Joseph Nuthalapati :fbx:

https://social.masto.host/@njoseph

FreedomBox core developer. Long-time Debian user and occasional contributor. Likes functional programming.

#Privacy #FreeSoftware #FreedomBox #SelfHosting #SmallTech #nobot #nobridge

Website: https://njoseph.me
Blog: https://njoseph.me/blog
Link Blog: https://njoseph.me/shaarli/
Public Wiki: https://njoseph.me/mediawiki/Main_Page

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Last Notes

2026-06-19 19:19:23 UTC

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O'Reilly pays 10% to their authors.
> My contract with the publisher specifies that I get 25% of publisher revenue from ebooks, online access, and licensing, 10% of revenue from print sales, and 5% of revenue from translations.
https://martin.kleppmann.com/2020/09/29/is-book-writing-worth-it.html

2026-05-18 10:51:15 UTC

Imagine the Earth's surface becoming uninhabitable for one billionaire moron's profits.
Satellite mega constellations are destroying the Ozone layer. The same ozone layer that I remember being saved through global cooperation in my own lifetime.
Any sane government would've deployed the army to stop this super villain from destroying the planet.
We got as far as possible from the Star Trek timeline and are living in the Parable of the Sower timeline.

2026-05-05 20:32:15 UTC

Co-authored-by: Keyboard

2026-02-24 05:45:48 UTC

I didn't expect that I would see the tech industry slowly turn into an industry that people get into only for the money. Maybe the tech industry now has more psychopaths per capita than the finance industry. Eventually it might compete with organized crime in lawlessness and outright evil.

2026-01-12 03:30:06 UTC

January 11 was the day when Aaron Swartz was killed by the academic publishing industry who are now happy to make deals with his contemporary, the compulsive liar Sam Altman.
The system puts some people to death for scraping while making others billionaires for doing the same thing. Mark Zuckerberg has torrented the entirety of libgen with no consequences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M85UvH0TRPc
Piracy is legal now, provided you register an LLC and get a .ai domain for your website.

2025-11-27 06:58:40 UTC

It might be worth moving out of GitHub just to avoid nonsensical vibe-coded pull requests. :blobthink:
Also, GitHub Actions is the most inefficient CI/CD system I've ever encountered.
Migrating from GitHub to Codeberg ⚡ Zig Programming Language
https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/

2025-09-30 11:27:05 UTC

I put together a few facts.
NVIDIA GB200 is $70,000 each. Enough to employ one intern or new college grad for a year.
AI companies need 100s of billions of dollars in investment unlike regular software startups that need a handful of millions.
AI companies are eating up all the venture capital. We could've had a 1000 startups funded instead, but it's all used up by NVIDIA chips, their data centers and operating costs.
---
Yes, AI took our software jobs, but not by replacing programmers.

2025-04-16 16:23:28 UTC

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After switching to Neovim (no AI plugins this time), I feel like the joy of programming is slowly returning.
LLMs are like energy vampires. They suck the joy out of everything.

2025-04-15 08:42:26 UTC

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Used VS Code without Copilot for a day.
While I'm at it, why not ditch Micro$oft VS Code as well? It's not a hard requirement for TypeScript.
Trying out nvim+lazyvim setup. A friend recommended that I also try wezterm. So, learning Lua seems inevitable at this point.

2025-04-12 06:25:36 UTC

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If I get fired for something, let it be for a mistake I actually did, not for something that's so stupid that it's unlikely for a human to do such a thing.

2025-04-12 06:23:40 UTC

I started using GitHub Copilot for work to generate both test and production code in January.
Since the refactoring work it was generating for me was too much, I stopped using it for production code a month ago.
It keeps creating test files in the wrong directories and breaks half the scripts in the repository (not consistently though 🤦‍♂️). Yesterday, this got pushed to the main branch and broke scripts for everybody.
The day has finally arrived! I've completely given up on AI-generated code.

2025-04-08 13:10:22 UTC

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I still haven't learned how to do builds for my own Android devices. I should.
"Your one maintainer stopped maintaining" is such a general problem of free software in general.
Maybe getting some students with a lot of free time on their hands to do LineageOS builds for their own devices would work. Their devices would last a lot longer than the manufacturer's planned obsolescence.
I am thinking of using GadgetBridge as well. It will suffer from the same problem.

