Posts by fabio@manganiello.eu
(DIR) Post #B0y7AsbYOAisu2Nn5U by fabio@manganiello.eu
2025-12-06T09:25:12.737098Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Linus Tech Tips: There was a recent thing from a major tech company where developers were asked to say how many lines of code they wrote, and if it wasn’t enough, they were terminated. And there was someone here who was extremely upset about that approach to measuring productivity because it means nothing.Linus Torvalds: Oh yeah, no, you shouldn’t even be upset at that point. That’s just incompetence. Anybody who thinks that’s a valid metric is too stupid to work at a tech company.LTT: You do know who you just said that about, right?Linus Torvalds: No.LTT: Oh. Uh… he was a prominent figure in the improved efficiency of the U.S. Government recently.Linus Torvalds: Oh, apparently I was spot-on.https://www.neowin.net/news/linux-creator-torvalds-thinks-elon-musk-is-too-stupid-to-be-working-at-a-tech-company/
(DIR) Post #B0yaxaDyPdNel1vfMW by fabio@manganiello.eu
2025-12-06T10:13:55.855586Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@aral have you taken a look at PGLite? 🙂
(DIR) Post #B1EYN21123kur8fbii by fabio@manganiello.eu
2025-12-12T23:27:40.715776Z
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@raphaellakay @delsaulnier @yazzangaza she just needs to change the link in her profile and replace the GFM link with the Chuffed link.The archive will automatically scrape the new link and refresh the campaign.But AFAIK on gaza-verified the link is registered manually, so @aral should probably amend it.
(DIR) Post #B1GgOV7PV6tbMBnCi0 by fabio@manganiello.eu
2025-12-15T08:57:19.149394Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
If you want a rigorous analysis of why statistical #AI models collapse when continuously trained on their own data without external supervision and constraints, read this amazing paper from last year.If you want to get a visual intuition of how model collapse looks like, look at this video.When AI stares at its own reflection for too long, and its inference is purely rooted on statistics rather than reasoning, this becomes statistically inevitable.Keep this in mind whenever you hear someone talking about “AI models learning from their own outputs” without addressing the statistical parrot issue.
(DIR) Post #B1QEBNNe6aRCSOwI8O by fabio@manganiello.eu
2025-12-19T23:40:28.694441Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
New #Mozilla CEO: “Blocking ad-blockers in #Firefox could bring in an additional $150M in revenue“.Sure, even extracting and selling one of my kidneys could bring me a big revenue, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea.Firefox by now has less than 3% of the browsers’ market share, and the only folks who still use it regularly are exactly those who don’t want ads constantly shoved in their faces, nor trackers to suck up every valuable detail about them.And they are willing to go the extra step and use a browser that is less supported than the overwhelmingly Chromium-based crowd out there.Take ad blockers away (and, most importantly, take away Manifest V2 extensions), and those few remaining users will just dwindle away to Brave, Vivaldi, Chromium/Cromite/Vanadium, or to support Ladybird/Servo, before you even finish saying the words “profit margins”.And of course their collective hallucination with AI has now crossed into the realms of ridicule. Nobody knows exactly what kind of new useful features will be added nor how those will solve problems that users want to solve. All we know is that “AI is coming”, embedded in a lot of low-value features that nobody asked and that some product managers put together just because someone at the top of the food chain asked to “put AI in their product”, and with literally zero chances of competing against the AI features provided by the browsers of companies like Google and Microsoft who can afford to invest into AI 4-5 order of magnitude more resources than Mozilla.I’m wondering why Mozilla seems so committed to this mission of firing dumb CEOs just to hire someone who is even dumber and detached from reality than their predecessor.https://www.theverge.com/tech/845216/mozilla-ceo-anthony-enzor-demeo
(DIR) Post #B1QEa3Fk4lDNGx0aES by fabio@manganiello.eu
2025-12-19T23:47:36.983738Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@h4890 oh I really hope that this is the case.Otherwise I have to simply admit that every single CEO Mozilla has had in the past 5 years is genuinely a complete imbecile.
