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WebNest of Tomas Jakl
My litle place on the internet
Latest posts
[TJ's notes]
Loved this A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator video by the Norwegian Consumer Council ! Related references: Consumer Rights Wiki #internet , #enshittification
[TJ's reposts]
Reshared https://calnewport.com/on-charlie-kirk-and-saving-civil-society/ Fully agree with Cal Newport's message. I quote his final paragraphs (but encourage you to read the rest): After troubling national events, there’s often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Here’s one option to consider: Quit using these social platforms . Find other ways to keep up with the news, or…
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So according to the recent talk Reflections on Haskell@Meta by Simon Marlow, Haskell is no longer used in Meta (Facebook, Instagram, ...) as the main language to specify automated moderation tools. Instead, they use Hack, their version of PHP. As Simon explains in the talk, the decision to drop Haskell was made whilst knowing that many of Haskell safety guarantees will have to be dropped in the…
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Some years ago Tom Leinster wrote a wonderful explanation of what makes a (mathematical) definition 'natural' : It’s a matter of aesthetics, and obviously there’s no precise answer, but here’s my stab at it. When you meet a new definition, there are two questions you might ask: where does it come from? and why is the definition exactly that, not something slightly different? If there’s a…
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Follow-up to my previous post , the Haskell GHC compiler on top of the Foreign Function Interface now also supports the REPL and Template Haskell in its WASM/JavaScript backend! This makes it now viable for real-world usage! For details see the announcement blog post by Cheng Shao: https://www.tweag.io/blog/2024-11-21-ghc-wasm-th-ghci/ #haskell
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I just realised how unusual British politics is. One day you have elections and the very next day you have a new prime minister. And that's it. In many countries (mine included) there would be negotations going on after the elections that can take weeks if not months and only then a new goverment is formed. I still believe coallition goverments are better, though 🙃. #politics , #uk
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Just had a blast listening to this podcast with Donald Knuth by Numberphile2. #podcast , #tex , #computer-science
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Previously I wrote about how amazing DerivingVia could be in Haskell. It turns out that it can also help to solve the Monad-Applicative-Functor overhead introduced in Haskell recently. This issue was broad up by Martin Escardo on Mastodon and the answer was provided on Well-Typed's youtube channel . #haskell , #DerivingVia
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Alexis King gave a killer presentation about Demand and Suspension in Haskell (aka the strictness analysis/optimisation). I can't recommend this enough, it has completely overwritten how I think about Haskell evaluation. It makes me think that strictness/laziness annotation in Haskell programs is actually possible (more precisely it would be called the demand annotation 🙂). #Haskell
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Since January 2019 I'm on Mastodon and since early 2020 I'm using Matrix and IndieWeb standards. And I am really happy to see that decentralised protocols are finally gaining some traction on many fronts. Meta has been rumoured to play with ActivityPub in with their Project 92. The EU through the Digital Markets Act (DMA) will force important online players to adapt some degree of interoperability…
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I like this blog post by Alexis King about types in Haskell. In particular the way she argues that " newtype s are not for type safety" and that the type system should be used pragmatically, as a tool. It makes me think if I'm also guilty of using types too dogmatically sometimes, rather than solely pragmatically. #haskell
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Massive news for #Haskell, its main compiler #GHC will soon have the option to compile to #JavaScript! This was previously only possible by using GHCJS which was a fork of GHC, a couple of versions behind GHC in features, etc. https://engineering.iog.io/2022-12-13-ghc-js-backend-merged/ #ghc , #haskell , #javascript
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And now Pocket tells me I'm one of their top 1% readers! Wow, I didn't really think I read all that much. 🙂 #Pocket
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My Deezer 2022 statistics surprised me. I listened to 7987 different tracks, out of which 5289 I discovered this year! I listened to 58286 minutes of music (i.e. 971 hours), which makes me a top 3% streamer. I also listened to 2675 different artists, with the most popular five: Joseph Trapanese The HU Samarabalouf Kalandra Bear Mc Creary Joseph Trapanese and Bear Mc Creary are there probably for…
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The shocking thing about getting a laptop in 2022 is that its suspend works worse than what I was used to, in a laptop from 2015! Current laptops often go to sleep but then overheat and completely drain battery. It took me a while until I understood that in the latest Windows laptops the firmware does not support S3 sleep anymore and instead only implements S0 sleep. The point is that then the…
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Reshared https://getblogging.org/ Get blogging!
