Does #AI saves or wastes your time?
It does help me with some technical or minor work issues. It does save time searching for obscure data, especially in foreign languages.
On the other hand, it wastes my time when people post long empty texts written by AI. It wastes my time when companies use AI to save their own time on my account.
I'm on the fence on this issue.
We tried to build a p2p board game in Rust. The challenge is to do it without a server or blockchain, but still maintain trust between players.
We ended up using two lesser-known mechanisms:
➡️Proof of Sequential Work (PoSW), and
➡️Verifiable Delay Function (VDF).
These are cryptography elements that are not known enough, right? Great motivation to write about them!
This thread is about PoSW only. VDF will have to wait for a later time.
#math #cryptography (1/10)
Given the amount of websites storing pictures of your documents due to the recent age restriction laws, a leak with disastrous effects is bound to happen soon.
To mitigate it we can either:
- Cancel these laws, or
- Invent an easy, cheap way to change your face, birth data and finger prints.
Who's working on the latter problem?
Two weeks ago, Jack Dorsey (Twitter/Bluesky) released Bitchat, a Bluetooth p2p encrypted (e2e) meshnet chat.
It got plenty of attention from mainstream media and from the privacy community, so I got curious about it.
Meshnet chat apps already exist. Briar, from 2018, is the most famous one and was recently featured on Hackernews*. There's also Bridgefy, Firechat, and others I never looked at.
Is there anything new or interesting about Bitchat? Let's check.
A list of "sixty favorite theorems from the six decades of computational complexity (1965-2024)" by Lance Fortno.
One day I'll know them all.
https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2024/12/favorite-theorems-complete-list.html
A rare case of bug existing at midnight but doesn't exist in the morning.
Splinter dev version seems to work again now. You can attach media to each post.
Here's an example: https://social.hastily.cc/@neiman/114862009887032204
Try out the DEV version here: https://splinter.almonit.club/
I just spent a week in the French Riviera! Am I an expert in the region after a week there, though I speak no French? In Internet terms, you bet I am! 😁
The bottom line? It was a great holiday. The Riviera is indeed "an outdoor hospital". It's not the most exciting place in the world, but it is pleasurable and simply has the smell of a nice holiday.
Below are a few observations and thoughts about the area. (1/9)
Splinter dev version has been clear of bugs for a whole 5 minutes.
There's a new bug now though, related to Mastodon limitation of posting multi-images.
Will try to sort it out tomorrow.
Fixed, and there are still 30 minutes left till midnight!
In the middle of writing a huge thread with many pictures I just ran into a new bug.
Fun.
I deployed the latest development of #splinter to its test domain: https://splinter.almonit.club/
It includes a:
- new media attachment system. You can now attach media to each post in the thread.
- limit adjustment. It actually fetches the limit from your server (if available), but you can always set it up yourself.
- "Break post" button 😅
Try it out if you don't mind bugs to help me test it! I'm gonna test it myeslf soon as well. Very soon..
Since starting to code with the help of AI, Meld (by Gnome) became my most useful software.
It's a tool that provides visual difference and merge. I use AI to write small functions, and to fix (my normally terrible) documentation. But I don't use any of its code automatically. Meld makes it super easy to review and merge the changes.
Fun fact: the train from #France (Nice) to #Italy passes through Monaco. For a few minutes, when the train stops at the station, the mobile phone switches to the Monaco network.
Monaco is not in the EU, so my #Polish sim provider (Play) allowed themselves to charge 3.2 PLN per a 100 kb in those 2 minutes. Due to passive data consumption this reached around 35 PLN without my knowledge.
Shame on them.
China has a new digital ID system for the the Internet. It's voluntary at the moment (but I doubt will stay for long). Companies don't know who you are, but the police can deanonymize you at will.
https://www.economist.com/china/2025/07/01/chinas-giant-new-gamble-with-digital-ids
It's easier to implement and optimize code you wrote yourself - and I think the AI-coding generation is going to miss on that one.
Any #RSS fans here? It's time to replace my Feedly with a self-hosted alternative.
What's the recommended option nowadays?
Is this the right place to ask how to include text in a #Rust (WGPU) app?
Should I render the text using the #GPU? Or include it using some other method?
The challange is that the GPU rendered graphics includes 2D camera movement (left-right, up-down) and zoom-in/zoom-out, and I want to make sure the text moves and zooms in/out along.
My uncle passed away today.
He was a very important person in my life. The only member of the family who was like me: infinitely curious with weird interests and strange impractical hobbies.
He was fluent in 16 languages (including Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish and Japanese!), he was a pioneer of computers (taught me to code when I was 6), but actually studied chemistry and had a home-lab for creating colorful glass in methods he invented.
RIP 💔
21 degrees in #Warsaw but the air conditioning in CoffeeDesk cafe works in full force.
I'll never get this country.
After a forced break I'm back now to work on the next release of Splinter.
The changes will be small; a more dynamic post limit (right now it's 500 for everyone), a button to force post break (instead of manually inserting '=====' now), and some other small improvements or bug fixes tat people requested.
It'll be ready either this weekend or beginning next week.