(DIR) Post #B1ZsE0Ms8Mrn0kmPUu by fabio@manganiello.eu
2025-12-24T11:21:37.700018Z
3 likes, 0 repeats
Lately I have noticed that when you purchase a ticket you don’t get a static PDF/PNG anymore.Increasingly often, you get a .pkpass file, which is supposed to be opened in wallet apps (like Google Wallet or any 3rd-party wallet app).Since I don’t like to share information about the events I attend with strangers on the Internet, I have decided to take a closer look at these .pkpass files.They are just zip files that contain a background image, an icon and a pass.json with the actual information about the ticket. Nothing that can’t be handled by a script rather than a 3rd-party 100 MB mobile app.I have thus put together a simple #shell script that does exactly that.Dependencies:jqzintmagickunzipcurl or wgethttps://gist.manganiello.tech/fabio/pkpass2pngUsage:pkpass2png https://domain.tld/myticket.pkpass ticket.png
(DIR) Post #B1dkyOR6xU8NygD8pE by fabio@manganiello.eu
2025-12-26T00:48:37.767785Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
“Wrapped” end-of-year products are becoming the norm in tech.What started as Spotify’s way to share your yearly listening habits in a couple of Instagram stories has become a trend in the whole industry - from LinkedIn offering you a yearly summary of your job hunt, to ChatGPT showing you how you interacted with its omnivorous bots over the year, to Duolingo providing insights into your language progress, to Untappd providing a summary of the beers you liked the most over the year.For as much as I advocate for data transparency towards the user, I don’t like this trend, and I don’t think it’s real data transparency.First, data transparency means providing users with access to dashboards with their data all year around - not only in the holidays season. And with any metrics they want - not only the ones that Spotify decides to pick. A good commercial example of this approach is last.fm, which, after losing rights to stream music content directly, has pivoted towards a more analytics-driven website, with comprehensive weekly, monthly and yearly reports of your listening habits.Second, the cost of putting up such products is much lower than the profit (and free advertisement) that they generate. Data analysts employed at these companies have access to this data all year round. But they decide to pick just a couple of metrics to wrap in 5 Instagram stories, and all of a sudden people go crazy about the generosity of these companies. Creating “Wrapped” features isn’t hard at all. You can find on my blog plenty of examples of how I’ve done it with a self-hosted setup. My Grafana dashboard is my Spotify Wrapped, always up-to-date with fresh data, and available any time I want.Third, they are a way to edulcolorate the massive profits that these companies make with your data. “Yes, we may make a lot of money by sharing your data with 3rd-parties, but hey, if we didn’t do that you couldn’t have this nice Instagram story with the songs you listened the most over the year!”https://theatlantic.com/newsletters/2025/12/companies-2025-year-in-review/685441/(Archived version: https://archive.ph/9TOi1)
(DIR) Post #B1ojPLfHJArs207dSK by fabio@manganiello.eu
2025-12-31T01:19:20.808294Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
(DIR) Post #B1zkFSQpWziCodlrQe by fabio@manganiello.eu
2026-01-05T21:40:15.745271Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
StackOverflow’s fall is a sign of something more troubling.Sure, if your main metric is the round trip time it takes to solve a technical question then it may not look that bad.After all, instead of asking questions to human experts who may take days or weeks to answer, beginners can directly submit them to an LLM trained on that very knowledge and get answers within seconds - perhaps not perfect, perhaps with a bit of refinement required amid model hallucinations, but in most of the cases enough to get them started.What many seem to ignore though is that the training set that went into the LLM was harvested through tens of thousands of curated answers manually submitted by human experts over years to the StackExchange platforms.We know a lot about all the most obscure use-cases of collections and itertools in Python, or the best composition patterns in SpringBoot, because thousands of human experts put together thoughtful answers and articles on those topics, and they are all publicly available.But technology is never static. Programming languages and frameworks come and go. Where will the knowledge about such future craft live? In a world where humans no longer willingly and freely post such knowledge on StackOverflow or Reddit, how can such knowledge be fed to increasingly hallucinating stochastic parrots?Or do we accept that human craft is only required to feed AI models that haven’t yet caught up with it, and then it can be nicely packaged and provided through chatbots owned by trillion-dollar companies?As if the only added value of developing problem solving skills in science and engineering was just to feed that knowledge to our AI overlords, and then be tossed away like hollow carcasses afterwards?