2025-04-08 08:37:24 UTC

India’s repair culture gives new life to dead tech
https://www.theverge.com/tech/639126/india-frankenstein-laptops
> Singh recalls a young engineering student who visited his shop last year, desperate for a laptop to complete his coursework. “He had saved up for months but was still short of money. I put together a machine for him from spare parts, and he left with tears in his eyes. That is when you know this work matters.”
#rightToRepair

2025-01-18 21:55:31 UTC

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There is no good technical reason why the community version of Synapse should not include the worker implemented in Rust. A smaller, resource constrained server, such as a single board computer with 2 GB memory would benefit from a more efficient implementation.
Element seems to be adopting the open-core business model like GitLab. I don't blame them for this; they did mention funding problems recently, but the arguments and analogies in the article don't make sense.

2024-12-17 03:22:43 UTC

A journalist (Ed Zitron) purchased the bestselling laptop from Amazon — a $238 Acer Aspire 1 and wrote about his experience using it.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
(If you reply with "they should've just installed <my favorite Linux distro> on it", I will assume that you didn't read the article.
The average person doesn't know how to install a Linux distro, or even applications for that matter, for the same reason that I don't know how to convert a diesel car to CNG.)

2024-12-13 03:15:49 UTC

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3. "When the LLM made up some stuff you didn't like, it was a hallucination" - Sam Altman probably?
LLMs cannot think. Also, they had no sense organs until they recently became multi-modal. They have no sense of right/wrong/meaning/nonsense etc. All of that comes from the human interpreting the signals coming from the LLM. Does this make their users computer astrologers? It doesn't matter. Like a stopped clock, they are sometimes right and can do novel things so people keep using them.
(3/3)

2024-12-13 03:06:07 UTC

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2. "The ability to speak doesn't make you intelligent" - from a recently popular toot.
The main ability of LLMs is to place token after token (a token is a part of a word) very quickly. To speak is to transform your thoughts into a form that others can understand. LLMs have no thoughts. Heck, they don't even understand words because they deal in tokens. Jar Jar Binks actually meets this definition of intelligence.
(2/3)

2024-12-13 03:04:49 UTC

Some thoughts about LLMs
1. "LLMs confidently give wrong answers/lies" - anybody who tried to get information from an LLM.
LLMs have no feelings or emotions. So, they cannot "feel confident". We perceive their lack of doubt to be confidence.
(1/3)

2024-11-04 02:18:23 UTC

My livelihood as a software engineer depends on the existence of computers.
Semi-conductor manufacturing is the most complicated endeavor that humankind has ever undertaken (yes including the Mars missions, read the book Chip War) and it is mostly concentrated in one island nation. Also, it involves critical raw materials that are available in only one location on Earth. It doesn't get more fragile than this.
Meanwhile, the "Cloud" is an illusion of infinite computers on a finite planet.

2024-10-20 13:31:15 UTC

If you ever wanted to write toots using the same UI as your git commit messages, there is a CLI app called "toot".
#Mastodon

2024-10-13 07:06:34 UTC

I saw a thread of people recommending a note-taking app called anytype. Apparently it is technically quite good. It is even local-first.
I won't use it.
Because it is VC-funded.
https://anytype.io/who
I don't care if it is the best-in-class, revolutionary, most life-changing thing in its category. I don't care if it is even more versatile than Emacs. I won't use it.
It will be enshittified. The founders' best intentions are irrelevant.
Never become dependent on a VC-funded thing.

2024-10-08 23:36:06 UTC

Raku can be a good replacement for AWK.
Example: Strip out the timestamps from a podcast transcript (or subtitles)
A file with lines like this
"[00:00:25.680 --> 00:00:28.360] We hope you enjoy this conversation."
cut -d']' -f2 transcript.txt | raku -pe '.=trim'
The same in AWK
cut -d']' -f2 transcript.txt | awk '{$1=$1;}1'
The word 'trim' is a lot easier to remember than GNU AWK's weird behavior with assignment. This is also easier than using `sed s/^\s*//`.
#RakuLang #awk

2024-10-07 18:13:47 UTC

"We want to call work what is work so that eventually we might rediscover what is love."
- Silvia Federici
A quote from the conclusion of the book "Work won't love you back" by Sarah Jaffe.
#quotes #antiWork #feminism

2024-09-09 07:03:52 UTC

So much complaining on the fediverse about a Firefox Labs feature on a nightly build, when most Labs features don't make it into the final product. But I think the complaining is warranted to prevent the features from making it into the final product.
Also, from Mozilla's perspective this doesn't hurt their climate goals, since the carbon consumed by third-party servers won't go into their carbon accounting. Maybe if they offered a Llama 70B model like DuckDuckGo does, but they don't.

2024-08-23 08:56:15 UTC

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Is there a reason why they are not using AGPLv3+ instead of GPLv3+?
It is software served over a network.
@npub12r3…zz58