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To whoever says that Microsoft loves open source I have three words: Microsoft Exchange Online! #microsoft
[TJ's photos]
The repairability score of Braun 5516 is 0. Reason: battery is not replaceable...! 🙄
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What? Google Drive refuses to let you download a file until you enable third party cookies! What the heck? #Google
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The new online #EU legislation, the DMA , is a very good reason to be proud of the EU this time around. Although, it's not perfect, we're setting the right trend. I'm usually against laws that aim to completely change some industries from ground up, instead of doing careful incremental improvements. However, this needed to happen at some point because the key global players failed to do the right…
Apple Is Not Defending Browser Engine Choice
Reshared https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-browser-engine-choice/ Well-written explanation of what Apple's policies do to the internet ecosystem. (All arguments supported by evidence.) The conclusion is quite clear, here are some key points: ... there's reason to think that Mozilla would not have suffered layoffs if Apple were an ally of engine choice. Apple's policies have…
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Okay, so I've added also vim-startify to my NeoVim set-up and started playing with lazygit and fzf . This is precisely the reason why avoided plugins in the first place, there is no end to this. I will not do any customisations of my set-up for at least a month, I promise! 😅 #vim
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Up until a week ago, the only Vim plugins that I was using were goyo.vim and lightline . It all changes suddenly and my no-plugin life I've been living since ever has changed upside down. Now I'm also adding vim-easymotion , vim-fugitive and vim-vsnip . I would also use telescope.nvim if had a higher version of NeoVim. 🙂 #vim
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Why have I not used #Vim snippets earlier? I especially like that with vim-vsnip I can have snippets to write other snippets :-). Also the command :VsnipOpen is really handy, to add/edit snippets on the go. #vim
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I admire when somebody perfects their set-up of something they do regularly. When I was writing my thesis I needed to draw a few images and I didn't want to spend whole days of making it in TikZ by hand. For that reason I found out that I can use Inkscape with svg2tikz to draw the diagrams in Inkscape and convert the resulting SVG into a TikZ source. The caveat of this is that if I wanted to have…
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Just learned about F* . Looks very interesting. I wonder how it compares to Coq, Agda, Lean, ... #theorem-proving , #agda
[TJ's reposts]
Reshared https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426 A nice summary by an Iranian who was jailed for his blogging in the first decade of the 2000s. He then came back from prison, into the world of social media. Very interesting read. Especially, I like this paragraph about deplatforming voices. In a free-market economy, low-quality goods with the wrong prices are doomed to…
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Microsoft has changed in recent years, however, still not enough: Windows 11 blocks Edge browser competitors from opening links #microsoft
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I've just ordered a new smartphone, with a 10-year warranty. Check it out too! https://10yearphone.com #10yearphone And if it doesn't arrive before my current phone breaks apart, I'll get a #Fairphone with a 5-year warranty https://www.fairphone.com , which can be got now :-) #repairability
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Just found out that " Learnability (in machine learning) can be undecidable , that is, independent of set theory". From the abstract: Consider the following statistical estimation problem: given a family F of real valued random variables over some domain X and an i.i.d. sample drawn from an unknown distribution P over X, find f in F such that its expectation w.r.t. P is close to the supremum…
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I wish I read Jean Goubault-Larrecq's Quotients, colimits of dcpos, and related matters in the first year of my PhD studies. I had to reinvent a lot of these ideas from there (and then apply them transfinitely) in my papers on free constructions and quotients of d-frames... #maths
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Attending my first fully hybrid conference! (All thanks to the brave folks behind ACT 2021 ) There are speakers, chairs, audience some attending in person and some online and in all possible combinations. #academia , #conferences
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Dana Scott on category theory: "The author himself does not always like or enjoy the discipline of category theory, which seems ofttimes to carry along very, very heavy machinery and odd terminology, but he long ago came to the conclusion that it is quite unavoidable ." From his 1993 paper "A type-theoretical alternative to ISWIM, CUCH, OWHY" (originally written in 1969). #maths , #category-theory
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I just found out about a new Haskell extension called DerivingVia . It looks incredibly powerful, especially when paired with DerivingStrategies and GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving . It would save me from writing a lot of boilerplate in the past! For details see this great YouTube video by Tweag. Edit (on 29 July): Matt Parsons has written a blog post on how this might become a bit overwhelming in more…