(DIR) Post #B1zkFVOoUwsi1FqnCa by fabio@manganiello.eu
2026-01-05T23:49:46.864564Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@dabeaz same here - Apress never paid that well, but at least I could still say “I do it because I like to teach tech subjects to human readers”.Which honestly opens the doors to an even more frightening scenario.Of course once human experts pull themselves out of the AI-feeding machinery slop and hallucinations around more recent topics and subjects will increase. And of course that will impact their products too.My concern is that then these companies may start hiring experts just to produce (privately, and for their purposes only) enough human curated content to be fed to the machine.Then the knowledge that we take for granted (either as freely available online, or for a modest price in a book) will be owned by private companies, and provided as a service through their products. Which may be a position uncomfortably similar to that held by catholic monasteries in the Middle Ages.
(DIR) Post #B28c4yAeoTlzuTeKci by fabio@manganiello.eu
2026-01-10T01:32:08.063415Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@suad @raphaellakay @joynewacc @aral the old campaign link has now been removed.The archive is conservative when it comes to data retention, so if a valid campaign link is removed it won’t remove the campaign, and manual intervention is required.In general we prefer that campaigns are either on GFM or Chuffed because that makes donations transparent. If you don’t manage to raise enough, you’re likely to appear at the top of the campaigns page and people will see it. But of course PayPal makes sense as a backup if you experience issues - it’s just that there’s no way of tracking the donations there because they are private.Many Palestinian accounts have indeed experienced issues with their campaigns on GFM recently, but my advice is to try and go through their verification process if you can.They also suspended for verification a campaign that I manage, and after some back-and-forth we got it unlocked again.They are not specifically targeting pro-Gaza campaigns, but there are two other issues at play:There have recently been investigations (and even arrests) in Europe because some fundraisers on GFM actually funnelled funds to Hamas. So GFM needs to be extremely cautious with compliance now if they don’t want to lose their banking license.Unfortunately, they didn’t think this throughout, and they don’t seem to have a proper verification process. So different agents that handle different cases may ask different things, or things that don’t make sense at all (like a physical address in Gaza).My advice is to try and be collaborative within reasonable boundaries because:Funds of suspended campaigns are otherwise lost.Attempts to open copies of the same campaign without satisfying their verification requirements may be interpreted as attempts to evade their verification process - which is a big red flag that may also impact the risk score of the recipient’s bank account.If you experience any issues, please feel free to add me in cc (fabio@manganiello.email) to your email thread with them.
