop's GNU/Linux Clone, Rich CLI Tool and More
Open Source projects are facing infrastructure trouble.
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Spotifast lets you enjoy Spotify tracks while lowering RAM usage by 5x or more
Spotifast lets you enjoy Spotify tracks while lowering RAM usage by 5x or more — alternative client also packs Winamp skins and Milkdrop visualizations.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice 26.8.1 is now available, at last
Unfortunately, the release of LibreOffice 26.8.1 has been a bit of a struggle, firstly due to a series of minor issues with the packaging of the backdoored Windows version, and then because of a serious malfunction in the server managing the downloads, which forced us to revert to the previous version
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FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty
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EDRI ☛ CADA represents everything that’s wrong with Europe’s approach to digital sovereignty
The EU’s Tech Sovereignty Package is supposed to jump-start Europe’s “sovereign AI” ambitions. But due to fundamental misunderstandings about the technology behind ‘AI’ and the blind trust in Big Tech’s AI doomer and boomer narratives, it is more likely to instead hurt digital rights and the environment instead, and waste valuable public resources that should have been invested in actually increasing Europe’s digital resilience. The Cloud and AI Development (CADA) Act, a part of the Tech Sovereignty Package, adds up to an aggressive policy push to impose “European AI”.
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Licensing / Legal
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David Revoy ☛ License update: AI derivation prohibited on all my art, lore, stories, and comics. - David Revoy
As a webcomic author, releasing my work under free culture license, making my art with only Free Libre and Open Source software, and with popular stories and art, I'm facing a new license problem.
The Creative Commons licenses I used since more than a decade (CC By for Pepper&Carrot, and CC By-Sa for MiniFantasyTheater) miss an option: the possibility to prohibit AI generated derivation.
And I really need now to setup something like that.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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Assaf Arkin ☛ The mileage rate moved in July
The table is public now too: every period since 2011, business, medical, moving, and charity, mid-year splits included. Charity has been fixed by statute at 14 cents for as long as anyone reading this has been filing, and the moving rate only applies to Armed Forces members moving under orders. Those are the kind of facts you want from a table rather than from an audit notice.
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Atharva Raykar ☛ Surveys
I don't trust any quoted statistics by default because I've (anecdotally) realised that pretty much every study is sloppily done or misinterpreted when quoted. The only time I trust a statistical analysis is when I have personally looked into it and seen that they did things right. I'm not even a stats pro or anything, the bar is in hell and any AI model, when given sufficient data and reasonably good prompting can debunk things pretty well.
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