I wouldn’t bother with the Fiverr thing but interesting personal projects and FOSS contributions are both good. Sizeable FOSS projects mean you’re working with other people which brings both benefits and challenges, and more closely resembles the “job” world. You could also look for actual paying work (not gig work like Fiverr, that is crap) if you have the time for it (summer job might be possible). Look at the monthly “Who is hiring” thread (first weekday of each month) on news.ycombinator.com, look on craigslist, etc.

Getting involved in FOSS is pretty simple. Find a project with a list of open tasks or an issue tracker, find something that interests you, say you are interested in working on that task, and start contributing patches. Usually if the project is not a high-visibility one with a lot of contributors already, it will welcome any help it can get. Lots of such projects have Freenode IRC channels where you can chat with the other devs in real time. I’m less comfortable with the ones that use Discord, but that’s just me.

When a user uploads an image or video on Mastodon instance 1, and a user of Mastodon instance 2 is following them, that image or video is copied over to Mastodon instance 2 - because that’s where that user resides.

The same thing happens with text posts, right? I don’t see an exponential expansion, just linear in the number of nodes. It sounds like the decentralized way to do things. Hmm. Anyway, thanks for the explanation. It saves some storage but doesn’t save bandwidth, it sounds like. Rather, the bandwidth requirement gets concentrated at the shared server.

CDN’s are quite expensive compared to budget VPS and e.g. Hetzner storage cloud. Their basic purpose is to give quick delivery to regions far from the server, not really to save cost. I don’t know the story with lemmynsfw. It’s basically an onlyfans marketing platform right? Maybe they have some donation scheme in place behind the scenes. Anyway free porn hosting isn’t so much an issue per se (imgur, tumblr, etc are also that,) but for those who don’t want to host porn, it likely creates nonstop workload to clean it up.

Also, besides porn, it’s sad that this beautiful fediverse that might have become an alternative place for actual humans to interact, turns into another marketing space for corporate media. I’d like to put up a text only server. I don’t know if that’s really doable with current fediverse types. But why try to recreate reddit and imgur and maybe youtube? Those all already exist.

Can someone explain what this is for? I’m basically unfamiliar with the non Lemmy parts of the fediverse. I had thought Mastodon was like Twitter so I don’t understand what a federated media server is supposed to do. It just sounds destined to turn into free pr0n hosting and then get shut down. But who knows.

News and email reader that runs inside Emacs. .el is the file extension for Emacs Lisp.

I think gnus.el might handle Lemmy now.

Whoever asked for the audit should have told you what they were trying to find out. If not, ask them.

I write tons of absolutely crap code for personal use, but I generally don’t publish it since it’s usually for stuff no one else would care about anyway.

SQL uses join tables to do what traditionally would have been done with dictionaries embedded in the objects. I.e. purpose made data structure. That approach is more efficient but less convenient than using a 3-way join.

There’s two things going on in the exercise: 1) some introductory Rust programming; 2) some introductory math and crypto.

Maybe it’s just me but I think it’s better to separate the two. If you’re going to do a prime number generation exercise, it will be easier in (e.g.) Python since the bignum arithmetic is built in, you don’t have all the memory management headache, etc. If you’re going to do a Rust exercise, imho it is better to focus on Rust stuff.

This is a pretty lame article. The idea is just use a bignum library, or a language with native bignums. While a few optimizations help, basically just generate random 1024 bit random numbers until you something that passes a pseudoprime test, and call it a day. The rest of the article converts the above into a beginning Rust exercise but I think it’s preferable to not mix up the two.

From the prime number theorem, around 1/700th of numbers at that size are prime. By filtering out numbers with small divisors you may end up doing 100 or so pseudoprime tests, let’s say Fermat tests (3**n mod n == 3). A reasonable library on today’s machines can do one of those tests in around 1ms, so you are good.

RSA is deprecated in favor of elliptic curve cryptography these days anyway.

Somehow they let attackers send themselves password reset links to arbitrary Gitlab accounts, apparently. Not good.

If only there were email communications that all but prove the allegations.

The allegations are presumably true but that is almost irrelevant. The question is what the world would be like in the opposite situation. The lessons of history suggest it would be pretty much the same world as the one that we got. A big enough pile of money in one place will never be left standing. For the article’s narrative to mean anything, it has to argue otherwise, and it makes no attempt at that.

It’s a narrative whose connection with reality is hard to discern. One could instead say enshittification is an emergent and often unstoppable force, carried out by whoever happens to be in place at the time. The Zitron piece is more like the “great man theory” in reverse. It evokes a shining counterfactual picture where without the evil villain Raghavan messing things up, Google Search would be wonderful (let’s ignore Google’s perennial other failures, privacy invasions, etc). If only that one specific electron had gone through the other slit, everything would be different! Reality is rarely like that. All roads tend to lead to the same place.

What a weird hit piece.

Fanatical has a similar bundle that I decided not to buy, because Packt.

https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/programming-with-rust-bundle

It’s cool that someone is still using perl. It’s sad that anyone is still using C. (Yes I still use it myself, but…).

If the function is module local (idk the rust jargon for that) or the compiler supports whole program optimization, this should happen automatically.

NoSQL has been a thing since before there was SQL.

54 minute video, is there a paper? Video is an OOPSLA talk, “Growing a language”.

It might be this: https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/documents/steele-oopsla98.pdf