(DIR) Post #B2B0pJKhFhRe4ytZQW by fabio@manganiello.eu
2026-01-11T11:46:58.265192Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
A quick communication to our wonderful friends in #Gaza.A few of you may have experienced limitations/suspensions on your accounts, especially on the main instance.First of all, I want to reiterate that this isn’t anything personal against you or a sign that @staff is not sympathetic with the #GazaVerified initiative - they’ve shown quite the opposite so far.Actions against accounts are only taken when several reports (usually for spam) are received and the moderation team is left with no choice.However, these restrictions are usually lifted when we talk to instance admins and explain them the situation, and those of you who are impacted pledge to use mentions more responsibly.Mastodon is still a platform that welcomes you, and we’ll make sure that this will keep being the case.Second, a common message I’ve heard in your appeals is “but we only tagged our friends and people sympathetic with our cause“.After so many reports, I started finding it increasingly unlikely that any of us would ever report you for spam - and repeatedly.So I’ve taken a closer look at some of the lists of users that some of you commonly tag and I’ve started to notice some patterns that may explain the reports (or at least some of them).Unlike centralized platforms like X or Instagram (or even Bluesky, where most of the people are on the main server), instances matter here.So my username (@fabio@manganiello.eu) is different from @fabio@mastodon.social, or any @fabio@something.com. Those are different people with accounts on different servers.I’m bringing mine as an example, but I have noticed several occurrences where some of you probably tagged people by typing @username, saw a couple of options in the dropdown, and unsure on who is the right one you included a few of them.When you send that message, those people will get a notification - and they may not be me nor any of your friends.If someone keeps getting notifications from strangers to donate to an initiative they’ve never heard of, and without any way to tell if you’re genuine or not, after a few times they may simply report you for spam. And that explains limitations and suspensions.So please, when you send messages that include many mentions, always make sure that the handles you have included match those on our profiles. That may prevent a lot of unsolicited notifications to people who may not be very sensitive with your calls for help.Finally, we do our best to boost your voices, and we’ll keep doing so. But we also want you to have your own voice heard on a social media platform that is actually open to listen to you, with no need for our boosts. If you build your own following then you won’t need a few of us to boost your posts - people will follow you because of what you say or show to them.I built the @gaza_verified_accounts bot exactly to boost your voices, so anyone who follows that bot sees all of your posts, even if they don’t follow each of you individually.If you post your genuine stories that actually move people, then that bot is likely to be followed by many - and your own voices heard by many.One last thing, you don’t have to tag @gaza_verified_accounts or @gaza_verified_campaigns explicitly. Those are automated accounts and I never check their notifications.It isn’t easy for me to deliver these messages by the way.I can only imagine in a remote corner of my mind how tough things must be for you.I can only imagine how I would behave on the Internet if it was my own life to be in peril, and if I had to fight for basic necessities on a daily basis.I feel like I shouldn’t be here preaching technical details about social media or netiquette to people literally going through hell.But I’m here to make sure that your voices are heard, that they touch as many people as possible, and that they keep being heard.Stay strong, we’re on your side ♥️@aral @gazaverified
(DIR) Post #B2LJJJFfrKYLGsbEHo by fabio@manganiello.eu
2026-01-16T11:55:35.459018Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
To our friends in #Gaza: if you have received a message from @information1 with a notification of suspension PLEASE do not click on it and report the account.It’s a scammer pretending to be an account of the main instance’s staff, and the link in the post is likely to install malware on your device.cc @staff @aral #GazaVerified
(DIR) Post #B2VhsPfq2ND7XbG6Oe by fabio@manganiello.eu
2026-01-21T09:50:39.844823Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