[TJ's reposts]
Reshared https://toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/106157965738867345 Something I've been noticing for some time, nicely summarised by Alex Russell. He gives a wonderful overview of how Apple is intentionally degrading the user experience on the web and forces users to use native apps instead of web apps (and hence makes more profit from their App Store). The full article can be found on Alex's blog…
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Reshared https://toot.cafe/@tomayac/106059856136232109 Why some developers are avoiding app store headaches by going Web-only: https://www.fastcompany.com/90623905/ios-web-apps #html , #Apple
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With FLoC being deployed to Google Chrome automatically, browser fingerprinting (and therefore tracking users across the internet) becomes even more powerful than it was before. At least there are some tools that help us fight it, namely EFF's amifloced.org and the DuckDuckGo's wonderful privacy extension now blocks FLoC . The irony of this is that these tools will be mostly used by power users…
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The people working in Univalent Type Theory (also known as Homotopy Type Theory) will tell you that its advantage is that you can work with equivalent objects as thought they were equal. But I think the opposite is true. Since you need to compose the proofs of equality everywhere, you're effectively working with equality as if it was just an equivalence 🙃. #maths , #type-theory
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A great video by TechAltar on what has the GDPR achieved in the 3 years of its existence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_W0wR4AClk . #GDPR
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Reshared https://mastodon.social/@yogthos/105642496226654898 Google banning Element.io from their Play Store because of suspicious content on Matrix network. This is the same as if they banned some e-mail client because they noticed that people share misinformation that way. Meanwhile Element.io have written a blog post about the story. #google , #decentralisation
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Reshared https://write.as/matt/social-suburbia There's a growing case being made with each passing year that if there's hope for the social web, it's in small communities. It's built on protocols like ActivityPub, rather than on one-stop “gated” (i.e. proprietary) platforms. Whereas our social giants are built from the start for unaccountable inequity, a web of small, connected communities has the…
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Big news: My friend William DeMeo has announced that he's formalised Birkhoff HSP Theorem in Martin-Löf type theory using Agda. Details on ualib.gitlab.io . #maths
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A lot of people are switching from #WhatsApp to #Signal these days. I don't like where it's going. Messaging should be as decentralised as e-mail is, otherwise we're heading to the same problem as we had with WhatsApp. Who guarantees that Signal won't be acquired by somebody we dislike in the future? For example, Matrix is a better alternative as its decentralised protocol guarantees that it can't…
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Just received a YubiKey from CZ.NIC (in exchange for writing about it with #overenomojeid). After setting up the two-factor authentication in mojeid.cz I can easily manage my citizen profile. It's great to see some progress in Czech "e-governance". #e-government
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While being stuck in England because my flights were cancelled, I watched a Moshe Vardi's talk that aptly argues against Cyber Libertarianism, why we can't reach (economic) equilibria and more. His OWLS talk is here youtu.be/BipEbkdbVNc . #talk , #society , #free-market , #libertarianism , #IT , #Covid19
[TJ's reposts]
Reshared https://mastodon.matrix.org/@matrix/105340035186014554 IT'S OFFICIAL: @gitchat@twitter.com now natively speaks Matrix!! Read all about what it takes to add native Matrix support to a large existing chat app, and bask in the glow of a world where FOSS chat is increasingly FOSS, open & interoperable once more :D 🎉🥳🍾🌉🚀 https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/07/gitter-now-speaks-matrix #matrix…
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I'm just incredibly tired of having to deal with the cookie pop-ups everywhere. Is there any legitimate use-case for third-party #cookies, apart from advertising? If not, we should just finally ban them (legislatively). Those that want to track us will use browser fingerprints anyway...
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Reshared https://social.weho.st/@Fairphone/105282820298324363 "Parliament wants to boost #sustainability by promoting #reuse and #repairs and by tackling practices that shorten the lifespan of products." A huge win for the #RighttoRepair 🙌 🛠️ : https://bit.ly/3misaVW
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Okay so Google killed their Buzz, Wave, Talk, Picasa, URL Shortener, Google+, Hangouts and now essentially even Photos. I'm leaving Google unwillingly more and more every year. I wonder which of the last products of Google which I still use (Google Scholar, Translate, Drive, Maps, Youtube, and Android) is going down next... #Google