To any #Linode customers out there: stay as far as possible from the London (EU-West) data center.Some of you may have noticed yesterday that many of my services (including my personal website, my Akkoma instance and even the Gaza archive) have been offline for a couple of hours.Already for the past 3 days I’ve been experiencing issues with my Linode nginx gateway running in London (and I’ve experienced intermittent connectivity issues with that node a lot over the past couple of years, especially after Linode was acquired by Akamai).When the gateway can’t communicate with my home network over VPN, any services it exposes aren’t reachable and you get Bad Gateway errors.So this is how my day went yesterday:I noticed for the 3rd day in a row connectivity issues to my Linode (but this time much more severe, and they were not transient).I filed a support ticket to Linode with a tracepath output from my network already showing the root cause (a back-and-forth loop between London and Amsterdam that shouldn’t have been there):$ tracepath fabiomanganiello.com 1?: [LOCALHOST] 1: _gateway 1: _gateway...10: ae3.r22.ams01.mag.netarch.akamai.com11: ae1.r22.lon02.mag.netarch.akamai.com12: ae24.r01.ams01.icn.netarch.akamai.com13: ae7.r22.lon01.icn.netarch.akamai.com14: no reply15: no reply... Too many hops: pmtu 1500 Resume: pmtu 1500Their support gaslighted me into all kind of alternative bullshit - “you’re on a shared CPU, perhaps you’ve got noisy neighbours?”, “could be it that there are some services respawning a lot on your machine?”, “could it be that you don’t know how to manage bridged interfaces, MTUs and promiscuous mode, and after 12 years spent operating this server now everything is suddenly breaking?”I lost my hopes of getting any decent amount of technical support from those folks and just went down my own way - purchased another Linode in Amsterdam, and spent the whole day migrating everything (DNS, nginx, mail server, XMPP, Gaza archive, rewiring ~100 Wireguard clients…) out of London and to Amsterdam, on a very wobbly connection to my old Linode.By the time I was done (about 3:30 AM) I decided to take a look at the ticket I had opened and I found a “Connectivity Issue in London“ alert. No communication from the technical support - just a badge randomly thrown there on the page reaching the same conclusions I reached, from the outside of their network, about 12h earlier.Guess what? Soon afterwards connectivity to my old Linode resumed as if nothing happened, without actually me touching anything on my Linode. But in the meantime of course I had already wasted a day migrating everything out of it, while their technical support was throwing some “did you turn it off and on?” bullshit at me.To be clear, I’ve been a Linode user for nearly two decades and I’ve never had a single issue with machines running in German or Dutch data centers. But London is a dumpster fire and you should not host anything there if you care about your users and your sanity. And the technical level of their customer support has also been consistently declining over the years.(Reminder for me: use Terraform for these things. Just because a server has been running for 12 years it doesn’t mean that the moment where you need to migrate out of it won’t come. And you should make sure that when it does you have the least amount of error-prone manual actions to take as possible).
(DIR) Post #B2VvJOPY8fjiqbppdA by fabio@manganiello.eu
2026-01-21T15:19:26.109406Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@aral @nicolasvivant it’s surreal how these folks would throw any new corporate crap at us while ignoring the literal elephant in the room - that ActivityPub has already proved its point and they just need to run their instances.–EDIT–Oh, a closer look points to something interesting:Anonymous accounts and automated bots are not allowed, according to the project’s backersSo how do you prevent anonymous accounts and bots?Simple, with online identity verification!That’s why they ignore ActivityPub 🙂 They’re trying to sell us the solution for an existential problem that they have created themselves around an emergency that doesn’t exist.At this point any Trojan horse that can get EU citizens to swallow online identity verification can work. And if they can edulcolorate with a “but it’s a European sovereign social network!” (even if the ID verification mechanisms still rely on Google’s and Apple’s operating systems) then why not give it a try? 😄
(DIR) Post #B2hnqp3rK9ssdeBTBQ by fabio@manganiello.eu
2026-01-26T15:04:21.584345Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Rare footage of a Nazi publicly bragging of the tight network of surveillance he has spun over anyone he doesn’t like - including “anti-war crazies”.The terrorist pictured in this video is Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. A fascist political movement that defends from defamation anyone who embraces fascism, colonialism and anarcho-capitalism, and specifically targets, harasses, threatens and doxxes anyone who disagrees with them.Remember his name and his face when this 21st century wave of Nazism is over and new Nuremberg trials are held.
(DIR) Post #B2hnqqCP5sJUARBo8m by fabio@manganiello.eu
2026-01-26T22:50:40.565923Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Hey @8124, I know that you’re reading me, that you keep thinking of me more often than I feel comfortable with, and that you’ve got your little army of scrapers to pull anything me and @aral post on our servers.I’d believe that at some point you’d have found some greater purpose in life, but no, you’ve really made it your mission to tell your grandchildren one day that while the world was descending into Nazism you were busy harassing people on the Fediverse who just so happened to criticize your most feverish sociopathic delusions.You’ve got so used to stare at the finger that points at the moon that even when someone puts under your nose a literally Nazi who says Nazi shit like “we actively monitor all the channels for activities of people who disagree with us (and then basically proceeds with listing anyone even vaguely left-wing)” you feel that your duty is to call for anti-Zionism Fediblock shit. What part of my post even mentioned Israel or Zionism btw? Or is it just a knee-jerk reaction that comes from your spinal cord with no coordination with your brain whenever you read our posts?Is it also anti-Zionism to criticize the unelected CEO of a US-based NGO that openly implements a plan of mass surveillance in agreement with governmental agencies (in violation of its own name, NON-GOVERNATIVE organization) to harass even “anti-war crazies”?Every time you criticize an NGO or a UN body that supports refugees shall I also call you an anti-Arab? Or are you implying that the existence of such unelected NGOs that make secret deals with the FBI is fundamental for the existence of Israel, thus confirming my view that Israel in its current incarnation is a fascist State?Where does your ever-expanding definition of antisemitism, anti-Zionism or whatever you want to call it today end, and where does your sociopathy and open support for fascism begin?Don’t you want to stop at some point?Don’t you see that everyone with a functioning heart and brain hates you and that you’ve made no friends here?Don’t you see that your pathetic propagandist attempts of framing any discussion about Israel on the Fediverse under your own terms and definitions and your pathetic memes have the same efficacy of a mosquito fart?Do you think that you’re actually doing a favour to all the moderate Jews out there who despise you and the unhinged lunatics like you?Do you think that anyone still gives a single fuck about your Fediblock calls?You blame us for “spreading hate” while most of our time is spent helping the ones whose oppression you firmly support, and you don’t even realize that in the meantime your timeline has become the best open-air cesspit on the Web to study hate, grudge and radicalization because of what you write?Do I have to start unleashing lawyers and send emails to the VPS providers that you keep using to scrape our instances for unauthorized scraping of social media profiles with the purposes of doxxing and slander?I don’t want to do that, unlike you I have better things to do with my life than harassing people on social media or spend my time on lawsuits. Things like, you know, supporting the victims of the genocide that you keep denying. But I also demand my freedom to use social media in peace on my own instance. Freedom of speech doesn’t apply only to your pro-genocide bullshit. Instance admins make their choices, and so far most of them have decided to suspend you rather than me. And every single time you attack us and we respond to you all you gain is just more suspensions.Also, how many times am I supposed to tell you that if you have better arguments than mine and you want to confront me you’re free to reply to my posts, but if you block me you must stick to your word, STFU and stop harassing me behind my back, you spineless coward?Also, a friend advised me to send you this.Libel card declined, Kahanist.
(DIR) Post #B2hnqrDrHx4TLEsU2y by fabio@manganiello.eu
2026-01-27T07:56:50.115377Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@aral also @staff the harassment and consistent scraping of our profiles even after the block from this account’s side has been going on for too long.Their fixation against me and Aral is pathological, and they are literally calling Fediblock even on political criticism of an NGO that publicly brags about mass surveillance. And I have evidence that they’re using automatic scrapers to pull and analyze everything we post.Is it possible to finally take actions against them, after this account has already been suspended or limited on 80 instances for basically trying to impede any criticism of Israel on Mastodon?
(DIR) Post #B2kF9rdH4h13C3yP2G by fabio@manganiello.eu
2026-01-28T12:58:29.551141Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
The issue with the #Chuffed campaigns on #GazaVerified over-reporting total amounts in case of failed payments has now been fixed.It’s still a big fluke on Chuffed’s side (they keep returning Unconfirmed transactions on their API for some reason), which forced me to implement some complex (and 429-prone) look-back reconciliation logic on each round of scraping, which in turn means that it may take a bit longer for Chuffed donations to be archived if we hit cool-down windows.But I’ve been monitoring the situation since yesterday night and it seems that things are stable now - no suspicious duplicate transactions.Please let me know if you spot any recent mistakes.Note that the fix is not retroactive and many duplicate donations still exist on the database. It’ll take me a while to clean them all up.@gazaverified @aral https://git.platypush.tech/blacklight/gaza-archive/pulls/5